how to download torrents without getting caught by How To Bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling. Back in August we reported that Comcast was limiting BitTorrent traffic. Comcast denied our allegations, even though we had some pretty solid evidence. However, a recent test by Associated Press confirmed what we have been reporting all along. The million dollar question remains, can Comcast subscribers get around this, and more importantly, how? Comcast is using an application from the broadband management company Sandvine to throttle BitTorrent traffic. It breaks every (seed) connection with new peers after a few seconds if it’s not a Comcast user inside your community boundary. According to some Comcast technicians, who were brave enough to tell the truth, these Sandvine boxes are installed at the cable modem termination system. As a result, it is virtually impossible to seed a file, especially in small swarms without any neighboring Comcast users. The good news is that there are several ways to fight back and get BitTorrent up and running again. Robb Topolski, a networking and protocol expert summed up some of the workarounds that reportedly solve the throttling issues. What is working. 1. Quite a few Comcast users report that forcing protocol header encryption completely eliminates the problems. This is the easiest solution since most BitTorrent clients support encryption. Please note that simply enabling encryption is not enough, it has to be forced. More details on how to do this can be found over here. 2. Another successfully workaround is to run BitTorrent over encrypted tunnels such as SSH or VPN. BitTorrent over SSH works, but it will cripple the servers of the SSH providers if you plan to use it permanently. A VPN service such as Relakks or VPNTunnel is a better option, and it is worth a few bucks. 3. Comcast prevents seeding, if you’re on a private tracker, and want to as much as possible, an easy solution is to lower your download rate. When downloading, make sure that you have met your uploading goal by the time that the download completes. The easiest way to accomplish this is to set a download rate slower than the uploading rate. This of course is not an optimal solution because your download will never be faster than you upload speed. 4. One of the best options, if possible, is to switch to another ISP. What is not working. 1. Some people suggested that setting your firewall to drop RST packets could be effective, however, this is not the case. The RST-messages Comcast sends go in both directions, ignoring the RST on only one side creates a useless half-open connection. 2. According to most reports, enabling the Lazy Bitfield option in your BitTorrent doesn’t solve the problem either. 3. Reporting the issue to Technical Support. No explanation needed here. 4. Grab a hammer, visit the Comcast office, smash a keyboard and knock over a monitor. This might sound like a great alternative but apparently it only results in jail time. I would advise affected Comcast subscribers to play around with these alternatives, some solutions that work for one person, might not work for another. Do you have another solution that is not reported here? Let us know in the comments! How to avoid triggering the new Alert System. A new anti-piracy program is due to launch today for the majority of U.S. Internet users. A source close to the Copyright Alert System—a preventive measure that would subject American Internet users to “educational” courses if they’re suspected of pirating files—told the Daily Dot it will take effect today for Comcast customers, and hit AT&T, , Time Warner and Verizon subscribers later in the week. But for all the hullabaloo about the CAS, there’s really only one action it flags. The program will try to catch anyone who uploads an established, copyrighted file using peer-to-peer (P2P) file software, such as BitTorrent. Not anyone who pirates using a file locker service like Megaupload. Not anyone who only downloads from P2P file-sharing services. Not even someone who slightly alters a file, uploads it for a short while on a P2P program, then stops before someone who works for the CAS notices. “If you’re just downloading, you’re fine,” admitted Ron Wheeler, senior vice president of Fox Entertainment, at the INET New York panel on CAS in November. To be clear, there are plenty of reasons Internet freedom activists are concerned about the CAS. The software that runs the system, MarkMonitor, traces downloaders via their Internet protocol (IP) addresses. But an IP address, as courts keep finding, is only an indication of who’s paying the bills on an account—and absolutely not a guarantee of who’s behind an online action. The reliance on IP addresses also creates a murky situation for anyone who either shares a wireless connection with neighbors or has their home Wi-Fi network hacked by people nearby. In both of those cases, it’s the paying subscriber, not the actual pirate, who will be held liable. And after you’ve been cited a few times by your ISP, the CAS allows the company to slow your Internet connection down—as “mitigation,” not punishment —which probably isn’t part of the terms of service you thought you agreed to. Yet in terms of legitimately triggering what the CAS is designed to catch, there’s only one way—being caught uploading—and it’s not too hard to avoid. “There are ways around [the CAS],” Jill Lesser, the executive director of CAS, admitted at the INET. “There are ways to pirate.” Downloading copyrighted