![]() For some people, that’s a good thing - it gives you privacy all over the web. Use a VPNĪ virtual private network (or VPN) is very similar to a proxy, but instead of rerouting just your BitTorrent traffic, it reroutes all your internet traffic. If you want to try something else, here are a few other tricks we recommend. Step 1: Sign Up for Private Internet AccessĪ proxy like Private Internet Access is the most convenient way to anonymise your traffic, but it isn’t the only way. We’ll be using Private Internet Access and uTorrent for Windows for this guide, but you can tweak things to fit your own setup pretty easily. Setting up a proxy just involves signing up for a service and checking a few boxes in your BitTorrent client. How to Set Up the Private Internet Access Proxy Ready to get started? Here’s what you need to do. Using a proxy may bring you increased anonymity, but nothing is guaranteed unless you avoid BitTorrent entirely. You’ll have to use something like Vuze or Deluge instead (or try one of the alternatives listed at the end of this article). uTorrent for Windows works great, but Mac and Linux favourite Transmission sadly does not support proxies. Not every BitTorrent client supports proxies.I lost significantly less speed with Private Internet Access than I did with BTGuard though. In my experience, more popular torrents stayed at their top speed of 3.4MB/s (my bandwidth cap) with a proxy, while other less popular torrents slowed down from 1MB/s to about 500-600kb/s. Running your connection through another server inevitably slows you down, although how much depends on what torrent you’re downloading, who from and a lot of other factors. That isn’t very expensive though, and it’s well worth it for the privacy you get. Private Internet Access costs $US6.95 a month or $US39.95 a year. Well, at least the ones worth using aren’t. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, there are a few downsides. If you encrypt your BitTorrent traffic (which we recommend), your ISP won’t even be able to see that you’re using BitTorrent. All the piracy monitors see is a proxy service sharing a file, and all your ISP sees is you connecting to a proxy service. That way, those anti-piracy groups can’t contact your ISP, and your ISP has no cause to send you a harrowing letter.īut wait, can’t the piracy groups then go to the anonymiser service and requisition their logs to figure out what you’re downloading? Theoretically, yes, but if you’re using a truly good anonymiser, they don’t keep logs, so there’s no paper trail of activity leading back to you. In this case, Private Internet Access’ proxy server is in the Netherlands. Piracy monitoring groups (often paid for by the entertainment industry either before or after they find violators) also join BitTorrent swarms, but instead of sharing files, they’re logging the IP addresses of other people in the swarm - including you - so that they can notify your ISP of your doings.Ī proxy (like Private Internet Access) funnels traffic - in this case, just your BitTorrent traffic - through another server, so that the BitTorrent swarm will show an IP address from them instead of you. That’s all very handy when you’re sharing files with other netizens, but file sharers such as yourself aren’t necessarily the only people paying attention. All of those people can see your computer’s IP address - they have to in order to connect. When you download or seed a torrent, you’re connecting to a bunch of other people, called a swarm. If you don’t want to use a proxy, go to the end of the article for alternative suggestions. So we recommend using it instead, using the instructions below. Thankfully, Private Internet Access - one of our favourite VPN providers - now provides a proxy very similar to BTGuard, but with faster speeds and better customer service. Unfortunately, BTGuard has never been a great service - it was just the most convenient. ![]() We’ve talked about proxies a few times before, most notably with our original guide on how to set up BTGuard, our guide to safe torrenting post-Demonoid. ![]() You have a few different options when it comes to hiding your BitTorrent activity, but we’ve found that a proxy is the most convenient and easiest to set up, so that’s what we’re going to cover here. If you’re still interested in using BTGuard, you can find instructions on its website. Since its original publication in 2011, we’ve changed our recommendation to Private Internet Access due to BTGuard’s slow speeds, bad customer service and other difficulties. This post originally detailed the setup of a proxy called BTGuard. Here’s how to do that with a simple proxy. If you use BitTorrent, you absolutely need to take precautions to hide your identity. These days, everyone’s looking to throttle your connection, spy on what you’re downloading, or even send you an ominous letter. BitTorrent isn’t the quiet haven it once was.
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