Georgia College's New Policy — Reporting All P2P Users To the Police

An anonymous reader excerpts from an article at TorrentFreak: "Georgia's Valdosta State University has updated its network with software that can pinpoint students who use P2P software. The university is committed to stop file-sharing on its network even if that results in prison sentences for students. Offenders will be disciplined by the school and then handed over to the police, the university has announced." School policy is one thing ("don't use file-sharing software on our resource-constrained network, or we may kick you off"), but I suspect the police wouldn't appreciate the task of sorting out legal from illegal use of widespread, essentially neutral software tools. Update: 11/15 18:27 GMT by T : Reader (and VSU alumnus) Matt Baker contacted the school; he reports that the school's IT director Joe Newton in response flatly denied the claims in the TorrentFreak article, and says the school hasn't installed such P2P tracking software, and doesn't hand students over the police, and says instead "I cannot foresee that we would ever do so." Thanks, Matt.

Valdosta State's rep in Jeopardy

[digitaldc]

Valdosta State was right up there with Harvard and Yale at the top of my applications list but seriously, who would even THINK of going there NOW? ;)

Re:not necessarily a bad policy

[circletimessquare]

of course the police can abuse you. of course anyone can abuse you. but you need to learn that, just as crippling in this world as an overabundance of trust to people who don't deserve your trust, is the existence of people like you: those with such a crippling poverty of distrust that you won't even expect a simple human baseline of behavior in civil society

the abuses you imagine above are rare. of course you might someday suffer from these kinds of abuses. and of course the ceiling can crash on your head right now. you can't live in a shell, expecting the worst all the time. you need to place some trust in your fellow human beings if only because you suffer the most when you assume the worst possible scenario all the time. most people are good and decent. really

Re:So

[Atrox666]

Hey a university is no place for the free exchange of information young man.

You should be spending your time doting on dusty old profs and their stale ideas.