Dear Lifehacker, I’ve done lots of research about my Internet Service Provider’s relationship with my uTorrent activity, but I still don’t feel entirely confident in my knowledge about what they see. What does my ISP see when I’m torrenting? What if I’m encrypted, or under a VPN? Many of your articles talk about how to stay safe/secure/private, but don’t always go completely behind the scenes. Can you help clear this up? Thanks, Baffled By BitTorrent
Image remixed from an original by Nomad_Soul/Shutterstock.
Dear Baffled,
You’re right; we’ve written a lot of articles about how to protect yourself over the years, but sometimes it can be confusing as to exactly what’s happening behind the scenes. And while it’s difficult to know, since every ISP is different, you generally have two different entities to worry about: your ISP, and the media companies looking to quash illegal downloading. Here’s what each of them monitors for and how you can keep yourself anonymous.
Your ISP Sees That You’re Using BitTorrent, And Might Throttle Your Connection
ISPs aren’t so interested in what you’re downloading. They leave that to the folks being stolen from. Instead, ISPs are more concerned with how much bandwidth you’re sucking up, and whether that’s slowing everyone else down. As such, some ISPs will throttle your connection — that is, slow it down — if they see you’re using BitTorrent. They don’t usually look at what you’re downloading (even though they could, if they wanted to), but they will check what kind of traffic is coming from your machine. That is, they’ll see how much of it is email, web browsing, video chat, online gaming, and so on. If they see any BitTorrent traffic, they might slow it down — it doesn’t matter whether you’re downloading a legal Linux ISO or Batman Begins. All they care about is that you’re slowing down their network.
To see if your ISP is looking for BitTorrent traffic, try the previously mentioned Glasnost tool. If your ISP isn’t throttling BitTorrent (and most of the Australian majors don’t do this routinely), then you don’t have much to worry about, though they still could see anything they wanted.
Media Companies See What You’re Downloading (And Will Tell Your ISP)
The real problem, if you’re downloading illegal media, is the company you’re stealing from. They (or lawyers or companies on their behalf) actually go online and seek out torrents of their material, whether it be movies, music, TV shows, or anything else, and will download the torrent themselves. From there, they can see a lot of information about the other users connected — including their IP address. You can even check this for yourself at home. Start downloading a torrent and click on the “More Info” section of your torrent client. You’ll see the IP address of everyone you’re downloading from and uploading to, plain as day.
Once they find your IP address (which they can do just by clicking “more info” in their torrent client), they’ll be keen to find out who your ISP is and get in contact. The exact process for how this should be done is a matter of contention in Australia right now, and we haven’t seen the same wave of legal letters that has occurred in the US. But detection and prosecution certainly remains a possibility.
So What Should You Do to Stay Anonymous?
It’s a dark time for BitTorrent. A lot of the old methods aren’t very useful anymore. Applications like PeerBlock claim to block the MPAA and RIAA from connecting to you, but they’re not very reliable, and you can still easily get caught when using PeerBlock. Similarly, while your BitTorrent client’s encryption can be helpful against throttling, it doesn’t always protect you, since some ISPs use more powerful methods of seeing what you’re downloading that can get past basic BitTorrent encryption.
These days, the only way to truly keep your downloading anonymous is to take more drastic measures. If you’re worried about getting caught downloading illegal materials, use a proxy like BTGuard. It funnels all your BitTorrent traffic through another server, thus keeping your IP address hidden from anyone connecting to your BitTorrent swarm. Even if you’re downloading a torrent that’s being tracked, they’ll see BTGuard’s IP, not yours, and BTGuard doesn’t keep any logs of its service, meaning they won’t trace that IP address back to you.
If you want to keep your traffic from being throttled, you can try enabling encryption in your BitTorrent client. if this doesn’t work, BTGuard provides an encryption program along with its proxy service that can hide your traffic better than uTorrent and other clients, to ensure you don’t get throttled.
Cheers
Lifehacker
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BTGuard commonly gets mentioned but be aware that you will experience a significant reduction in speed due to the inability of your Torrent client to allow connections from outside. You are effectively connecting as if your incoming connections are blocked by your router. This is a side effect of being anonymous and simply means you need to be more patient. I'd expect all torrent proxy services to do the same.
Actually if you disable 'IPv4' for that connection it should give you back your speed, or a good chunk of it anyway! :)
According to the uTorrent help, IPV6 doesn't support proxy so what may be happening is that BTGuard is being circumvented thus giving me greater speed but exposing my IP.
"the only way to truly keep your downloading anonymous is to take more drastic measures."
I know the best way of not getting caught downloading off BitTorrent! rather drastic I must say...by not doing it! bloody hell, is this ethical LifeHacker, seriously??
Exactly. Surely lifehacker would at least MENTION that not downloading is the best method?? C'mon LH, you and all of us know this is illegal.
A majority of BT is used for naughty purposes but why should that warrant the need to ban it.
