5 Ways To Download Torrents Anonymously

With anti-piracy outfits and dubious law-firms policing BitTorrent swarms at an increasing rate, many Bittorrent users are looking for ways to hide their identities from the outside world. To accommodate this demand we’ll give an overview of 5 widely used privacy services.

With an increasing number of BitTorrent users seeking solutions to hide their identities from the outside world, privacy services have seen a spike in customers recently. Below we’ve listed some of the most-used services that allow BitTorrent users to hide their IP-addresses from the public.

The services discussed in this post range from totally free to costing several dollars a month. The general rule is that free services are generally slower or have other restrictions, while paid ones can get you the same speeds as your regular connection would.

VPN (paid / free)

Hundreds and thousands of BitTorrent users have already discovered that a VPN is a good way to ensure privacy while using BitTorrent. For a few dollars a month VPNs route all your traffic through their servers, hiding your IP address from the public. Some VPNs also offer a free plan, but these are significantly slower and not really suited for more demanding BitTorrent users.

Unlike the other services listed in this article, VPNs are not limited to just BitTorrent traffic, they will also conceal the source of all the other traffic on your connection too. Ipredator, Itshidden and StrongVPN are popular among BitTorrent users, but a Google search should find dozens more. It is recommended to ask beforehand if BitTorrent traffic is permitted on the service of your choice.

BTGuard (paid)

BTGuard is a proxy service that hides the IP-addresses of its users from the public. The service works on Windows, Mac, Linux and as the name already suggests, it is set up specifically with BitTorrent users in mind. Besides using the pre-configured client, users can also set up their own client to work with BTGuard. It works with all clients that support “Socks V5″ proxies including uTorrent and Vuze. In addition, BTGuard also includes encryption tunnel software for the real security purists.

After these words of praise we’re obligated to disclose that BTGuard is operated by friends of TorrentFreak, but we think that should be interpreted as a recommendation.

TorrentPrivacy (paid)

Torrentprivacy is another proxy service for BitTorrent users, very similar to that of BTGuard. It offers a modified uTorrent client that has all the necessary settings pre-configured. The downside to this approach is that it is limited to users on Windows platforms. TorrentPrivacy is operated by the TorrentReactor.net team and has been in business for more than two years.

Anomos (free)

“Anomos is a pseudonymous, encrypted multi-peer-to-peer file distribution protocol. It is based on the peer/tracker concept of BitTorrent in combination with an onion routing anonymization layer, with the added benefit of end-to-end encryption,” is how the Anomos team describes its project.

Anomos is one of the few free multi-platform solutions for BitTorrent users to hide their IP-addresses. The downside is that it’s not fully compatible with regular torrent files as Anomos uses its own atorrent format. Another drawback is that the download speeds are generally lower than regular BitTorrent transfers.

On the uTorrent Idea Bank, more than 1,600 people have asked for the Anomos protocol to be built in to a future uTorrent build, making it the second most-popular suggestion overall.

Seedbox (paid)

A seedbox is BitTorrent jargon for a dedicated high-speed server, used exclusively for torrent transfers. With a seedbox users generally get very high download speeds while their IP-addresses are not shared with the public. Once a download is finished users can download the files to their PC through a fast http connection. FileShareFreak periodically reviews several good seedbox providers.

Ernesto @'Torrent Freak'

Richmond Fontaine's Willy Vlautin on RN's 'The Book Show' 13-08-10

Illustration: Nate Beaty

Music has been a strong creative influence in Willy Vlautin's life. He's a singer songer-writer in the alternative-country music band Richmond Fontaine. It was music that made him start writing fiction and he's written three novels: Motel Life, Northline and Lean on Pete.

For Off the Shelf though, Willy Vlautin tells what books have shaped him:

Ironweed by William Kennedy

The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

Pick-up by Charles Willeford

Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver

Get it

HERE

The writes and wrongs of election coverage

exilestreet Sound advice from son#2 To all those voting Greens: I fully support them but vote ALP just so the Libs don't get in. #ausvotes less than 5 seconds ago via web

HA!

