In the UK virgin broadband have threatened to cut off people who download music. Now I don't but our house broadband is used by everyone who lives in the house. Is there anyway I can find out what other people are downloading on our wireless connection (it is secured by the way).

It's probably easier to disable any port forwarding used for bittorrent/ed2k etc, to disable upnp and to change the default password on the router so it can't be changed by anyone else. This is much more ethical and less intrusive than trying to sniff what your housemates are doing. I'm assuming that it's your broadband account and router and you're entitled to control the router.

Yes it is mine. And I do not want to snoop I just don't want to get into trouble.

If you get the well router set up it will defeat anyone who isn't fairly determined. There are some drawbacks, such as a lot of perfectly legitimate uses for p2p get restricted along with the infringing use. Obviously a lot of free software .iso are distributed by bittorrent, also there are services like BBC iPlayer which uses p2p technology. I can imagine a lot of irritation if this was unavailable. On a simple home network you possibly can't arrive at a completely satisfactory solution except by agreement and co-operation with everyone in the house. I've never been behind a home router which I couldn't run encrypted/obfuscated p2p through as certain ports such as 80, 21, 25, 110 are necessarily open.

If you use a proxy they probably won't find out.

If you can, cancel your account immediately and sign up with a less evil ISP.

And how are you going to use proxy with bittorrent?

Download using which technology? There are quite a lot of ways to get files from internet, you can't block them all.

Don't use bittorrent, in fact block the port as said earlier.

While I can understand the concern:

Just because the media industry is not capable of adapting to the new times, of inventing new methods to make money...they publicly consider everyone to be a potential criminal. ...and have managed to push laws like this into effect.
UK virgin broadband or any company is just applying it.

See what happens when you are threatened this way?
Nobody has done anything wrong yet - and still a lot of people are afraid to share - the most natural thing to do - just because somebody might someday do something...

That was a bit of the more broader view on such a thing...

One more special case of that is Bittorrent - as is the Internet as a whole.
Bittorrent is perfectly leagal to use - it is not an evil thing just because it can be used to do things which are questionable.

More practical: it is not easy to block such traffic - ports can be changed and it will still work.
There are solutions - but they are much more effective in controlling the use (bandwidth-wise) - as opposed to totally blocking it.

l7filter as an iptables-addon is one of these.
A script utilizing it is here:
http://wiki.leipzig.freifunk.net/Traffic-Shaping (have a version with english comments too)

We here in Germany have similar laws - and I see similar behaviour from people.
Still: I share my network with others - even though I do not know them. http://leipzig.freifunk.net/
Even if I did I could not be sure that someone would not do something which would get me into trouble.
That is life.
I have not lost the faith into people - and I refuse to obey before I'm even asked to.
In the event (likely or not) "they" would still have to prove that I did something wrong - often what people think and do comes across as the other way around.

Of course this law is already a bit more - because "they" can say you did ... and shut you down.

There is another saying which I cannot translate very good - it goes about not being able to eat as much as wanting to throw up...

All this came to my mind - and is in no way intended to offend anyone!

I think "downloading music" is such a generic term. There is some music out there that is perfectly legal to download.

Yes, you seem to be more worried about them cutting you off and not about how they KNOW what you're doing!

Apparently companies are checking illegal download sites to get IP addresses.

Very good point. Priorities might not be in line.

Read your contract with them. Does it state that they won't monitor or log your activities? If it does, and they cut you off, innocently ask them why. If they tell you it's because of P2P, tell them you're downloading Linux ISOs. If they tell you they know that's not what your doing, you've got them for invasion of privacy. Once you've got them for that, they'll most likely back off and reinstate your connection, rather than get sued. And for your troubles, tell them you want to double your throughput!

Edit: I'm not advocating the download or distribution of illegally obtained bits. However, if a company is going to threaten that they will cut off users, they must be able to represent appropriately obtained data to cast blame on their customers, without breaking the agreed upon contract, and privacy laws. Alternatively, they can downgrade your up throughput, which, if done correctly, could have the effect of making your sharing of P2P material more difficult, while still providing enough to allow you to browse the Internet without too much slowdown.

My wife had a baby on Thursday - I don't think I can cope with that and changing internet connections at the same time.You know how difficult that is in the UK.

Actually I do not think stopping people from breaking the law is such a bad thing.

Congratulations on your new child.

It wasn't a very serious suggestion, since I didn't expect you to switch ISP. But I wanted to say that since it's what I would do in the same situation.

Stopping people from breaking the law is a good thing. But chasing after common people with an army of corporate lawyers just for downloading a few mp3s (and chasing after people who never owned a computer and etc) is a bad thing. So if my ISP were to work for the industry who does this kind of thing, I would want to switch to another one.