University Bans BitTorrent Sites

Written by enigmax on March 08, 2007 

While students at universities in the US are pressured by the RIAA, Cardiff University citing pressure from increasing numbers of copyright infringement notices, has taken out a blunt instrument and banned it’s students from accessing some of the world’s largest BitTorrent sites, regardless of the legitimate content they contain.

The Information Services department of Cardiff University in the UK has notified 25,000 students of its intention to protect the university from a rising tide of copyright infringement notices due to ‘inappropriate use’ of P2P. It will accomplish this by the wholesale banning of a whole range of BitTorrent search engines and trackers from the university network.

Dear All,

Following receipt of a number of copyright infringement notices, Information Services is taking steps to protect the University.

The principle source of these copyright infringements is inappropriate use of peer-to-peer file sharing, for example Bit Torrent.

A number of web sites have been identified which primarily provide access to a high proportion of copyrighted, pornographic or offensive material. Access to these sites, listed below, will be prohibited.

This policy is not aimed at restricting legitimate academic investigation. Should access be required please contact insrvAssist.

Sites with prohibited access:
http://www.torrentsearch.com/
http://isohunt.com/
http://torrentscan.com/
http://www.torrentspy.com/
http://torrent-finder.com/
http://thepiratebay.org/
http://www.torrentreactor.to/
http://www.torrentportal.com/
http://www.mininova.org/
http://skflan.nl.tp
http://www.onlytorrents.com/
http://www.mybittorrent.com/
http://www.torrentz.com/
http://www.torrentradar.org/
http://www.demonoid.com/
http://www.smaragdtorrent.org/
http://www.fulldls.com/
http://www.torrents.to/
http://www.torrentvalley.com/
http://www.torrentshub.com/
http://fenopy.com/
http://extratorrent.com/
http://btjunkie.org/
http://www.bittorrent.am/
http://www.astatorrents.com/
http://www.meganova.org/
http://www.bitdig.com/
http://torrentattack.org/

Your insrvAssist contact for this message is XXX XXXXX.

Thank you,
Security Team

Previously, students using P2P applications Aimster, LimeWire, KaZaA, Mactella, Morpheus, Phex, iMesh, Qtella, Audiogalaxy, SwapNut, NeoModus, XoLoX , BitTorrent, WinMX, Gnutella, Gnotella, BearShare, Gnucleus and GTK-Gnutella had been told: “IMMEDIATELY ensure that your system is set to prevent the application from acting as a provider of unlicensed materials to other users.”

Its quite obvious that this message did not stop students from continuing to share files and the banning of the above sites is unlikely to stop them either. New sites appear all the time and although the blocklist takes out some major torrent sources, there are many hundreds more - e.g TorrentReactor.to is blocked but not TorrentReactor.net.

The excellent Yotoshi gets no mention and even President Bush’s torrent site is unbanned and fully available. Interested students will find the Linux stuff here.

Previously: DRM Killing BitTorrent.com Video Store

Next: Meet EZTV, The Leading TV-torrent Distribution Group

26 Responses

1 Mar 09, 2007 at 03:07 by Hank

Well, at least they can still get linux torrents.

2 Mar 09, 2007 at 03:17 by Jonesy

Wow. That’ll sure stop them! Yeah, right.

3 Mar 09, 2007 at 03:47 by bit torrent dude

notice only public trackers are banned so anyone using a private tracker can still get torrents, and private trackers > public trackers anyway.

4 Mar 09, 2007 at 04:01 by me

Demonoid.com FTW

5 Mar 09, 2007 at 04:05 by James

Presumably this will be greeted by proxy servers like with myspace,
-
http://www.WindowsVistaUserGuide.com

6 Mar 09, 2007 at 04:26 by ace

Finally a good authoritative list of torrent sites.
http://www.glendalegolfs.com

7 Mar 09, 2007 at 05:02 by vanlandw

At least they can still get to eztv. I couldn’t live without it.

