How To Protect Your IP Address While Torrenting?

By Paul Liu
Monday, May 22nd, 2017

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Bittorrenting is a peer-to-peer file sharing technology that has been around for more than a decade. It facilitates sharing of files by breaking them into small pieces which are then downloaded by interested users with the help of a bittorrenting client. This not only helps users with slow internet speeds to download very large files (such as videos) but also allows them to contribute to the file sharing community. Since its inception, bittorrenting has consistently accounted for a very large percentage of the overall internet traffic.

Although the bittorrenting technology is highly useful and totally legal, it is often used by online pirates to share copyrighted movies, music, software, ebooks and other types of digital products. Because of this, trade organizations like MPAA and RIAA as well as legal entities representing copyright owners are known to snoop upon torrenting traffic and keep a track of IP addresses which share copyrighted material. Many countries (including United States) have enacted laws which allow copyright holders and ISPs to send notices and even levy fines upon users which share copyrighted products via bittorrenting. In addition, ISPs in some countries are even known to terminate user accounts which keep sharing copyrighted movies, TV shows and music files despite repeated warnings.

Due to the sensitive nature of the technology, it becomes essential to hide your torrenting sessions from the copyright holders as well as your ISP (especially if you download movies and TV shows). Since ISPs determine the true identity of a P2P user via his IP address, you need to protect your IP address while downloading or sharing files via bittorrenting. Here are few ways to accomplish this and download files via torrents anonymously:

1) Use a torrent proxy – As the name suggests, this is a special type of proxy which is meant just for bittorrenting. BTGuard and Private Internet Access are couple of service providers which provide this type of service. In addition to using the client supplied by these providers, you can also set up their proxies on popular torrenting clients such as uTorrent and Vuze. A torrent proxy is usually a Socks 5 proxy which hides torrenting traffic from the ISPs and routes them through the proxy providers’ servers.

2) Use a VPN – VPNs are very similar to proxies but they offer the additional advantage of encryption of traffic and unblocking of geographically restricted content. However, you cannot use just about any VPN to secure your bittorrenting traffic; you must subscribe to a service that permits P2P activities. If you choose a service provider that does not allow torrenting and use its service to share or download content via torrenting, you would face instant ban and your IP might even be reported to the authorities. Browse through our site to read reviews of reputed VPN providers which allow torrenting before making a subscription decision.

3) Use a Seedbox – Seedboxing refers to renting a dedicated server and then using it exclusively for downloading and sharing files through bittorrenting. Users can connect to rented seedboxes in order to download files via torrents and then download those files to their computers via FTP. Unlike VPNs, seedboxes offer great download speeds but they do require some extra setup in the beginning. Also, renting a seedbox is considerably more expensive so they are only meant for prolific bittorrenting users who wish to download a lot of content and at the same time, protect their real IP address from their ISPs.

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May 22, 2017

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