downloading clearnet torrents with i2p Download torrents anonymously through I2P for free. When you torrent on clearnet, your IP is visible to other peers. Malicious actors might act as peers to de-anonymize you. Some people use VPNs to remain anonymous, but they cost money, and you can’t be sure how trustworthy your VPN provider is. I2P is a free anonymity network that works well with file transfers, that’s a good alternative to VPNs. (Disclaimer: You should only download legal content. Use this article at your own risk. This article doesn’t encourage illegal behaviour. You are responsible for everything you do.) I2P is still in beta, it might have bugs, so be careful with it. Download and install I2P. On Windows, if you have trouble starting I2P, try installing it as a service. You’ll probably want the Java version, because it comes with a built-in BitTorrent client. You can use I2PD too, but you’ll have to set up your torrent client yourself. For the Java version you’ll have to install Java too. Install the browser bundle, or make a fresh profile in Firefox for I2P, where you install NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere and maybe some other privacy add-ons. Configure Firefox to use 127.0.0.1:4444 as proxy. You should disable JavaScript (in NoScript or in your Firefox settings). You can control I2P through 127.0.0.1:7657, the I2P Router Console. It takes a few minutes for I2P to start up. You’ll want to set the bandwidth used by I2P to something close to your internet bandwidth. In your physical router and your software firewall you should port-forward the ports used by your I2P installation; you can check the ports in your Network Configuration. If you can’t reach some eepsites, you should add some additional subscriptions to your Addressbook. I2P has a torrent client that automatically, securely routes your traffic through the I2P network. You can reach I2PSnark with the Torrents button in your router console. Under Configuration you can set where you want to download your files, and if you want to autostart your torrents when I2P starts. Torrents hosted on clearnet trackers (usually) don’t work inside I2P. You can only connect to peers who also run I2P. You can find some trackers at the bottom of I2PSnark’s configuration page. Or you can search somewhere else. The I2P community is pretty active on Irc2P, the IRC network inside I2P; download HexChat, review the settings, remove any information about you or your computer, and join 127.0.0.1:6668. Postman’s tracker is probably the most popular; you can search for torrents, or you can sort by swarm size to find popular ones. If you found something you want to download, copy its magnet link into I2PSnark. It’ll start connecting with other peers, start downloading and uploading pieces. Be patient, it’ll take some minutes for the torrents to start. I2P is pretty slow, not many people use it yet, and you might not find some files you want on I2P trackers. But it’s the future of free anonymous file sharing. The more people who use it, the better it becomes. How to Torrent Anonymously. Using the standard BitTorrent protocol is insecure if you're torrenting copyrighted material, because you must connect directly to your peers to download the file. This means that a copyright holder could seed a movie that they own, collect the IP addresses that connect to them, then sue them all for copyright infringement. If we want to torrent copyrighted material without any chance of getting caught, we'll need to send the traffic through a mixnet. Your first thought might be to route the traffic through tor, but this is actually a bad idea. See this post for why (TL;DR, torrenting over tor slows down the network because it wasn't built for that type of traffic, and certain BitTorrent clients will leak your IP address even if you configure them to go through tor). Tor is out, but i2p will work. I2P is a mixnet like tor, but it has a few key differences, which I won't go over here. Suffice to say, i2p can handle the traffic from torrenting (because it was built in a different way than tor), and it has its own torrent client built-it that preserves your anonymity, called i2psnark. This is what you should use for anonymous torrenting. Step 1. Install i2p. Be sure to read the post-install work on that page, because i2p may not work without a little bit of tweaking. Troubleshooting i2p is not in the scope of this article, so from this step onwards we will assume i2p is working, and that you can reach i2p deep web sites. Step 2. Get a magnet link from a tracker. The biggest tracker for i2p torrents is Postman's Tracker, so I would start searching for what you want there. Important: you cannot download normal clearnet torrents using i2psnark. You can only download torrents that were set up on i2p from the start. This means there won't be as many