Bittorrent in NUS

The Bittorrent Logo

DISCLAIMER: This post is in my personal opinion and may be RIGHT or WRONG! So do your homework before trying the stuff out!

There have been some queries in the comments (Ok, there's only one, but the referrer logs show many entries).

So, does bit torrent downloading work in the NUS network using a personal laptop?

Short answer

It works partially but not at optimal speed. Use it for legal purposes only.

Long answer:

NUS's routers do not support (or are disabled for security reasons) UPNP (What is it?), so speed is limited by the number of computers you connect to, and not the number of people who connect to you first, as the router does not know how to forward the packet from the other computers to your computer.

The Universal Plug and Play Logo

So, the speed you get will not be optimal but the data will download.

Is it illegal?

According to NUS Acceptable Usage Policy, it is not against the policy to use Bittorrent in the network.

However, what you use it to download can overturn that (Section 4.1 in NUS AUP). For example, if you use it to download copyrighted movies, songs, mp3s and other illegal content, then it is illegal.

But if you use it to download open source software like the Linux variants, then it should be OK.

Legal Downloads? Where?

So, what can we download legally?

• You can download Linux variants to experiment such as Ubuntu
• There are a host of completely legal torrents at http://www.legaltorrents.com such as movies, games, mp3, etc.
• This blog post has a list of sites with legal downloads.

Also, go for torrents with a high number of seeds for better speeds.

The most popular Bittorrent client

There you go. Download utorrent and start torrentin'.

UPDATE (8/Apr/07): Here is a blog post by someone in NUS who was caught download a copyrighted TV Series Heroes. So be careful!