From the first Z1 computer to the recently developed 4G network, time has brought astounding technological leaps and bounds.

 But to protect these developments and investments, networks must be as smart as the phones and computers on which they are used.

 Last month, UDit sent a university-wide e-mail that said, "In response to provisions issued in the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA), the President's Council has approved the restriction of peer-to-peer file sharing to and from our campus network effective August 3, 2010."

 Peer-to-peer, or P2P, file sharing is a technology that alleviates the need for large amounts of bandwidth and file space. It does this by breaking down the huge files that typically clog a central server into small pieces shared across the participants of the P2P network.

 While LimeWire aficionados may roll their eyes, the restriction can ultimately only help university network users.

 "There are legitimate uses of P2P," said Dean Halter, UDit risk manager. "The main problem with peer-to-peer file sharing is that in the overwhelming majority of the cases, [users are] copying something that they don't have rights to, and they're violating copyright law."

 The University of Ballarat's Internet Commerce Security Laboratory in Australia conducted a study, randomly sampling 1,000 of the most popular BitTorrent - a type of P2P file sharing - files.

 The findings concluded that only 0.3 percent of the files did not infringe on copyright laws. Of the remaining files, 89 percent were shared illegally, while the other 11 percent were "ambiguous" and "likely to be infringing," according to Jacqui Chen in a report on Ars Technica.

 "It's just a method of distributing information," said Karen Bull, director of business services in UDit, "and if I own the information, then I could certainly use peer-to-peer to share that out."

 Of P2P users, students are the main offenders, most commonly using programs to obtain music, movies and games free; though, not without consequence.

 Just two years ago, 15 University of Dayton students paid upwards of $3,000 each in settlement fees to the Recording Industry Association of America after sharing music, claiming to have done so unknowingly.

 "The nature of the applications or the software is reliant on everybody sharing these files," Bull said. "So just by default of downloading a client like Gnutella or BitTorrent, it automatically sets you up to share things back out."

 As such, sensitive personal information can only be a click away from falling into the wrong user's hands.

 In February 2010, the Federal Trade Commission issued a warning to about 100 companies across the country whose employees had installed P2P software on their machines and were identified to be sharing customer and employee data.

 In a university setting, student and faculty records, credit card information and other private data can be inadvertently exploited through file sharing.

 While legitimate P2P software distributors do their best to ensure that their programs give users control of what they share, less legitimate clients can make similar claims and simultaneously install backdoors and Trojan viruses, which "give the bad guys control of their computers and access to everything on them," Halter says.

 Fortunately, there have yet to be any major complaints, as many safe and legal alternatives exist. A full list is offered at educause.edu.