Thankfully I shared a cube wall with someone smart enough to realize the confusion, and explain me out of being walked out.
They were monitoring for torrent traffic, but weren't paying attention to what was being torrented. Apparently a company-wide warning had gone out the week before I started.
One of the helpdesk staff told me that it had been noticed, since the bandwidth to that machine was very high, but he unofficially liked the idea of the university being top of the seeding table, so I should leave it running :-D
[1] http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/stats.html?info_hash=8dcb18... (but mine would have been in 2007 or so).
I remember downloading some content over IRC to share on the campus network because I knew how to use it and it was slow, but not blocked.
I had as much backed-up space as I could justify (some gigabytes by default), plenty of space for laptops where there were power sockets as well as 1Gb/s wired and fast wifi connections, personal webspace/server, a PostgreSQL database, a Tomcat server, remote SSH access to all computers and a distributed computing system (Condor).
Looking at the current guide for students[1], they also get access to a local Gitlab instance, a private IaaS cloud and a GPU cluster.
I got two urgent panicked phone calls from the same person within five minutes of each other for bulk-downloading satellite images from, if memory serves, NASA.
BitTorrent is a fantastic way to transfer files, except for this one hitch I keep hitting.
I wanted to about 2tb of data, mostly torrents, over a wlan from my NAS, and kept getting dropped packets. Eventually I gave up on smb and ftp, and set up opentracker (a simple download and build, with iirc two config options) on my windows desktop under WSL, and swapped the tracker to a local address; after this, it worked perfectly.
I remember one customer (a state department of education) in particular had a server at each school with reasonable private bandwidth but unreliable routing and dismal internet connectivity, so we used the BitTorrent protocol for eventually-consistent asset distribution between their sites.
See also: using NNTP as your pub/sub message bus.
You find a website that creates a link between 2 clients, and the file is shared via https (maybe the file is decrypted at the server and encrypted again using your public key). Sounds easy if both clients don’t have a public IP (to get SCP to work, at least one client needs a public IP) and every browser now has WebRTC.
...which is unfortunate because even something like the anonymous DH that is specified, or more standard, TLS with random/self-signed certificates, would force monitors to need to MITM all connections in order to find out what they contain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption
If you're monitoring and logging the traffic then it's trivial to not only determine the filename of a bittorrent download, but also everything you need to connect to the torrent yourself and download it to verify that it's what the filename says, if that's what you wish to do.
And, personally, I'd expect someone to at least check the filename before accusing me of committing a crime. :(