torrents to choose from on i2p trackers, because not as many people use them. However, don't let that turn you away, because the way to fix this problem is to get more people to use them. Anyways, once you've found the torrent you want to download from Postman's Tracker (or whichever tracker you're using), copy the magnet link. Step 3. Start downloading it in i2psnark. Go to your i2p router console's home page, then scroll down until you see the link to "Torrents" under "Applications and Configuration". Click it, and it will take you to i2psnark. Paste the magnet link in the box that says Add Torrent. From URL, and click the Add Torrent button right next to it. If everything went right, it should appear in the list of torrents. Give it a few minutes to connect to peers, and it should start downloading. Step 4. Tweak i2psnark's settings. By default, if you have to restart i2p (or your whole computer), i2psnark will not restart downloading or seeding its torrents unless you tell it to. This probably isn't what you want, so click the Configuration button in i2psnark, and check "Auto start torrents". Now they will start on their own. Also, change the Up Bandwidth Limit to something reasonable. It recommends setting it to half of what you set i2p's total bandwidth to be (you did that when you read the Post-Install Work page like I told you to, right?). Step 5. Enjoy your torrent, and seed it. Congratulations! You just downloaded a torrent anonymously. Now, be sure to seed it. Since everything is being routed anonymously here, you don't have to worry about getting busted for seeding copyrighted material, so go ahead and seed it, so that the torrent can remain available for everyone, and so it will download a little bit faster for the next person. I'd recommend seeding at least until you've uploaded twice as much as you downloaded. Note that this may take a long time to happen, so plan to keep these files on your hard drive for at least 1 month. If you're running low on space, then choose which torrents you download carefully, so that you don't have to delete them before you've given back twice what you downloaded. Step 6. Give back to the community. Let's say that you own a movie on DVD that isn't on Postman's Tracker. Well, be a good neighbor and share it! First, rip it from DVD using ripping software, like HandBrake. You may need to install this as well, to break whatever weak-sauce copy protection your DVD might have. I recommend using HandBrake's High Profile settings if it's a movie, and the normal settings if it's a TV show with a bunch of episodes. Once you've ripped the movie, you may want to put it in a zip archive, to lower the amount of data that has to be downloaded. Put the zip file somewhere where it won't be in the way, because if you move it after you start seeding, the torrent won't work for everyone else. Then, go to i2psnark, and type the exact path to the zip file in the "Data to seed" box under Create Torrent. For this example, we'll upload it to Postman's Tracker, so click the radio button for Postman's, and click "Create torrent". This will create a .torrent file, which you will then have to upload to Postman's Tracker. Here's where it gets tricky. On Linux, by default, i2psnark will create your .torrent file in /var/lib/i2p/i2p-config/i2psnark/ . The problem is, only root can access that folder. So, we need to copy the .torrent file somewhere else before we can upload it. So, open up a terminal, and type in sudo cp /var/lib/i2p/i2p-config/i2psnark/.torrent /home// . This will copy the .torrent file to your home directory. There's still one more problem. The .torrent file's permissions still only allow it to be read by root. So, cd to your home directory, then run sudo chown .torrent . Now you can read it normally. At this point, you are ready to post the torrent on Postman's Tracker. Create an account there, then click Upload on the header. It will take you to a page with instructions for how to upload, and some rules. You should be able to figure everything else out from here. Now, watch as those peers start lining up! Download. For most platforms and systems, setting I2P installed and running will consist of up to three steps. Install Java: I2P is written in Java and requires a Java system to be installed to run. In addition to the I2P download, you need to install Java if you do not have it already installed. I2P requires Java Runtime Version 7 or higher. (Oracle, OpenJDK, or IcedTea Java Version 7 or 8 recommended, except Raspberry Pi: OpenJDK 9 for ARM, PowerPC: IBM Java SE 7 or 8) Determine your installed Java version here or type java -version at your command prompt. Only two platforms do not require Java to be installed before I2P is installed, those platforms are: Android: Android comes with a Java virtual machine as part of the platform, which I2P for Android