Bittorrent's Been Around for a Whopping Ten Years, but It Continues to Evolve and Remains One of the Best File-Sharing Tools Available
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BitTorrent's been around for a whopping ten years, but it continues to evolve and remains one of the best file-sharing tools available. If you really want to make your downloads soar—and keep Big Brother out of your business—this guide's for you. We showed you how to get started sharing and downloading files with BitTorrent a few years ago, and most of that still applies, but if you're looking to up your BitTorrent skills, things have changed a lot since then. In fact, some of you may find BitTorrent a bit old school for your tastes. Sure, the ISPs are cracking down and throttling peer-to-peer users, and you have other great file-sharing alternatives like Usenet, but that doesn't mean BitTorrent doesn't still have a place in your routine. It's pretty easy to ward off prying eyes with today's BitTorrent clients, and while Usenet is certainly great, BitTorrent is still more widespread. As such, it tends to have a better selection on certain things, and is at the very least a good fallback method for when you don't find what you're looking for elsewhere. After all, there's no reason you have to be loyal to only one file-sharing protocol. This intermediate guide to BitTorrent is designed to help you do three things: jack up your speeds (without consuming your bandwidth) and keep unwanted snoopers from seeing what you're doing. We've divided them up into three sections: * Increase Your Speed and Privacy with a Few Easy Settings * Keep That Newfound Speed from Hijacking All Your Bandwidth * Really Hide Your Traffic with External Solutions For the purposes of this guide, we're focusing on two BitTorrent clients: uTorrent for Windows and Transmission for Mac OS X. That doesn't mean you can't use other clients like Vuze (or KTorrent and Transmission for Linux, if you are of the Linux persuasion), but there are just too many clients out there for us to give specific instructions for each. uTorrent and Transmission are some of the most popular clients out there, and they're our favorite here at Lifehacker, so where appropriate, we'll give you specific instructions for each client. Note that uTorrent for Mac is not nearly as mature as uTorrent for Windows, and may not have some of these features—so, in this particular case, when we reference uTorrent, we mean uTorrent for Windows. Keep Your BitTorrent Speed and Privacy at the Max with a Few Simple SettingsBitTorrent clients have come a long way in the past few years, and where it used to be much more difficult to hide your BitTorrent activity, it's now a matter of checking the right boxes. Here are a few settings every BitTorrent user should have enabled. Randomize and Forward Your Router PortsIf you're connected to your internet through a router, it's likely that many of your ports are closed, meaning your speeds will be much slower than you'd like. You'll need to let your router know which ones you want open for BitTorrent traffic, which is known as port forwarding. Furthermore, many ISPs or organizations (say, if your neighborhood or leasing company provides your internet) will block popular BitTorrent ports, so you'll want to switch up the port you use every once in a while to keep them guessing. Full size Both of these are extremely simple in uTorrent and Transmission. In uTorrent, just to go Options > Preferences and hit the connection tab. Make sure all four boxes under the "Listening Port" section are checked—Enable UPnP Port Mapping, Enable NAT-PMP Port Mapping, Randomize Port Each Start, and Add Windows Firewall Exception. Full size In Transmission, open up the app's preferences and head to the Network pane. Check both the Randomize Port on Launch and Automatically Map Port boxes. If you see that the light next to the port's number goes from red to green, then you've successfully opened your current port to BitTorrent traffic, and you should notice a good increase in speed. Note that for best results, you'll want to make sure your router is UPnP capable and has UPnP enabled. Most routers are UPnP ready, but if you find that you're having trouble, you may need to look at your router's manual and settings page to enable its use. Encrypt Your BitTorrent TrafficNowadays, many internet service providers will throttle your bandwidth, prevent you from seeding, or do any other number of annoying things to try and stop you from torrenting. Apart from randomizing your ports, another thing you can do to try and keep them out is encrypt your traffic. It won't necessarily work on every client, but I've found that it nearly doubled my download speeds, so it's certainly worth a shot. Full size In uTorrent, go back to the preferences and hit up the BitTorrent section in the left sidebar. Under Protocol Encryption, open the dropdown menu labeled Outgoing. You have three options: Disabled, Enabled, and Forced. Try Enabled for awhile, but if you don't see a good speed increase, using the Forced setting might give you better results. Also note the Allow Incoming Legacy Connections checkbox—If you have a specific torrent that doesn't have a lot of people seeding, you might want to check this box temporarily, though I try to keep it unchecked whenever I can. This ensures that any peers you connect to will use encryption and that your ISP will be less likely to throttle you. Full size In Transmission, head over to the Peers pane of the app's preferences and check the Encryption section. Definitely check the "Prefer Encrypted Peers" box, and I'd highly recommend checking the "Ignore Unencrypted Peers" box, though again, if you are noticing that there aren't a lot of peers connecting for a specific torrent, try unchecking it to see if that helps your speeds. Block Peers that Might be SnoopingEven worse than throttling ISPs is the threat of the snooping RIAA, MPAA, or other organizations looking to take you down. Often, they'll post fake torrents of copyrighted material (or just join in on real ones) and track those downloading, leading them right to an unprepared you. While there is no foolproof way to avoid them, a really great simple way is to use a peerblocker. Transmission has this feature built-in, while Windows users will need to use a separate program. Full size If you're a Mac user, open up Transmission's preferences and head back to the Peers pane. This time, check the box that reads "Prevent Known Bad Peers from Connecting" down under the Blocklist section. Hit the update button to make sure the list of bad peers is recent, and check the Automatically Update Weekly box to keep it up to date. Full size Windows users will need to download previously mentioned PeerBlock (an updated version of the seemingly defunct, previously mentioned Peer Guardian 2) to block the big boys from snooping. The first time you run it, it'll take you through a setup wizard, in which you can decide who you want to blacklist. Check the box for anti-P2P organizations (as well as anything else you may want, though the P2P box is the only important one for BitTorrent) and schedule it to update as often as you want. You might as well update it every day; there's no reason to be stingy with your privacy here. Then, just make sure it runs when you use your BitTorrent client—it'll keep you safe from those bad peers. Automate Your Client and Free Up BandwidthThese are some tricks that have been around for awhile, and they won't exactly keep Big Brother off your back, but they are useful for keeping BitTorrent from overtaking your internet connection, especially if you've experienced some heavy speed increases from the above tips. Here are a few ways to automatically manage BitTorrent's use of your bandwidth. Set Global Bandwidth Limits Full size BitTorrent downloads and uploads can hog a lot of your internet connection's bandwidth, especially if you're sharing popular content. The simplest way to keep BitTorrent from hogging your connection is to set global upload and download limits. In uTorrent, you can find them in the Connection section of the Preferences. The settings are fairly self-explanatory—just set your max upload and download rates (in kB/s), or choose 0 to keep the rates unlimited. Full size In Transmission, it's under the Bandwidth pane of the app's preferences—just check the "Download Rate" and "Upload Rate" boxes and set your speeds however you want. You can also set a "Speed Limit" mode, if you want to switch between two different bandwidth limits—say, give it more bandwidth when you're just checking email and the like, and cut the limits down when you need that bandwidth for streaming video or online gaming. Throttle Your BitTorrent Downloads on a ScheduleYou could just quit your BitTorrent client (or manually turn on Speed Limit mode) whenever you want to conserve your bandwidth, but if you're like me, you'll forget to start it back up—meaning you'll end up delaying your downloads (most likely until you want whatever was supposed to be downloading, at which point you will slap your forehead). Full size To remedy this situation, uTorrent and Transmission both come with simple Scheduler features that you can access through the Preferences.