Watching anime at college

[feRfe]

at college on public network now, so im not sure whether i can dl anime anymore ==.

i was wondering how other ppl are handling it and stuff

are stream sites besides crunchyroll ok? even if the site doesn't have contracts with the anime studios?

ye thx in advance for any answers

[Vexx]

Unless your college is run by idiots, crunchyroll is just fine at the moment. As for "other" streaming sites, it depends on whether they are licensed or not. Funimation's site is also legit.

Torrents of unlicensed material may or may not be okay - you'll have to read your policy at the college carefully.

If you're real paranoid, I'd say learn about IRC (how to configure, commands, locations, how not-to-piss-off the channel ops, etc)

[Excorsism]

Rule of thumb: do not download copyrighted material.

Torrenting by itself is not illegal. Depending on the content, it can tread the line of illegality. Streaming sites generally are okay since the studios/companies cannot sue you/penalize you. If anything, they would go after the site itself.

It really depends on your college's policies but I doubt they will slap you across the face with fines because you are streaming animated products. At least, at my college, downloading is not a problem unless I am downloading popular Hollywood videos or streaming for that matter.

But just to be safe, if you are genuinely scared of getting tracked down and pushed into legality issues, just stream.

And if the college does happen to catch you, I would expect a slap on the wrist with limited internet privileges and some seminar you may have to attend to lecturing you about internet laws and such.

[0utf0xZer0]

Originally Posted by Vexx

Unless your college is run by idiots, crunchyroll is just fine at the moment. As for "other" streaming sites, it depends on whether they are licensed or not. Funimation's site is also legit.

Torrents of unlicensed material may or may not be okay - you'll have to read your policy at the college carefully.

If you're real paranoid, I'd say learn about IRC (how to configure, commands, locations, how not-to-piss-off the channel ops, etc)

One warning I have about IRC: it's perhaps not a good idea to try and use it over wi-fi. I can't speak for everyone, but in the cases where I tried this, I ended up getting video corruption that was not present when I downloaded off IRC using an ethernet connection to the modem.

There's also at least one free DDL sites that deal mainly in fansubs of (mostly) unlicensed material. But I really have no clue what your college's network policies are.

[Alchemist007]

Do what you know. If you do not know nothin', learn you it.

That being said, all methods mentioned above are good, just remember to use protection (PeerBlock for one).

Btw, if you weren't being careful at all for your downloading before, I presume you didn't care if the ISP started sending you letters warning you? Going to a college doesn't change the danger level I don't think. Though it usually takes something major to piss them off to say the least.

[-KarumA-]

A lot of school don't allow torrents either, mine had a block on all websites that involved the name torrents and hosting. A lot of the search sites wouldn't load and users were limited in rights so that they couldn't install anything without it being permitted.

Ask around, other students usually know the answer as they would also download with torrents if they could (it would however slow down the entire system).

The network at the university where my friend studies has a shared network and they would exchange files between each other using it (for movies, anime, software anything). Just ask around and find out from your fellow students

[synaesthetic]

Dorm life blows. Go get an apartment with a bunch of friends/classmates and get your own broadband line. Be your own sysadmin.

My school doesn't give a shit what I download or how much bandwidth I use as long as it's not constant. I sat in the library one day and installed the entire Orange Box on my new laptop from Steam--that's fourteen gigs of game data--and I got a constant 4+ mb/s download speed, nobody said shit, nobody cared.

[Neat Hedgehog]

If you really want to download stuff, and you don't want to run the risk of getting in trouble because you're not sure what's legit or not, and you'd like to even be able to use torrents (in a way) you could learn to tunnel with SSH. You'd have to have a machine set up outside the network to connect to (possibly you could get a friend to assist you) but then you'd be free to do pretty much whatever you want.

[feRfe]

i know how to use IRC, i use it more than torrents actually

it's safe?

[chikorita157]

Never use torrents on a college Wifi... It probably won't work mainly because of the configuration and even if it did work, it will be painfully slow. Also, dorm connections typically limits how much you can download and going over it will auto deny any other internet resources except campus resources.

Your best bet is to use IRC or using legal streaming sites... or wait until you go home and use your connection there if you are commuting.

[feRfe]

so is IRC 100% safe?

[Vexx]

Nothing is "100% safe" ... but any download that is one machine to one machine is goin to be safer than a 'cloud'. Direct Download via http, ftp, or irc-xdcc-send is safer.

[synaesthetic]

My school must not care at all because I can sit in the library and torrent shit at 2.0MB/s if my peers are good.

[feRfe]

well does anyone actually understand the process of how rights organizations monitor dls?

