The motion picture association has started its campaign targetting users in the United States for filesharing on college campus. In recent news, the MPAA was found to be in contact with some of the country's biggest educational institutes, something -- sharing personal information with third parties -- which remains illegal in Canada.

As early as October 25th, the MPAA are reported to have sent letters to the presidents of 25 well-known universities.

They have a brilliant idea, which the MPAA believes the universities will take well to: A university toolkit designed to spy in students leaving machines vulnerable to hackers and displaying Internet traffic for the entire world to see.

The MPAA originally claimed that the toolkit isn't designed to "phone home", but further testing by the Washington Post reveals that out of the box, the product immediately sends possibly private information back to its developers.

How does the toolkit work?

The "beta" toolkit sets up an apache web server (just like what you're looking at here on canadiancontent.net) which publishes real time information about current traffic and web sites visited including usernames.

After the press contacted the MPAA, they dismissed the web server setup as a bug and promised a bug-fix.

At this time, there isn't any information about whether Canadian universities were contacted, but previous rulings in Canada forbade ISPs from handing out personal information about their clients. We're not yet sure if this applies to universities as they're not public service providers.