how to download torrents without getting caught by comcast 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 share 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 client 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 Copyright 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, Cablevision, 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 sharing 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 The Pirate Bay. (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.