Back with School Network Issues

Hardware Hub Networking
1

So some may remember me from this thread:

https://forum.teksyndicate.com/t/how-to-properly-hide-bittorrent-installation/87933

Well, while I've given up on trying to torrent at this school, I'm now facing a much more peculiar issue.

The other day I needed a file that I had on an old computer and couldn't pay for again. I found a torrent for it, however this time I took to trying cloud-based downloaders to direct download the torrent instead of using a torrent client. Since it's cloud-based and simply stores the file in my account to direct download like any normal file, I assumed it shouldn't yield any detection as I've never had any trouble with direct downloads, even with pirated files.

However oddly enough I was blocked out of internet access yet again, though all my strikes had been reset (not sure if because it's a new semester or because the method has changed).

So some may be reading this and figure "WELL MAYBE YOU JUST SHOULDN'T PIRATE BLAH BLAH BLAH". But the problem isn't specifically this issue, but rather the fact that today I was simply downloading a file that I created, own, and backed up onto mega myself from another system -- and somehow I was blocked out again????

So I guess my question is, is it legal for the school to monitor my activity so closely that they can discern exactly when I'm "doing bad stuff"? But if that's the case then I should've taken hits for downloading other not-so-legit files right?

Which leaves me with another possibility: Can cloud storage services be detected and falsely labeled as p2p file sharing? But even in that scenario, I still frequently use OneDrive, Google Drive, and Splice, so why wouldn't they also yield the same issues?

Another possibility could be that my school's IT is just that god-awful that it would present false-positives at the drop of a hat. This is actually a likely possibility considering most of the resources this school uses are so horribly outdated that even I could probably find a way to break them (google chrome labels many of the school's core sites as "suspicious" or "possibly harmful"; they still depend on early flash for a myriad of services)

2

Yes, they're allowed to monitor their own network. It's quite easier to differentiate P2P traffic from normal traffic.

They might have some form of deep packet inspection on the network.

No. Go talk to your IT department about it.

3

How are they monitoring what programs you have installed is it a a piece of software they've installed or are they purely using traffic detection to identify the application?

They may be detecting you're pirating by flagging large downloads or maybe even have software that recognizes pirated material by comparing filenames to those on well known torrenting sites..

Try changing the filenames within the cloud server and if the service is available compress the sh*t out of it. The only way to find out is by trail and error, unless you get friendly with an IT technician and figure out what they are running on the network which would make it alot easier to circumvent.