uses. Therefore it is not necessary to install Java to use I2P for Android. Debian and Ubuntu: On Debian and Ubuntu when using a .deb package to install, the system will automatically install and configure a Java environment for you. Windows: Java 8 is recommended. Java 9 or higher may not work. Release Notes. Release Notes Change Log Debian Change Log Android Change Log. Pick your I2P Bundle. When you download the I2P software bundle, you get everything you need to connect and start participating in the I2P network and community. It even includes basic applications for every user, like e-mail, bittorrent, and a basic I2P Site for you to personalize and share. After you've installed, a set up wizard will help you configure a few important things like how much bandwidth you would like to share while your router begins to make connections to the network. After the set up wizard is complete, you will be directed to the console home page where you can access the rest of the applications or configure, monitor, or troubleshoot your I2P connections. Downloading clearnet torrents with i2p. Anonymity networks hide your IP address, letting you access the internet anonymously, securely, uncensored. On Tor, exit nodes let you access the normal internet (clearnet). Both on Tor and I2P you can access hidden services (onions, eepsites) that are only accessible through these anonymity networks. This is preferable to clearnet sites because of increased security. Host your existing website on Tor/I2P as well! Tor uses volunteer routers to route your traffic through multiple hops before you reach your destination, while on I2P everyone is a router. This makes I2P suitable for file sharing. Torrents inside I2P are only accessible through I2P; I2P has its own torrent trackers and communities. You could run decentralized nodes inside I2P for technologies that require a lot of traffic (cryptocurrency full nodes, IPFS). These networks are a free, open source alternatives to VPNs; Tor lets you access the clearnet, I2P allows you filesharing. Anonymity networks are the pillars of internet freedom. Many of the decentralized technologies lack privacy, leak your IP address to other peers. You can combine anonymity networks with decentralized technologies to access them anonymously. Host nodes on these networks! Browsers: Tor Browser, Firefox with privacy add-ons, settings Operating systems: Tails, Whonix, more. File sharing, hosting, other networks. With Dat and IPFS you can share files, websites in a peer-to-peer network similar to torrent. You can share your files with a few clicks/commands, others can download the files from you, they can pin your files so others can access those files from them. Pinning services can host your files so they are always available. On IPFS, gateways ensure connection to IPFS files/websites even from the clearnet. You can share static websites and blogs on IPFS and Dat for free. If your website gets popular, it may remain in circulation forever. Static website generators: Jekyll, Hugo, many others. Social networks. Scuttlebutt is a peer-to-peer social network. It works even if you’re offline. You store your and your friends’ data on your device, and share it to other peers when you meet face-to-face via a common Wi-Fi network or Bluetooth, or optionally on pub servers. You can browse the feed when you’re offline, you can post and comment, and it syncs when you next meet someone with Scuttlebutt, or when you’re online. If your friend has data about others, he shares that data with you. It works even in rural places that don’t have internet. When you first open the program, it creates a public and a private key for you. You are identified by your public key (and by your non-unique name). You can’t migrate your keys right now, at least not easily. It being peer-to-peer means you can never delete the data you shared, so be careful what you post. Mastodon is the biggest decentralized social network out there. Pleroma is the lightweight version of Mastodon. They are alternatives to Twitter. Distributed instances share users’ data amongst themselves. Users can seamlessly communicate between instances, they can follow each other, reply to each others’ tweets. The Mastodon website and most popular instances are heavily censored, don’t trust them. The website doesn’t list free-speech Mastodon instances. Censored instances block free-speech instances on instance-level, which means no one can access these instances and their users from them. They heavily censor their own users, and block everyone who disagree with them. Mastodon is open source and federated, which means you can still use it, but you must search for free-speech instances, and study their about/rules pages before you sign up. Or host your own. If you’re annoyed by users, block them yourself, don’t trust SJW admins/moderators to