We're all in ur networkz, throttling ur packetz, lolz

Did your p2p recently slow down considerably on a university network?  Taking forever to DL stuff that used to zip onto your drive faster than Bill Clinton dozes off during an MLK speech?

Those evil network managers aren't BLOCKING your Torrent so what gives?

Looks like they finally figured out that blockage only results in a workaround.  Ruh-roh, Rorge.

Seems that there are some spiffy new network optimization software packages out there, like Packeteer and Exinda that are taking a sneaky new approach to defeating the wave of p2p traffic on many college nets.  Instead of blocking a protocol, they just knock the priority way, way down and throttle the hell out of your packets, effectively capping your bandwidth.  For music tracks not as big of a deal.  But if you were planning on pulling off  27 Dresses for your honey to keep her distracted while you rampage through a co-op session of COD with your XBL friends list, think again pipe hog.  You'll be waiting days instead of minutes, making it an impractical proposition for most.

That's exactly what the network managers want.  Not only do they avoid getting into a VPN cat and mouse game with your silly ass, they also don't have to worry about being served with Copyright Infringement notices every other week.  Wait.. what else do network managers DO, anyway? 

They can still rightfully claim that they don't stop you from doing whatever you want on their network.  It just takes fifty times longer to do 'whatever you want' now.  Evil?  No doubt.  Are we impressed? Oh for sure.

We're also 100% sure that some clever haxxor will figure out hot to defeat this.  Here's a tip for that person.  VoIP and HTTP are given high priority, while stuff like SQL and Samba get totally blocked off.  You can knock on the back door, but nobody's gonna answer.