files is not a black and white issue; one might want to download files they’ve legally purchased but misplaced, for instance. And anyone who can figure out how to use P2P networks can learn to download from them without being flagged by the CAS. How? Without getting too technical, it’s not hard to set up your P2P program to stop uploading files, or to do your file sharing anonymously by hiding your IP address. The first option is a serious breach of etiquette amongst file sharers: You simply don’t upload files. You can do this by signing off when you’re done downloading or by turning off uploading altogether in the settings of your file sharing program of choice. This is a dilemma for the P2P file-sharing community, which relies on users to share files with one another piece by piece, rather than hosting them on central servers. If BitTorrent users stop uploading (“seeding,” in P2P parlance) files, that means less content for hungry downloaders to choose from. And what’s more, a file without enough seeders can download so slowly that even the most hardened pirate might give up and buy it legitimately. For this reason, many private BitTorrent sites require their members to maintain a minimum upload-to-download ratio. Of course, this plays directly into the anti-piracy goals of the CAS. By spreading the word that uploading just got riskier, the program could slow the supply of copyrighted material that U.S. users provide to sites like . (Don’t expect major movies and TV shows to disappear from the Internet, though—releasing juicy pirated files is very much an international pastime.) The freeloading approach isn’t the only way to protect yourself, though. You can mask your IP address entirely by using a Virtual Private Network, a service that will route all your traffic through its servers, encrypting your data and hiding your identity from the CAS’s monitoring software. Getting a VPN is a key step for anyone living under an authoritarian regime who needs to protect their speech or access sites that have been blocked by the government (think someone in China who wants to access Twitter). VPNs are also widespread in the business world, where they’re the most common way for employees to securely log into an office network from home. Which one you use is up to you; there are a number of them available. Many are free, but you can shell out a monthly fee for a premium service if you need faster download speeds or stronger encryption. One VPN will even donate to Internet rights organization Fight For the Future if you pay for a subscription. Lesser admitted at the INET panel that the CAS, as it currently stands, is helpless against these measures. “For now, that’s not addressed,” she said. At its heart, she’s long insisted, the CAS is an educational program. Perhaps its legacy will be that it educated users how to better hide on the Web. Illustration by Jason Reed. Kevin Collier. A former senior politics reporter for the Daily Dot, Kevin Collier focuses on privacy, cybersecurity, and issues of importance to the open internet. Since leaving the Daily Dot in March 2016, he has served as a reporter for Vocativ and a cybersecurity correspondent for BuzzFeed. ‘Rihanna exploits child slaves in India’: Rihanna just became a billionaire—leftists don’t think that’s a good thing. ‘Me tryna hit’ TikTok trend is the ultimate overreaction. ‘Love Island’ star’s video reignites call for ‘queer, inclusive version’ of show. Republican posted anti-COVID-19 vaccine memes on social media right before dying of COVID-19. How To Avoid Getting Caught Torrenting. There are basically two ways to safely download torrents as much as you want: How To Avoid Being Tracked While Torrenting – Option #1: The first way is to create a secure technical setup on your own, which will have to include a virtual private network (VPN), a torrent download software, an anti-virus software for checking the downloaded files and – what the most savvy techies would do – install a virtual box that will only be used for your torrenting activity. A virtual box is a separate computer within you computer, like a container, that will keep your main system out of the game. A VPN comes at a cost, make sure you never use a free one for torrenting activity. We’ll explain the reason why later in this article. Summary of what you need if you set up all on your own: VPN torrent client antivirus software virtual box. How To Avoid Being Tracked While Torrenting – Option #2: The second way: If all of this sounds like a lot of effort to you and you’d prefer a way of secure and anonymous torrenting that is way easier, then a cloud torrent service like bitport.io or one of the others is exactly what you need. Cloud torrent services take care for all those security measures – the only thing you need to do is sign up at such a service and start downloading anonymously. Check the exact explanation how cloud torrent services work below the comparison table on this page. Summary of what you need if you want to securely torrent the easy way: cloud torrent service. More About Secure Torrenting with VPN. How To Avoid Your Internet Service Provider From Knowing You Are Torrenting: As long as your IP address and therefore your local location are not visible, you can easily and securely download torrents – via a virtual private network. In this article, I’ll go into more detail on how this works, why an encrypted connection is essential for torrent download and security, and how you can securely use a torrent with VPN. This is a very