censor everything. Decentralized video-sharing platforms. PeerTube uses the ActivityPub system to federate instances around the world. LBRY is still in beta, right now it’s pretty centralized, but everyone can host instances. LBRY gives users the ability to donate cryptocurrency to channels, and channels to monetize their content. Both platforms let users seed videos they are watching or they downloaded, similar to torrent. Worthy mentions: BitChute, DTube. Communication, messaging, encryption. E-mail. E-mail is a pretty flawed system. Most people use it unencrypted. It’s bad for privacy. In theory it’s possible for attackers to intercept e-mails in plain text. Headers are unencrypted. It is pretty centralized, Gmail controls most user e-mails. It’s hardly free and it’s hard to sign up with providers; big providers steal all your data and require de-anonymization for sign up, privacy providers limit free users, or require payment. It has a good concept though. It’s asynchronous, popular, serious, well supported, easy to use. E-mail addresses last forever, or at least for a long time. Websites use it for identification and communication with their users. Finding a free, decentralized alternative to e-mail is important for internet freedom. Bitmessage and I2P-Bote are decentralized, serverless, peer-to-peer alternatives to e-mail. They are asynchronous, encrypted, all messages are stored and distributed by all peers, and only the recipient can decrypt their messages. There are no servers for which you have to pay with money or your data, you don’t have to sign up with nor trust providers. They are run by the community, they work like torrent. I2P-Bote uses the I2P anonymity network by default, Bitmessage can work through Tor or clearnet. PGP lets you create a public-private keypair. You give out your public key, your private key is a secret. Others who know your public key can encrypt data so only you can decrypt it. PGP is a good way to mitigate some of the issues with e-mail. You encrypt the messages with the recipient’s public key, and even if the message gets caught or the e-mail provider gets compromised, they can’t decrypt your e-mails. PGP is pretty popular. It’s easy to use. A lot of software support it, there are a lot of libraries that implement it. On the darknet, you should encrypt all your messages, but even on clearnet you should use it for normal messaging to dodge mass surveillance. OpenPGP and GPG are the open source implementations of PGP. You may not want to type your real life name and e-mail address when creating a keypair. PGP let’s you sign text/files with your private key, so everyone knows that they belonged to you. It’s really popular among software developers to sign software releases so users know the binaries came from the developers and haven’t been tempered with. You should always verify software you install, keep developers’ public keys handy on your keyring. PGP is a good way to identify yourself. They may take away your access to your e-mail address, but they can’t take away your private keys. Websites should identify their users by PGP, at least as a backup for e-mail. VeraCrypt is free software to encrypt files inside a volume or whole partitions with a strong password or pass-phrase. You should encrypt everything. IRC is the one of the oldest chat protocols out there. It’s still pretty popular and supported. Simple, easy to use. You chat with many people in chat rooms. You can’t receive messages while you’re offline though. Some IRC clients may leak data about you, so be careful what you use. HexChat is a recommended client. IRC servers are not federated, but there are many different servers. XMPP is another old protocol. A lot of support, libraries, clients; many software use it. XMPP is federated. Extensions make it suitable for different needs. The OTR and OMEMO extensions let you encrypt your messages; use them for secure communication. IRC and XMPP are popular on the darknet; anonymity networks hide your IP from the servers, so it’s a good way to connect. Newer decentralized, federated chat protocol. FOSS alternative to Discord. Popular, has big communities with big chat rooms. You can receive messages while offline, you can see room history. Suitable for private messaging too. You can use the built-in end-to-end encryption for private messages and private group chats. Alternative physical networks. Mesh networks. If you are cut off from the internet, there’s still a chance to connect with others. You can connect Wi-Fi routers and devices to form a mesh network where each node relays packets. You can use old, inexpensive Wi-Fi routers, and you can build or buy antennas that work for longer ranges. LoRa is a long range wireless network technology which uses free radio frequencies. It’s longer range than Wi-Fi, usually kilometers. Low power, low cost, has