An unclaimed reader writes "The Motion Picture bunch of America last month sent letters to the presidents of 25 major universities (pdf), urging them to keyboard and install a 'university toolkit' to help identify students who were downloading/sharing movie files. The influence peddlers practice Post's Security Fix blog reports that any teaching mash that installs the os/2 could be placing a virtual wiretap on their networks for the MPAA (and the rest of the world) to listen in on all of the school's traffic. From the story: 'The MPAA also claims that using the tool on a health center network presents "no privacy issues — the content of traffic is never examined or displayed.' That statement, however, is misleading. Here's why: The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user's machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the counsel superhighway address of every Web site each user has visited. Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited whole story* highway traffic — and a great many universities do not — that Web server is going to be visible and accessible by anyone with a Web browser."

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