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Posted March 30, 2013 by TopDog in Articles
 
 

How to Torrent Anonymously with a VPN

Torrent Anonymously with a VPN
Torrent Anonymously with a VPN

These days more and more people are learning how to torrent anonymously. ISP’s are increasingly monitoring and throttling bittorrent use and 3rd party agencies are monitoring and recording IP addresses in bittorrent swarms without your knowledge. As a result, more and more are turning to anonymous vpn services and anonymous proxies in order to keep torrent speeds fast and torrent usage anonymous.

How public is my bittorrent usage?

Most individuals have a very large bittorrent footprint. You probably don’t realize it, but your IP address is visible to every computer that has access to the bittorrent swarms you are connected to. This can be many thousands of computers for each torrent file. Your IP address is a unique numerical identifier that can be used to identify specific internet connections of individual users.

Anyone can pull your public IP address from the swarm and use it to target your home network. Did you know that nearly all hacking attempts are based are targeted against a specific IP address? Furthermore, there are dozens of torrent monitoring groups who observe and record your download activity across a huge range of torrents without disclosing their activity to you. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing online, I don’t know anybody that likes being tracked.

Also, you Internet Service Provider (whoever you pay for internet access) can see all your internet activity and may even keep records of the websites you visit and files you download for up to 2 years.

How a VPN lets you torrent anonymously

When using bittorrent, your activity can be tracked in two ways.

  • By your publicly visible IP address in bittorrent swarms
  • Directly by your ISP (Internet Service Provider)

A VPN easily protects you from both types of monitoring, while keeping your speeds high.

How A VPN Works

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) in its simplest form provides 2  distinct benefits, each one addressing one of the 2 bittorrent security vulneratiblies.

#1 – Anonymous IP Address – A VPN allows you to connect to the internet through a remote 3rd party server. This server assigns you a new IP address different from the IP of your home network. As a result, all websites you visit and peers you connect to using bittorrent will see this new “anonymous” ip address as when making connections to your computer instead of your own. This means that anyone monitoring your usage will not see your true IP address.

There are several VPN providers that keep no logs at all, so any internet usage via these anonymous VPN services is completely untraceable.

#2 – Encrypted Data Transmission – The second benefit of a VPN is that all data transmitted between your computer and the VPN server is encrypted. This means that the all data transferred is encoded and undecipherable or viewable without a passw0rd (known as a key) that is only available to you and the VPN provider. The benefit is that nobody can view decrypt or view your internet usage without the key. This includes your ISP.

As a result, nobody can track what websites you are visiting while connected to the VPN. Also, your ISP will be unable to throttle (slow down) your bittorrent usage because they won’t even be able to tell that you are using bittorrent (due to the encryption).

The Best Anonymous VPN’s for Torrents

we have a whole separate article dedicated to this subject, but here are a few great choices:

Here is a short list anonymous VPN’s for bittorrent. These VPN providers keep no logs for more than 24 hours, and explicitly allow bittorrent use.

Using A Proxy For Anonymous Bittorrent

Some users may find an anonymous proxy service to be a better option than a VPN for bittorrent. There are a few differences between a VPN and a proxy.

  • A bittorrent proxy will make your bittorrent usage anonymous, not your entire internet connection
  • a proxy will generally use less powerful encryption, but will still be secure if set up properly
  • Proxy service usually costs less than VPN service.
  • A proxy will be faster than a VPN on the same server (because of lighter encryption)

The two best proxy services for bittorrent are:

These are both great choices. They are both fast and encrypted. BTGuard and Torguard do not make or keep any logs and are completely anonymous. They allow bittorrent usage and have easy setup options (basically you download a custom version of utorrent (btguard) or deluge (torguard) that has all the correct proxy settings installed). You can also use their manual setup guides to use the proxies with your favorite bittorrent client.

We found Torguard to be cheaper than btguard, and you get more proxy server options (over 20 locations to choose from)

Btguard is a little easier to set up but costs a bit more.