Usenet and University Throttled Limit

V-P

Hey everyone! I let one of my friends use my school interenet connection (which is typically limited to 10 GB/week) to download something on Usenet. He downloaded about 5-6 gigs worth of stuff. It's been two days and it seems as though it didn't count against my bandwidth limit. I'm just wondering why using Usenet got around the throttled bandwidth... I thought maybe it had to do with ports but I'm not really sure. BTW, his usenet client was set to use SSL, so I'm not sure if that's what got around the limit. Is there a way I could get a browser to mimic whatever it's causing usenet to get around the throttle? Basically I'd like to be able to stream Netflix movies in my room without having to worry about going over...

kryyst

Depends on how the caps work. If you have a 10gb/week cap period. Or just 10gb/week for file transfers. Pushing something over ssl wouldn't appear as a file transfer since it's encrypted. It couldn't distinguish it from regular encrypted traffic. To get netflix over ssl you'd have to create an ssl proxy tunnel to connect to an unregulated computer or to a paid proxy subscriber.

drasnor

You could use TOR for your SSL proxy but I'm not sure the latency is low enough for streaming.

ardichoke

It's also possible that your university has it's own Usenet server and on-campus transfers don't count against your bandwidth cap. Of course, that would only be true if they do in fact have their own Usenet servers and your buddy used them and not an off-site Usenet server.

V-P

He used Astraweb so definitely not the University's usenet servers if they exist. Also, the cap isn't just for file transfer. It's a hard cap on all traffic. Still confused as to what's going on but I don't want to ask the techs here because they might actually try to plug up the hole.