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Keeping yourself hidden from the prying eyes of big brother is a big deal to a lot of people.  Mostly this idea makes itself visible the more and more one hears about Cease and Desist notices from ISP’s warning about Dreamworks, Microsoft, and other major companies watching them download movies and music.

Although BitTorrenting has many many uses as a legit method of acquiring files it is not always illegal.  What is it exactly?  It’s a protocol and it is up to you whether you are using it for legit purposes or not.

I will admit I do seed quite a bit of stuff.  Mostly it tends to be various free stock photos from various websites or one of the most popular; brush packs I have compiled for Photoshop.  These are both two things you could legally seed as they are freely available for download on the internet.

Lets say you want to hide your traffic as best as you can anyways…  Here are a few methods.

PeerBlock

1.    PeerBlock (http://www.peerblock.com/)

PeerBlock is becoming one of the more popular programs to use on your local machine or even your server (if that’s what you’re into).  The interface, operations, etc are all almost identical to PeerGuardian 2 which does basically the same thing.  If anything, it’s just a clone.

How does it work?  PeerBlock keeps lists of IP Addresses of known organizations and companies that are out to track you for illegal downloading or uploading.  PeerBlock will block the adMany of these companies for example, Dreamworks, will track your IP and downloads until they are reading to complain to your ISP.  That’s when you get the dreaded Cease and Desist letter

2.    SOCKS Proxy or VPN (Many Available)

Proxy

Of course there are always proxies and VPN’s available in a million different places.  What a proxy does is instead of someone seeing your IP they see the server that you are connected to.  This is because all traffic is going from You->Proxy->Outside.  This provides the *internet illusion* that you are operating from a different IP Address than your real one and keeping you hidden from the real world.

To this day, the biggest complaint of using a proxy or VPN is speed.  Download speeds or upload speeds can be significantly lower than normal.  My normal speeds went from 1.7 mb/s to at most, 80.3 kbps.  You can also set up your own proxy server or VPN.

One of the best free ones I have come across has been a service called “ItsHidden” (http://itshidden.com/).  However, they do disconnect free accounts every 20 minutes now but they didn’t used to back in the day.

3.    BTGuard (http://btguard.com/)

BTGuard is a relatively new service aimed specifically at BitTorrent users.  It serves as a major encrypted proxy server and VPN (like stated above) while maintaining great bandwidth speeds.  Also, since it’s a proxy you can (most of the time) bypass any limitations from ISP’s that throttle bittorrent traffic.  Check out this VuzeWiki article for a list of Bad ISP’s that are known to cause trouble for bit torrent.

“Your downloads will be routed through Canada which enforces some of the strictest privacy laws in the world, ensuring the protection of your identity, even from your own ISP!”

The down side?  It’s subscription based which honestly, for the price and the advantage you gain, is well worth it.  Their prices are as follows (as of 2010-06-05)…

• Continued Subscription : $6.95 per Month.
• Single Month PrePaid : $6.95
• Three Month PrePaid : $19.95 (5% Off)
• Six Month PrePaid : $34.95 (15% Off)
• Twelve Month PrePaid : $59.95 (25% Off)

There are of course many other ways to protect not just your BT traffic but your identity and privacy as well.

Keep you eyes out!

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