torrenting anonymously

November 13, 2006 8:06 PM

How does one use bittorrent anonymously?

I've seen this tutorial about using Azureus with Tor and this post on lifehacker. I'm pretty tech savvy but I cannot make any sense of those instructions. Anyone got ideas/links to a more practical guide on how to do this?

posted by special-k to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I don't think you can ever be %100 anonymous. However, you can use things like Peerguardian which blocks certain IPs from seeing your computer and the Azereus mentioned above. Look up stealth p2p also as that could help yield some results. Oh and be careful you don't get spyware.
posted by occidental at 8:14 PM on November 13, 2006

Best answer: The links you provided seem to be referring to running Bittorrent through an anonymizing service (Tor). This is certainly possible (like it is with any Internet protocol) but might be more than a little tricky. Also, the sheer volume of data that BT transfers would be restrictive, and BT performance would certainly suffer.

Other than doing this, anonymous Bittorrent is pretty much impossible, due to the simple fact that anyone who connects to the swarm can see your IP address and which pieces of the torrent you're sharing. This is required in order for Bittorrent to, well, work.

Peerguardian doesn't really do anything. It protects you from getting intentionally-bad data from industry plants, but any reasonable BT client will ignore peers that are repeatedly sending bad data anyways.

This is why many torrent sites have moved to invite-only private trackers. This doesn't eliminate the risk, but certainly greatly reduces it.
posted by neckro23 at 8:39 PM on November 13, 2006

Relakks - A private, encrypted, annonymous VPN. I've used it, just to see how good the network is, and I got around 200k per second. It was fairly reliable too.
posted by bigmusic at 10:38 PM on November 13, 2006

Please don't use Tor for BitTorrent. You fuck it up for people who use it for legitimate uses.
posted by devilsbrigade at 11:50 PM on November 13, 2006

You can use someone else's wireless signal.
posted by billtron at 1:17 AM on November 14, 2006

People who use Tor for bittorrent are scumbags. Please just use Peerguardian and take your chances like everyone else.
posted by i_am_a_Jedi at 4:49 AM on November 14, 2006

Others have pointed this out, but it bears repeating: Tor is not for Bittorrent. Tor is for people who needs to anonymize their internet usage for legitimate reasons. Copyright infringement is not one of those reasons.
posted by bshort at 5:41 AM on November 14, 2006

I'll repeat what a few others have already said - do not use TOR for Bittorrent. You're abusing the network for something it was not made for.
I even posted this in one of the comments at Lifehacker after everyone seemed so excited about it. I was also disappointed that Lifehacker would encourage it.
posted by althanis at 7:53 AM on November 14, 2006

Best answer: The typical use of Tor with Bittorrent is to anonymize tracker traffic only. I fail to see how that is abusing Tor. I agree that using Tor to tunnel the actual data traffic between peers would be abuse.

Tor for tracker traffic + Configure Azureus to use encrypted connections = about as good as it gets, without beating on the Tor network.
posted by kableh at 8:58 AM on November 14, 2006