After reading the title, many of you will probably skip reading this! Well that is fine, because if the title is foreign to you, then you will not be concerned about the service being disabled. However, you may still want to read the article to have an idea why. A number of students will miss not have BitTorrent available and you may hear some of their concerns. Knowing the reason why may help inform any conversation you have with these students.
Universities are increasingly becoming targets for criminals who want to steal personally identifiable information. This allows them to access all sorts of things about people such as: SSN, bank information, loan information, vehicle tags and even information about relatives and friends of the person. We take our custodian role of your data very seriously.
Additionally, media outlets and law firms are aggressively pursuing people who are illegally downloading their copyrighted material. We receive 2 or 3 notices a day about Digital Millennial Rights Copyright Act (DMCA) breaches. These notices come with some hefty fines.
Taking this and other factors into account we have decided to disable the BitTorrent service (and other similar services) on Harding's campus. We will do this over the Thanksgiving break.
Why? One of the most prolific channels for illegal downloading and other security concerns is through BitTorrent. We have researched this for some time and have looked into how other universities have dealt with these issues. It seems that we will be joining many other universities who have found no other way to stop these illegal and dangerous activities other than by blocking BitTorrent.
We are aware that BitTorrent can be used for legitimate purposes. However, we have reached a time where the non-legitimate uses far outweigh the legitimate uses. If you have been using BitTorrent for legitimate uses and it is difficult for you to find alternative ways of getting the material you are after, please contact our Client Support on extension 4440 or itshelp@harding.edu for help with this.
Thank you for your understanding as we do our best to keep Harding IT environment secure and legal.