[synaesthetic]

They can't really monitor what exactly you're downloading, but they can guess--remember the whole Comcast/Sandvine fiasco? They can detect if you're using a P2P swarming application and throttle bandwidth based on that.

Or they can just preemptively block those kinds of services. Or they can do other things with their routers; for instance, a coffee shop I frequent has their router set up to throttle any downloads through web browsers to near-56k speeds if the file is over 10MB in size.

[GHDpro]

If they actively monitor for P2P traffic (and undoubtedly a lot of universities probably do these days), but don't monitor for bandwidth usage, I'd recommend using Usenet (aka newsgroups) using a paid Usenet provider that allows SSL connections on port 443 (=HTTPS port, so won't be blocked by firewall). This way there is no way they can trace what you download (but beware - they can still keep track of how much bandwidth you use).

See my Usenet guide here: http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=81306

As Usenet provider I can personally recommend Astraweb. They have a $25 ("prepaid") account that allows 180GB worth of downloads without a monthly fee. That should last you quite a while (unless you get the habit of downloading ISOs).

Just one warning... if they do monitor for bandwidth usage (and well, if they're monitoring for P2P usage as well that would not be a weird thing to do) then I'd go very, very easy on what you download - just the bare minimum. Just ask your seniors what your college's policies are and how strictly they are enforced.

If your college/university is really strict on downloads, then there is always snail-mail. No kidding! When I worked for Apple Computers in Cork, Ireland during 2003/2004 I had a lousy internet connection at home (dial-up) and the corporate network was strictly monitored, so I basically had no option to download anything big. So on my next visit home (every 3 months) I installed RAdmin on my desktop PC in the Netherlands at my parents house. I remotely queued BT downloads and occasionally had my mom put a DVD-RW in the drive, then send me a bundle of discs in a sleeve by mail. After copying these to my laptop I'd then send the discs back (DVD-R(W) was still kinda expensive) and repeat. Of course in your situation you might also simply ask a buddy at home to do the downloads for you (rather than go through the trouble of setting up RAdmin).

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

They can't really monitor what exactly you're downloading, but they can guess

I'd be surprised if most schools didn't monitor outbound web traffic, so it wouldn't be hard to find an entry for the torrent file itself being accessed. If I saw a computer that downloaded a torrent file and then began using a substantial chunk of bandwidth, I'd put two-and-two together. Peer-to-peer connections are pretty obvious as well. Most ordinary users don't suddenly connect with dozens of machines across the globe.

That said, I doubt anyone in most university IT departments have the time to engage in this kind of monitoring without some reason. The most obvious would be extraordinarily high bandwidth usage.

There's a lot of anime now available for legitimate streaming; why not start with those? I also recommend reading the campus IT usage rules. I'd bet there's a section that spells out what's considered unacceptable behavior.

[synaesthetic]

I'm sure mine does monitor traffic, but since their connection is ridiculously fast and the only way you can connect a personal computer is through 802.11g wifi--and seriously I have no idea what the hell kind of connection this school has because I did a test out of curiosity. I had my laptop, my girlfriend's laptop and another friend's laptop all connected to the wireless network there and all of us downloaded something big and legal--for this test we all downloaded Linux ISOs from different sources. We all got nearly 4MB/s download speeds and none of the other people in the library even noticed.

[Ending]

I remotely queued BT downloads and occasionally had my mom put a DVD-RW in the drive, then send me a bundle of discs in a sleeve by mail. After copying these to my laptop I'd then send the discs back (DVD-R(W) was still kinda expensive) and repeat.

Why not just buy an external 2Tb external USB-drive? They don't cost that much and you can always mail it back. Safer too, since you can use TrueCrypt to encrypt the drive.

Another option is to use an encrypted connection/whatnot between your home computer and campus. Sure, they can see there's a bunch of traffic going on, but if you aren't using terabytes of bandwidth, then it's not a problem. Especially since there is no way to prove that anything illegal has been done. (Although, if you live in US, they don't need any proof as long as they got money.)

[Kotohono]

Originally Posted by Vexx

Unless your college is run by idiots, crunchyroll is just fine at the moment. As for "other" streaming sites, it depends on whether they are licensed or not. Funimation's site is also legit.

Torrents of unlicensed material may or may not be okay - you'll have to read your policy at the college carefully.

If you're real paranoid, I'd say learn about IRC (how to configure, commands, locations, how not-to-piss-off the channel ops, etc)

This especially IRC part, I know my Club's president manages to download anything he wants to watch, or the clubs wants to fine on the college network without issue from IRC. As I think the network here blocks all torrents [ I haven't tried it since I can just torrent at home]