I was speaking to a professor at a conference in Orlando about the feasibility of stopping file-sharing on college campuses and this is what we came up with after talking for a while about “building a better mousetrap.”

Okay, some ways to thwart file-sharers.

“Deep” Inspection Firewalls: They can actually look at packet content for “flagged” packet information. This could be a certain program’s packet anatomy, a.k.a. Gnutella network authentication or certain packet anatomies of other P2P services.

The only downside to this kind of surreptitious blocking of data is that you might block something unintentionally. This is where your systems administrator comes in and identifies what is good or bad traffic. It will be interesting to see where this technology leads us in the future. If you block the software transmissions by “reading” the packet information then it’s much harder to just “switch ports” to get around firewall port blocking.

Privacy issues come to mind when someone is “inspecting packets.” What exactly can they see or are they allowed by law to see? It would really depend on who your service provider was and what was in their “terms of service” statement. Basically you are entering into a contract when buying service. What is in that contract is what you are agreeing to. This would be a good time to read your ISP’s TOS. You can generally find these statements on your ISP’s Web site or by contacting them directly. [Terrence O'Connor]