Yes, you can restrict clients from accessing pirated content by implementing access controls and monitoring systems.
Yes, you can restrict clients from accessing pirated content by implementing access controls and monitoring systems.
It seems the person in question manages a network they’re letting others connect to with their own devices. Although I’m not a lawyer, it’s likely the OP might face issues if users access the internet through that network for illegal activities or piracy.
And additional complications arise when they realize his spying on their files.
It makes sense that someone should avoid surveillance. However, people must rely on firewalls to stop such actions. Or perhaps it’s more about why they’re already tapping into the OP’s network from the start?
Essentially unachievable task. Much larger fish are already handling it than you, and these locations will simply move to other domains or become fully private (needing login). I’m not a coder or anything similar, so this remains purely theoretical—I don’t know if it’s feasible in reality. Have monitoring tools for domain accesses, file downloads, etc. As you mention using the torrent protocol for big file transfers, you likely could create a whitelist for legitimate use and allow everything else to be flagged or filtered. So essentially how spam filters operate. If you apply the same method across all users’ PCs, you’d get a solid baseline of normal domains, files, and similar activity to compare against suspicious behavior.
There are methods to complicate downloading various random data, though it requires significant effort from you. For instance, you might install Opnsense, configure DNS blacklists (it comes with a solid set for blocking ads and malware, and you can expand it as needed), restrict traffic on unused ports (like 80, 443, 22, 123), prevent access to non-essential ports such as 53 and 853 (except for the router's IP), implement an intrusion detection system and antivirus filtering on the router, and use VLANs to segment devices into networks with varying restrictions—especially useful for IoT devices. Simply blocking outgoing traffic to/from WAN ports that don’t match common ports alone will be very challenging for anyone trying to torrent pirated content or similar activities.
Torrent serves more than just pirated content. Many games employ comparable protocols, and some applications let you obtain them via torrent on their official sites. This can also help reduce server load. Disabling torrents isn't the only answer.