It's a new school year, which means it's time for the bright-eyed youth of our fine country to move into their dorm rooms, fire up their laptops, and take advantage of the blazing-fast, weapons-grade campus Internet to torrent the movies and music they missed over the summer. Which colleges and universities have the biggest BitTorrent habit?


TorrentFreak reports data from the BitTorrent monitoring service Scaneye, which tracked the number of people sharing files from university IP addresses over the last year. According to TF, which had a look at the actual data, a majority of these "hits" are instances of illegal file sharing and not legal p2p transfers. Here are the top 10, from the list of 50:


Well, what a surprise, for the second year in a row, the nerds at MIT are on top with a collective 1933 hits. The feat is all the more impressive considering the school's populations of 10,000 students is by far the smallest of any other school on the list. And what an embarrassment for nerd-haven, arch-rival Stanford, which with just 434 hits comes in at a pedestrian 27th place.

Now we don't know how exactly this data was collected, and a number factors might affect how many hits a school gets, including the size of the enrolled population and how many students live on campus. The numbers are small, but as a rule, the number measured wouldn't be indicative of the actual number of cases. It's most likely a sampling of data, which would then be extrapolated to a larger number.

But still. MIT. Wow. Tim the Beaver has been putting in some late nights on the interwaves. [TorrentFreak]

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