support for Arduino, Raspberry Pi and the like. Good for DIY IoT projects. Has really low bandwidth though, and it’s further regulated in Europe. Meshtastic is a mesh of small LoRa devices that connect to your phone. You can send text messages to your friends without connecting to mobile service providers that can monitor your location and communications. Could be a good way to avoid surveillance, as an “underground” communication channel, or if you want to connect with friends even if you don’t have an internet connection. The project is still in beta, might not be secure, and if you want to use it you might want to use better encryption and turn off location. DisasterRadio is LoRa mesh focused on emergency communications. Most radio frequencies are regulated, you can only use them with license, which means de-anonymization. Usually used to transmit audio, but there are projects to transmit data, like e-mail (Winlink). Can have really long ranges, some setups link over continents, or connect to space stations. You don’t have internet, or it’s really slow, you don’t have mesh: you get a hard drive or some other media, fill it with data and pass it around with friends. You copy the hard drive, you distribute it. In Cuba, “El Paquete Semanal” is a one terabyte package containing pirated content distributed weekly. Cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency is money that is not controlled by governments. You can do transactions online in a decentralized way. You control everything about your money, your private keys are the only way you can access your money, so keep them safe, keep them private, back them up multiple times, on multiple location, on paper, on steel. There are many scams, be careful with your money. It can be anonymous, although governments passed regulations to de-anonymize all its users. You should use decentralized exchanges that don’t enforce KYC, that don’t control your money, use cryptocurrency ATMs that don’t require KYC, use privacy coins, use coin mixers, track what data is associated with which addresses, and never give out your real life information. Centralized exchanges either force KYC on sign-up, or when they encounter “suspicious” activities, so your money’s never safe. They steal your money if they think at any point it was associated with whatever they think is “criminal activity”. Cryptocurrency should be decentralized, anonym, private, fungible, not controlled by anyone, not regulated, FOSS, secure; code is law. You should try to avoid technologies that violate these principles. Bitcoin is the first, the biggest. Ethereum lets you create decentralized applications with code that runs on the blockchain. Be careful, Ethereum Foundation did steal money from so-called “hackers”. IOTA and Nano currency are fee-less. IOTA lets your decentralized applications store data and communicate through the Tangle. They have libraries for JavaScript (and other languages), so you can access the Tangle right in the browser. Be careful, IOTA is in beta, is centralized; its wallet was recently compromised and IOTA Foundation is planning to sacrifice fungibility and de-anonymize victims. Normally with cryptocurrencies the transactions are public, which makes it hard to stay private. Privacy coins like Monero and Zcash have private transactions that hide who sent money to whom, making them private, anonym, fungible. Monero is private by default. Anonymous Torrenting with I2P-Snark: Using Snark (Steps located in post) This post will demonstrate how to download with Snark. People who have used Bittorrent before will be familiar with the process as they are very similar. First of all, start up the Tor Browser and I2P router . The I2P router will try and open your default web browser, this can be closed though since we’ll be doing everything with the Tor Browser. Also for added security, you should globally block Javascript with the NoScipt plugin (the little ‘S’ button near the back button). Now, as with clearnet Bittorrent , you need to have access to a tracker in order for you to begin downloading something. Currently there are two trackers on I2P , DifTracker and Postman . Scrolling down on the startpage will show you links to them. Each site has a variety of different torrents which can be accessed in three ways, as a .torrent file, a magnet link and I2P’s unique maggot links. For the purpose of simplicity, we’ll be dealing only with the latter. Each tracker website is quite easy to navigate and search. After discovering what you want to download, copy the associated maggot link. Since Snark doesn’t have automatic link detection, you’ll have to add it manually. This however is very easy to do just scroll down and click on the Torrent magnet logo. This will show you Snark . Paste your maggot link in the highlighted box, and your torrent will start downloading.