important issue because the law in your country might be very strict about torrents. For this reason it is essential to know how to safely download and use Torrent. Download Torrents Safely. In many countries BitTorrent websites are forbidden by law. One of the best known BitTorrent sites is “The Pirate Bay”. The attempt to ban this site has already gone through several instances, but without success. In fact, the court had initially banned “The Pirate Bay”. Since this falls under censorship, the case was appealed to the European Court of Justice. The European Court of Justice has declared the Torrent website guilty – now the court has the word again. If one day a ban should be imposed nevertheless, then in the Internet a whole quantity of alternative Torrent Websites exist. In addition, clever technology can still be used to gain access to these sites – namely via a virtual private (self-contained) communication network or a so-called proxy server. In this way you can download torrents unhindered. Use Torrent Safely With VPN: Download Torrents Over A Secure VPN Connection. P2P Safe Loading. Even if a court ruling banned “The Pirate Bay” and made it inaccessible, there are countless other solutions on the Internet, including a number of torrent websites. The torrents are a bit like drug policy. If torrents were legalized, there would be less crime. So if a torrent site is blocked – don’t worry! As I mentioned before, there are many alternatives to download torrents. For example, via a virtual private network. So you can safely use a torrent with VPN. Another possibility is a so called proxy browser like . This is also a practical solution for downloading torrents. P2P and torrent download are prohibited in some countries. However, the use of a virtual pvirvate network is not. This allows you not only to download anonymously, but also to avoid geographical blockades. A good example is Netflix. If you live in Germany, you cannot access the American Netflix because it is blocked. However, if you have an encrypted connection, you can also use the entire US Netflix streaming service here and download films. The geographical blockades have something to do with . Not every Netflix library is activated for every country. In addition, the Netflix offering in the USA, for example, is much larger than, for example, in Germany. In addition, the series in the USA are always up to date, in other countries often not. Secure VPN Connection: Download Torrents Securely And Load P2P Securely. Torrent Security: There is a simple and convenient way to securely download Torrent or use Torrent and load P2P securely – over an encrypted connection. Since we also don’t know what the future will bring from a legal point of view, we should already be looking at how it is possible to download P2P or torrents. With a virtual private communication network subscription you are on the safe side. I have created a list of the top providers with which you can safely download Torrent and safely use Torrent – this is based on the following criteria: User friendliness and quality Network and Peripherals Countries covered and price. I know all the providers and have tested them all myself. I work completely independently. ExpressVPN NordVPN Hide.me. What is a virtual private communication network? It secures all your communications on the Internet using end-2-end encryption. This prevents unauthorised access to your data and prevents third parties from interrupting the connection. Your complete Internet communication is protected over the secure connection. Neither hackers, government agencies, nor your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can see what you are doing on the Internet. So you can download anonymously, safely download P2P and securely download torrents without being disturbed. The virtual private network makes all this possible. With a good provider you have the possibility to choose between many different servers in different countries and log in there. Your IP address is hidden via the encrypted connection so that you can also access geographically blocked or censored pages. For example, it is possible to access the American Netflix service from Germany and vice versa. If, for example, you spend a lot of time abroad or on business trips, you can also watch your favourite TV program from there. Download Torrent safely: A Virtual Private Network therefore offers you the invaluable advantage that you will never miss your favourite program again and that you can also safely download torrents, safely download P2P and generally download anonymously. Keep Your Hands Off Free VPN Services. Due to my extensive experience I can recommend in good conscience and quite clearly: Stay away from free offers. Always remember: Nothing is free in life – your mother may have always recommended this to you. Believe her (and me) – even on virtual private network services this applies to 100 percent. With a Virtual Private Network it is not a good idea to look at the money. The reason is obvious: If the provider doesn’t charge money for his services, he has to earn money in some other way. And with your data. It stores the logs and collects your data. He then sells them to the highest bidder. In the worst case, it even goes one step further: it can happen that not only your data is misused, but malware is installed on your computer at the same time without you noticing it. Download Torrent safely – please do not try with a free VPN. Most free services for streaming movies or downloading