Slashdot notes that the Associated Press has picked up on ICARUS, the University of Florida's file trading monitoring system.

ICARUS is an open source application which resides on the student's computer, and when it detects file trading, it knocks them off the Internet and sends a notice to the student and, I would imagine, to the university. Note that it also detects virus problems.

As discussed in the comments for the first Slashdot post about this in October, digital rights privacy advocates feel it's an intrusive monitoring system, that it violates student rights. Strangely, I'm suprised that I'm more in favor of this system than the one that FSU is currently using. Our network administrators have installed a packet monitoring system which looks at inbound and outbound traffic from the dorms, monitors bandwidth usage for users, and detects packets that look suspicious, like file trading.

I think my perference comes from the fact that FSU's system monitors all traffic from outside the students' computers, that everything is being "snooped." They, the administrators, are watching everything. Whereas the Florida ICARUS system is sending out notices only when there's more direct evidence of file trading and relies on an intelligent agent, not an individual, to do the watching.