+1 tomtalks - you can legally download files via BitTorrent, just that mostly it's a medium for illegal downloads.
Most people use the internet for nefarious purposes, therefore LH should put a warning on all their internet related articles that the internet is illegal. Right Christian and Jordan?
Dude, you stop using it, you are not the internet police and it's no ones business but the user. So mind your own
I don't think he read the part where it was mentioned the ISP can see what it is, legal or not.
There are plenty of legal torrents that people don't want to be seen downloading.
Exactly.
I've used torrent file-sharing for all kinds of legal downloads that could be construed as illegal in this guilty-until-proven-innocent liberal society.
I've had to replace game disks, entire games, and even circumvent DRMs that were keeping me from getting what I paid for, to even simply having a working back up copy of all games I legally own.
All of this should be perfectly legal, but regardless, can be misconstrued as illegal downloading, and a problem that I would just prefer not to have to deal with.
Exactly how would not downloading be considered anonymous downloading?
I think you meant the best way to be safe is to not download.
Whitson's sentence is perfect as he's assuming the downloading is necessary.
Either way, the question was "what does my ISP see?" & was answered...
I currently rent a seedbox through Xirvik somewhere in Europe, so the torrents go direct to there, and then FTP to me.
Am I protected? It seems like having the middleman keeps me clear from the torrents. But what's to stop the media company tracing the torrents to Xirvik and then demanding my details?
I would suggest at least using secure FTP (sFTP) since your ISP could still technically see the traffic from your seedbox.
To answer the 2nd part of your question, you would ideally have a seedbox in a country with different or non-existant copyright laws. e.g. Luxembourg.
I assume that an encrypted VPN would essentially do the same as BitGuard?
Every time I read an article about downloading I have to laugh cause most people seem to buy into the propaganda that its illegal to download. Its not. Doesn't matter what you download. The ISP's (as mentioned) do not care because they understand that one of humanity's best inventions (the internet) needs piracy to work like it does. Every time you go to a web page you know you are downloading and creating a copy of that web page right? Having said that, how many copyrights do you violate everyday, just by web browsing? be it pictures, video, music, copy-righted text. Downloading and breaking copyright is a fundamental on how the internet works. Without doing so, we might as well not use computers and the internet for communications. Just cause you use bit torrent (or some other p2p program) or you don't use it, is irreverent. The interent has how many people on it at any given time? how can the copy right holders even prove its you that is doing the downloading? just cause they see your IP in the list, it doesn't mean squat. Your computer might have been compromised by a hacker and anybody on the interent could be using your computer and your connection as a proxy. You may be using an unsecured wireless router and anybody in your neibourhood could be using your IP to download. Given the general state of computer security ignorance, don't it stand to reason that this is a good defense IF (and i emphasize if) the copyright holders try to sue you. You are only worried because you bought into their propaganda, Do not worry about what your ISP or anybody else may see your IP doing, with a bit of REAL knowledge (not propaganda) it is easy to protect yourself in court. I received one of those stupid cease and diciest letters when I was living in America. I just laughed at it because, I know they cannot prove anything. I know It is just a scare tactic. Once I received it I actually downloaded twice as much, just to spite them. If the copyright laws are rigorously enforced like the copyright holders want, do you relies that the interent would be dismantled piece by piece because the very meaning of copyright means to restrict communication, where as computers and the internet serve to maximize communication and to do so it means violating copyrights, thats just how it is.
Bottom line - Use the internet, read, learn. Educate yourself. Understand that you are not doing anything wrong by using bit torrent (or any other p2p program)
I love that bit torrent is used for legit purposes line, how often does anyone need to download a linix distro?Doesn't only 0.0001% of pc's use linix?Just fess up every one does it, it's o.k..
Linux isn't the only legit purpose for linux distro, WoW client uses bittorrent to download updates. There are some other games that do it as well as far as i know.
Artists that allow bootleg versions of there music (concert recordings usually) are usually distributed using bittorrent.
Creative Commons movies, web shows, etc can be distributed thorugh bittorrent.
Its a way to minimize your data connection usage as a distributor.
Meh just use Filesonic....dodges all the problems with torrents all together. Havnt touched a torrent in years.
Dodges what problems Abe? you have more problems using file servers than you do with torrents. and with torrents you dont need the server infrastructure like you do with file servers which costs money at some point. That just gives the right holders cause to believe someone is profiteering on the rights that they hold. Torrents do not cost anyone anything....except uploading bandwidth.
boxpn VPN service provider solved this issue for me. They are using a very high SSTP encryption technology. When I conect to their network with my WIndows 7 pc I can download any torrent without any issue. My ISP can't monitor my traffic and doesn't Throttle my connection.
Personally I use SSL encrypted usenet, but if I ever have to grab something off a public BT tracker I always cover my ass by using http://vpnsecure.me . Been using them for over a year now without a problem yet :)