torrents do not work because the connection is constantly disconnected. When choosing a VPN, be sure to pay attention to torrent security. What Does A Secure VPN Cost? Download Torrent securely for an attractive price: A secure virtual private network is not expensive, absolutely affordable and can offer you the invaluable advantage of Torrent security. The average price is about 3 to 8 Euro per month. It can even get a little cheaper, even with the top providers – if you take out an annual subscription. This is usually the cheapest solution. In addition, most providers offer a test phase with a duration of 3 to 30 days. During this time you can test the virtual private network. If you are not satisfied, you will get your money back via the money back guarantee. So There Is No Risk! In addition, you can use several devices simultaneously with the Virtual Private Network for each service – also called Multi-Login. The number of devices you can connect at the same time varies depending on the provider. Normally there are between three and six devices per connection. So you can use your virtual private network with your friends or family – and share the costs at the same time. This makes it even cheaper for you. How to torrent anonymously with the Six Strikes law. Five top US internet service providers are, as of the 25th of February, now monitoring your internet traffic for torrent activity. As part of the six strikes law, they will send you six warnings. After those, your internet connection will be crippled. This is a fundamental invasion of your privacy. Luckily for you, there are ways to avoid any ‘strikes’. These come in the form of a seedbox and also a VPN. How six strikes works. The six strikes system is also known as the ‘Copyright Alert System’. It is implemented by a group called the Center for Copyright Information (CCI). CCI consists of the ISPs Verizon, Time Warner, Cablevision, Comcast and AT&T. It also consists of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It means that with six strikes ISPs now allow private agencies to monitor your internet usage for . If copyright infringement is found then you will receive up to six strikes. Each strike displays a message in your browser or via letter. To see some example notices, see this article on Ars Technica. The first five strikes are warnings and aim to educate you about piracy on the internet. As part of your sixth strike, your internet connection is significantly slowed down as an anti-pirating punishment. How to avoid copyright alerts. Rather than get a new internet service provider, it’s possible to stick with your current provider and conceal your online activity. Luckily for you, technology moves incredibly quickly and there are already methods to hide your activity from your internet service provider. These aren’t new methods and if you are downloading torrents, you should have been doing this long ago. Seedbox. This is a no-brainer — it is what this website is dedicated to. If you are downloading torrents and you use a seedbox, there is no way that your ISP can monitor your torrent usage as part of the six strikes plan. This is because a seedbox is a remote computer and the torrents are downloaded on *that* computer, not yours. You simply use FTP to connect to the server and download your files. This FTP usage is highly unlikely to be monitored by the six strikes copyright police. Please, read our article explaining seedboxes: ‘What is a seedbox?‘ and use our seedbox comparison tool to find the cheapest seedbox or the seedbox with the best specification for your needs. Also, if you are concerned about privacy, why not look at our list of seedbox providers that accept bitcoin? Private trackers. Private torrent trackers are often required to be used by seedbox providers. As the name suggests, Private trackers are normally “invite only” (Receiving an invitation from a member already signed up). Because of this, they are much more secure to download from because it is highly unlikely that fake (baiting) torrents will be uploaded by six strikes enforcers. Check out Opentrackers.org for great up to date information about torrents and private trackers with open sign-ups. If you have a seedbox, you are one step in the right direction. As you may have noticed, I wrote that ‘FTP usage is highly unlikely to be monitored’. This is because it is possible to monitor that traffic and it could happen in the future if rights holders become more savvy to seedbox usage. The solution to this monitoring is a VPN. A VPN sends all your internet traffic through an encrypted channel to another computer. This other computer sends out your request and sends you back the data still in an encrypted form. This means all your ISP and potential monitoring agencies see is how much traffic you use, not what you are using it for . So if you use a VPN and a seedbox, firstly you aren’t downloading any torrents on your home connection. Secondly, when you are downloading files from your seedbox, you are doing it through an encrypted VPN connection which no one can intercept. The only weak spot with VPN providers is the fact that some of them may log your usage and that may be traceable back to you. Seedbox Guide can vouch for a few providers that we have used and had great experiences with. None of these providers log: Private Internet Access. PureVPN. TorGuard VPN. Another torrent friendly provider. They will not log or monitor your activity. For posterity, there is a permalink to VPN providers in the menu bar