♪♫ Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood - Jackson

Psychedelic Drugs Show Promise as Anti-Depressants

Don't Drink The Water

Illustration by Emmanuel Romeuf

Andy Roberts’s feature on LSD in the water supply (‘Reservoir Drugs’) described the CIA’s obsession with this type of threat in the 1950s and the scare stories about hippies dumping drugs in reservoirs and similar media reports. I’d like to go back a bit and fill in the gap on the CIA’s own interests. The huge quantities of LSD needed might have meant that spiking water supplies was absurdly impractical… but a little thing like that didn’t stop the world’s favourite spy agency.

In the early 1950s, the CIA approached the Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland, the company that had patented LSD, and requested 10 kilos of the stuff. They were politely informed that the total production only amounted to 10g, enough for some 40,000 doses, but far less than the Agency wanted. The CIA bought what it could from Sandoz, and used some of it in the notorious MK-ULTRA programme. Among other things, the programme explored the effect of LSD on unwitting subjects by spiking drinks at parties. But the idea of using gigantic quantities had not been abandoned.

Dr Jim Ketchum was involved in the US Army’s programme for testing the military effectiveness of a whole range of psychedelic chemicals. He entered his office as Department Chief one Monday morning in 1969 and found a black steel barrel, a bit like an oil drum, in the corner. [1] The military does not always explain everything, and Dr Ketchum assumed there was a good reason for this unusual addition to the furniture. However, after a couple of days he became curious. He waited until everyone else in the building had gone home one evening and opened the lid.

The barrel was filled with sealed glass canisters “like cookie jars”. He took one out to inspect it; the label indicated that the jar contained three pounds of pure EA 1729. This wouldn’t mean much to most people, but to anyone working in this field the code was instantly familiar. Substances were given EA designations from the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal; EA 1729 is the military designation for LSD. The other glass canisters were the same, perhaps 14 of them in all. This was enough acid for several hundred million doses with, Ketchum estimated, a street value of over a billion dollars.

Some wild ideas about what to do next flitted through his mind, but in the event he simply sealed the barrel up again. By the Friday morning it had vanished as mysteriously as it arrived...

Continue reading

David Hambling @'Fortean Times'

U.S. Is Said to Assure Israel a Nuclear Iran Isn’t Imminent

Inebriation

...about a man who specializes in "a very specific type of insobriety - unconscious insobriety."

Drug addict benefit withdrawal considered

People dependent on drugs and alcohol who refuse treatment could have their welfare benefits withdrawn under plans being considered by the Home Office.

The idea is in a consultation paper on the government's drug strategy for England, Wales and Scotland.

The proposals also suggest that addicts on benefits should not be required to seek work while receiving treatment.

Some experts have suggested that withdrawing benefits could lead addicts into crime and prostitution.

The Labour government intended to carry out pilot schemes this year to get drug users into work.

Under the plans, addicts who failed to attend a treatment awareness programme would lose welfare benefits.

However, in May the Social Security Advisory Committee - an independent statutory body - said withdrawing benefits from drug users would lead them into crime and prostitution.

The coalition government scrapped the pilot programme - but the Home Office has now revived the idea.

It asks for views on whether there should be some form of "financial benefit sanction" for claimants who do not take action to address their drug or alcohol dependency.

The Home Office has also confirmed plans to give ministers the power to ban new substance for a year until they have been properly assessed in a bid to combat so-called "legal highs".

Minister for Crime Prevention James Brokenshire said: "The drugs market is changing and we need to adapt current laws to allow us to act more quickly.

"The temporary ban allows us to act straight away to stop new substances gaining a foothold in the market and help us tackle unscrupulous drug dealers trying to get round the law by peddling dangerous chemicals to young people.

@'BBC'

Al Qaeda Plans for War with Israel

25 Tracks: A dubstep chronology By Eighteen

25 Tracks: A Dubstep Chronology by Eighteen on Mixcloud

As part of Drowned In Sound's 'Subliminal Transmissions' week, 25 Tracks is an attempt to put together a mix that encompasses as many of dubstep’s myriad shifts as possible over the course of an hour. It’s never going to be comprehensive, and there are doubtless gaping holes where individual artists and sounds ought to be, but the aim is to provide a mostly chronological map of its development – all the way from the dark garage of El-B and Horsepower Productions to the many hybrid forms battling for attention today.

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