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BitTorrent

A few years ago, at a different job and company, I had a situation with BitTorrent and the company IT department.

At the time, I had never heard of BitTorrent, and even now I only know the general idea of what it is. It’s a program for file sharing over the Internet. I’ve never been into any of that file sharing stuff, legal or illegal. I just recently bought and downloaded Portal 2 through Steam, and that transaction brought the old trouble with the IT department to mind. (For my non-game-geek readers, buying and downloading games through the Steam online distribution system is completely legal and actually the normal and publisher-preferred way to get many new games.)

I was just sitting at my desk, working, and one of the IT guys came and stood at the “door” to my cubicle.

“Hey Bullgrit,” he said.

I stopped what I was doing and turned to him. I knew he was an IT guy, but I’d never had any direct dealings with him before, and I didn’t know his name. “Hey,” I said.

“So, how’s BitTorrent working out for you?” Then he took a swig from his can of Dr. Pepper. His body language was screaming at me. His stance at my door and his facial expression showed obvious disgust and stated, Yeah, you’ve been caught!

Like I said, I had never heard of BitTorrent, and he spoke so quickly that I didn’t understand what he said. “Bit turner? Huh?” I responded. I was very confused. He was obviously confrontational, but I didn’t have a clue what it could be about.

“We found BitTorrent on your computer,” he added. I still didn’t understand the word. He seemed to be so anxious for some kind of angry situation that he was still talking fast.

“OK,” I said. “What is it?” I looked at my computer screen. I don’t know why. I gathered from his attitude that this “bit turner” thing was bad, and my computer must be infected with it.

“Never mind,” he spat, and stormed off.

I sat there a minute wondering, what the hell?

I got up and went to some coworkers. “One of the IT guys just came to me and told me I have . . . bit turner? on my computer. But he wouldn’t say what that means. Is that a new virus or something?”

The coworkers thought for a moment, and then realized the name was BitTorrent. They told me what it was, what it was used for, and I understood what it meant for a corporate IT department to find it on one’s work computer.

I went to the IT department to find the guy who had just come to me, but he wasn’t around. I wasn’t able to find him the rest of that day. I did manage to get up with him the next day, though. I told him I found out what BitTorrent was, and told him that I didn’t know how it got on my computer.

He was in a very different mood this day. He said he investigated it on my computer, (apparently remotely, while I continued my normal work), and found that it seemed to have been installed through some backdoor in the system. No files had been transferred onto or off of my computer. He deleted the program and my computer was clean, now. I thanked him and left.

Then I went to my boss to tell him what IT had found and done on my computer.

“Yeah,” my boss said, “Doug told me he had found BitTorrent, and he was investigating it. Good to know nothing happened with it.” We talked about the situation for another couple minutes, and then I went on back to my work.

So, apparently Doug, the IT guy, had reported the BitTorrent discovery to my boss and to the head of IT, and they said to figure out what was happening on the computer. Neither said to confront me about it – my boss immediately assumed some cyber hacking, rather than any illegal action on my part. Doug’s coming to me and confronting me about it was purely his own decision.

I guess he must have figured that getting me to admit to installing and using the program immediately would be easier and faster than him having to go through the programming of my computer. Well, he didn’t expect to find me completely ignorant of what the hell he was even talking about.

I sometimes wonder how that confrontation would have gone differently if I had known what BitTorrent was, even if I didn’t have anything to do with it getting on my company computer.

Bullgrit

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