P2P help

[Kevin]

I've been using the P2P application WinMX to share my mp3's and music videos for years now, but ever since I moved to school, all my P2P applications don't work anymore. Downloads and uploads crawl at speeds under 1 k/s. However, I can send files at blazing speeds through AIM. I believe that the culprit is my school cutting off access to popular P2P access ports in order to deter copyrighted music sharing. I've spoken to other people in my school and they're experiencing similar problems with Kazaa and other P2P apps. I'm dying to download music -- is there ANY way to get around this? PLEASE help me!!!

By the way, for those of you who are familiar with WinMX, these are my settings:
-Primary connection to the network
-Send and recieve UDP datagrams on port 16257
-Listen on port 16699 for incoming TCP connections

[ibglowin]

I've been using the P2P application WinMX to share my mp3's and music videos for years now, but ever since I moved to school, all my P2P applications don't work anymore. Downloads and uploads crawl at speeds under 1 k/s. However, I can send files at blazing speeds through AIM. I believe that the culprit is my school cutting off access to popular P2P access ports in order to deter copyrighted music sharing. I've spoken to other people in my school and they're experiencing similar problems with Kazaa and other P2P apps. I'm dying to download music -- is there ANY way to get around this? PLEASE help me!!!

By the way, for those of you who are familiar with WinMX, these are my settings:
-Primary connection to the network
-Send and recieve UDP datagrams on port 16257
-Listen on port 16699 for incoming TCP connections

With the RIAA suing people these days all colleges have had to shut down file sharing. They can easily be sued for allowing file sharing on their network. My daughter just went off to UCSB. They had to inspect her laptop for any P2P software and viruses before she was allowed to plug into the network. Anyone caught fileswapping on the campus network will be suspened from school for a month.

Is there away around it. Sure. Pay for your own network connection (cable modem). Or start paying for your music from places like the Apple iTunes store.

[lee635]

First, we need to remember that not all file sharing involves copyrighted materials. There's unsigned bands looking for exposure and public domain files that one can legally share freely. Also, we plan to use P2P to download mp3 versions of music for use at our campus radio station. We have a large catalog of LP records that need to be migrated and to manually create mp3s for all these albums would be very time consuming. Also, since radio stations, "Pay to play" each song, artists receive their royalties whether we rip the album manually or pull down an mp3 via internet.

You might try the latest version of morpheus which integrates support for using a "high anonymity" proxy, such as a free overseas proxy server. Since you would be going through a proxy, you would likely connect via a different port between your local host and the proxy server.

Also, there exist some very active usenet newsgroups that post mp3s as well. Downloading off usenet may not be as "sexy" as winmx or morpheus, but it gets the job done.

[HarryD]

Sorry Kevin but your school is doing what it should be doing. Stop wasting valuable bandwidth!

[Kevin]

I was looking more in the way of techincal help rather than people preaching down to me how P2P is "wrong". Oh yeah, and by the way, mp3 sharing was not the sole purpose of my P2P use. I also used it to download maps for Counter-Strike and other crucial files I could not find on the web. I guess I'll have to take my problem elsewhere. :(