Blocking Torrents?

[Rye]

The network I maintain at work is infested with losers that think it's good to suck up bandwidth by downloading movies. It's just an ordinary windows xp small home network with no real administration other than me going around making stuff work. Ideally, I need some sort of program that can block torrents on individual machines that can be password protected and left on in the background without showing up in the system tray or as an application in task manager.

Or any other ideas?

[General Zod]

Traffic shaping is one of the most common ways of discouraging/blocking bittorrent use.

[phongn]

A firewall that only lets certain ports through (HTTP/HTTPS, POP3, etc.) helps, as can traffic shaping.

[Vendetta]

Identify the people that are doing it, remove their network access.

[Beowulf]

Go to the boss, and get into the network use policy (or equivalent) that use of filesharing software is not allowed, and is grounds for termination of internet access, or similar.

[Uraniun235]

I can't believe these guys haven't been officially warned or fired yet. This sort of problem should not be solved with technology but with policy.

[Vendetta]

In any sensibly run company, any illegal use of the company's equipment would be grounds for dismissal (at my workplace you would actually be immediately removed from the premises pending formal dismissal), especially network equipment, because the company is liable for any damages resulting if it doesn't have an effective acceptable use policy in place.

Implementing technological barriers to this kind of activity is still a good idea though, because it makes it more difficult, and if any court cases are brought the company can show that it was taking steps to ensure only legitemate use of it's network equipment was allowed.

[Solauren]

A little late on the bandwagon but...

point out companies have been held legally accountable for what there employees download (at least for copyrighted material)

Then point out the RIAA lawsuits

[Uraniun235]

Couldn't you just firewall it too? I don't know the bittorrent port, but you could probably google to look it up then set up the computer's firewall to filter it.

Some torrent client developers are starting to implement mechanisms designed to evade filtering.

[Durandal]

The network I maintain at work is infested with losers that think it's good to suck up bandwidth by downloading movies. It's just an ordinary windows xp small home network with no real administration other than me going around making stuff work. Ideally, I need some sort of program that can block torrents on individual machines that can be password protected and left on in the background without showing up in the system tray or as an application in task manager.

Or any other ideas?

Don't let employees install software on their computers.

[Rin]

I tried ipp2p last year as a small project for school. It filtered torrents and ed2k traffic nicely and I didn't notice any side-effects. Requires that all traffic go through a linux machine thou...

Might be worth trying if problem is serious, but better test it before. My fooling around was quite limited by my linux experience.

[Zac Naloen]

jesus this is easy.

Tell the boss companies are accountable for illegal use. Company policy will quickly change and then forceably remove any software they aren't allowed to use. Easy.

You can also lock down windows users so they can't install anything, no recurring problems.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

The network I maintain at work is infested with losers that think it's good to suck up bandwidth by downloading movies. It's just an ordinary windows xp small home network with no real administration other than me going around making stuff work. Ideally, I need some sort of program that can block torrents on individual machines that can be password protected and left on in the background without showing up in the system tray or as an application in task manager.

Or any other ideas?

I'll jump on the "This is a problem best solved by policy" bandwagon. Seriously, if someone's using his or her computer to download movies, then he or she is abusing company resources for conducting personal business on company time and money, and exposing the company to legal liability. Talk to management and make this clear to them. In fact I'm rather surprised that the company actually permits this sort of behavior from its employees to begin with.