If your university is blocking IP addresses for non-email purposes with Spamhaus, well, they’re wrong. That’s not what Spamhaus is for. Can you ask your IT team to reconsider?
Right, after they took that informed decision, I hope they went on to block Dropbox, iCloud, GoogleDrive and OneDrive.
Not technically p2p, but they typically serve a similar purpose and I would argue that it is probably much easier to do something that your Uni is actually trying to prevent than using Syncthing.
Microsoft Update works using p2p, if configured to do so. They might want to prevent that too. I hope the IT department knows their stuff.
Syncthing is about well defined endpoints. I would argue it is about as much p2p as the landline phone in every office of your University.
I am just writing this in case you need arguments.
I’d go as far as saying that the average IT department is acting cowardly. What is not understood, needs to be blocked. Understanding the basic principles of what benefits networked computers can bring, using any particular software, requires time to investigate what the software does. They usually don’t trust their users to know what they are doing (often rightfully). So anything that has the faintest smell of lying outside of their comfort zone / approved usage patterns (which cover probably > 90 % of users) is cautiously blocked.
This is unfortunately not going to change. Most users are happy with using 5 % of the things that their computer can do in a network. IT departments don’t have time to investigate. Unless some next-generation, decentralized Internet initiative really lifts off, BYOD and open-minded company network usage becomes commonplace, and users are well educated to know what they are doing with their devices and start demanding self-responsibility at large scale. Not so likely.