8 Mar 09, 2007 at 07:00 by Powerstatb

The college I went to, Christopher Newport University, blocks the packages created when using torrents. That seems a lot worse then banning sites. Maybe the school should be in an article.

9 Mar 09, 2007 at 10:06 by DomZ

I call bullshit on this, I’m from Cardiff University and access to them torrent sites are fine [although downloading torrents has never been easy due to the restricted firewall, but not impossible ;)]

10 Mar 09, 2007 at 11:54 by Deodar

Hah been there done that.

WSU (Washington State University)
blocks the downloading of any URL with the extension .torrent or .tor and in order to actually download a torrent you have to use azureus with the highest encryption.

11 Mar 09, 2007 at 15:09 by hamster

how nice of them to compile me a list of good torrent pages!
maybe they should register a domain for their banlist or something, eg. “www.cardiffuniversity.org/BanlistAkaBestTorrentPages.html”

12 Mar 10, 2007 at 22:15 by >>> Guess who I am

Lol

Best thing is I work at Cardiff university and I can honestly say Ive not heared anythign about this at all lol

However, INSRV as the are known know jack-shit about network securtiy etc so can be bypassed easily

13 Mar 12, 2007 at 09:17 by >> Me Again

Well I don’t know where this story came from, but I can tell you that on the main network NONE of those sites are blocked….

Also no notes have been sent out to staff regarding this either to make them aware…

Im assuming as it all went out to students it is on the RESLAN network supplied with their accomodation….

14 Mar 12, 2007 at 13:08 by this sucks

man this sucks, i cant get to the sites from the computer labs anymore. has somthing changed it worked yesterday.

15 Mar 20, 2007 at 03:20 by GramBorder

Hi

I want to all of you know, World is mine, and yoursite good

Bye

16 Mar 26, 2007 at 19:26 by TAP

There’s so many ways around this. People from Cardiff Uni, have a tip from someone not far from you. Find out the IP of the BT site, use that instead of the URL, and use encryption in your client. You’ll still be able to download.

17 Mar 31, 2007 at 22:44 by Yahir

http://a88c05da461b8e07ecd022f2a02e0e9c-t.kc3ed9.info a88c05da461b8e07ecd022f2a02e0e9c [url]http://a88c05da461b8e07ecd022f2a02e0e9c-b1.kc3ed9.info[/url] [url=http://a88c05da461b8e07ecd022f2a02e0e9c-b2.kc3ed9.info]a88c05da461b8e07ecd022f2a02e0e9c[/url] [u]http://a88c05da461b8e07ecd022f2a02e0e9c-b3.kc3ed9.info[/u] 8e168a7b8b48b1332e887ee12f9008ab

18 Jun 12, 2007 at 16:57 by ossryxukpu

Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! fqnjlnuuczuxz

19 Jun 13, 2007 at 08:40 by lkxfdxsihp

pneyxdut

20 Aug 14, 2007 at 04:54 by Morgellons

Cannot anyone be creative with their networking skills.
You would think that they had a social disease.
Just change the ports.
http://www.morgellonsresearchfoundation.com

21 Sep 10, 2007 at 17:55 by William

Pretty nice site, wants to see much more on it! :)=

22 Sep 22, 2007 at 19:19 by bceflsht tpun

zrsnhxvbd kujbfq weimb sfuqktz ahcpfrsel yhgvodx kybufizq

23 Oct 08, 2007 at 09:52 by Axxess

So the students will be forced to use proxy servers.

24 Dec 06, 2007 at 05:01 by coach

http://technorati.com/blogs/coach-coachhandbags.blogspot.com

25 Dec 29, 2007 at 11:11 by gomosopions

Hi

Great book. I just want to say what a fantastic thing you are doing! Good luck!

26 Apr 19, 2008 at 04:04 by Grammar guy

“banned it’s students”

C’mon, man, it’s “its”.

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