now that contains the above information. We will update it with more services soon and potentially provide a similar interface to our seedbox guide. Additionally, TorrentFreak has compiled a list of VPN providers that do not store information that is traceable back to your personal identity. Please discuss any issues you have or comments about six strikes in the comments below. How To Download Torrents Safely & Anonymously Without Getting Caught. Using BitTorrent is not illegal or unsafe. Bittorrent help user to transfer large files to thousands of user in a short period. Even Facebook and Twitter use BitTorrent to move files around. But the majority of the people tend to use torrent for download copyright content available on public torrent site such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, etc. Due to this, Torrenting activities are monitored in US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and in some other countries around the world to trace people who are downloading illegal content. So to download Torrent Anonymously, Many BitTorrent users are looking for ways to hide their identities from the ISP and Copyright holders like MPAA, RIAA and others. How You Get Tracked. ISP. Your ISP(Internet service provider) can read anything you device send over the Internet. Some also sell your web browser data to marketing companies. Some ISP will be monitoring your traffic and then they will slow down your Internet speed (). If they spot torrent traffic. Fake Torrent and Using Publish Torrent Trackers. Copyright holders like MPAA, RIAA and others have teamed up with ISPs for the “Copyright Alert System,” to send DMCA notices to they customers who are downloading copyrighted material online. This anti-piracy organization will collect the IP address of those users who is downloading copyrighted material online. They can trap torrent user by creating a fake torrent and by monitoring public torrent tracker, and those details are forwarded to the ISPs who will send a corresponding copyright alert to their customers. Tips 1 : You can check it with ipMagnet a tool which allows you to see the IP address of which your BitTorrent Client is sending to its peers and trackers! Tips 2 : Using Private Torrent Trackers will give less possibility to be monitored. Solution to Download Torrent Safely: If you want download Torrent Anonymously, a VPN is what you need. Over hundreds and thousands of BitTorrent users have already using VPN to ensure privacy while Torrenting. Here is a list of best VPN for torrenting. How Vpn Help You to Browse and Download Torrent Anonymously. Ever Bittorrent user use two things for torrenting. A BitTorrent client For downloading Torrent. A web browser to browse and get .torrent file or magnetic link. Anonymize Your Torrent Client. I have already told you about ipMagnet tool which let you see IP address of which your BitTorrent Client is sending to its peers and trackers. In the above image, you can see some IP with a country flag with it. Here it will list the IP address of those who is currently downloading and seeding the file. Copyright holders will collect these IPs and they will be sent to the ISP(Internet service provider) who will send the corresponding copyright alert to they subscriber. They can trap in two ways: 1. While download new movies or song from the top torrent site such as The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents etc. you would have got a lot of Fake Torrent files. Some of them are created by the spammer to make money and some are created by the copyright holders like MPAA, RIAA, etc. to trap torrent user and collect IPs of those who are download it. 2. Another way is if you are using publish Torrent Trackers. Using Private Torrent Trackers will give less chance to be monitored by them. How VPNs Protect you here? Your VPN Client will hide your real IP and show VPN server IP to every website or application that Visit. Note : Make sure your VPN follows “Zero Log” policy. If your VPN keep any logs. It allows them to match an IP-address and a time stamp of a user. To Help user e have listed best Torrent VPN that follow “Zero Log” policy. Anonymous Browsing & Unblock Torrent Sites. You use a browser to visit a website and to download a torrent file or magnetic link and some torrent site will be blocked in your country. How VPNs Protect you here? Your internet provider usually blocks These websites. You can unblock website once your VPN services establish an encrypted tunnel between your PC and their servers. Since once you got connected to a VPN server. Any request that you make will first go to the VPN server through the encrypted tunnel and then to the requested website. So your can’t be monitored, control or censored. Bandwidth Throttling. Bandwidth throttling is a process of slowing down your Internet speed based on your traffic by your ISP. If they spot traffic from Torrent, Netflix etc. How VPNs Help you here? As I told before VPN encrypts your internet traffic which means your ISP can’t know whether you are using torrent or watching video on Netflix. So to avoid Bandwidth Throttling, VPN is the only solution for it. My final word, VPN is just for the torrent user. Anyone who needs online privacy you can use VPN. Reader Interactions. 1 Comments. Curtis Beard says. hello im using express vpn and have a browser add on for express vpn and i still received two letters from cox cable about my downloads the third they will shut my service off …any help would be great …should i use another vpn.