Monday 15 October 2012

BTGuard Review: Completely Anonymize Your Bittorrent Traffic


By on Monday, October 15, 2012

With all new laws against file sharing coming along with the Entertainment industry lobbying for increased powers to spy on BitTorrent users, You need to hide your IP address a.k.a your physical location from public eye .If you're using BitTorrent, utorrent, Azure or any such client without taking certain measures to hide your activity, it's just a matter of time before your ISP throttles your connection, sends you an ominous letter or sometimes you can be a party to a Lawsuit. So how to Remain anonymous on Bit Torrent? Read More to find out






Why to Use an Anonymous and Proxy Service Like BT Guard



When you download or seed a torrent, you're connecting to a bunch of other people, called a swarm, all of whom—in order to share files—can see your computer's IP address. That's all very handy when you're sharing files with other netizens, but file sharers such as yourself aren't necessarily the only people paying attention. Piracy monitoring groups (often paid for by the entertainment industry either before or after they find violators) also join BitTorrent swarms, but instead of sharing files, they're logging the IP addresses of other people in the swarm—including you—so that they can notify your ISP of your doings. A proxy (like BTGuard) funnels your internet traffic—in this case, just your BitTorrent traffic—through another server, so that the BitTorrent swarm will show an IP address from a server that can't be traced back to you instead of the address that points to your house. That way, those anti-piracy groups can't contact your ISP, and your ISP has no cause to send you a harrowing letter.
Using BT Guard, you don't need to be doing anything illegal. Maybe you just want to keep Big Brother out of your business and from throttling your connection. Either way, if you really want to keep your activity private, your best bet involves routing your BitTorrent connection through an external service. BT Guard is a dead simple BT-focused proxy and encryption service.

The piracy groups can go to the anonymizer service (BTGuard) and requisition their logs to figure out that you're the one downloading the new Movie? Theoretically, yes, but the reason why we chose BTGuard is because they don't keep logs, so there's no paper trail of activity leading back to you. All the piracy monitors see is BTGuard sharing a file, and all your ISP sees is you connecting to BTGuard—but not what data you're downloading, because it's encrypted.

If you subscribe to an ISP that throttles BitTorrent traffic, and aren't using an anonymizer service, you have an additional problem. Your ISP can still see what you're doing, and if they detect that you're using BitTorrent—even if you're using it for perfectly legal purposes—they'll throttle your connection so you get unbearably slow speeds. When you encrypt your BitTorrent traffic, your ISP can't see what you're using your connection for. They'll see that you're downloading lots of information, but they won't be able to see that it's BitTorrent traffic, and thus won't throttle your connection. You still have to be careful of going over your ISP's bandwidth cap, however, if that exists.

BTGuard offers you both a proxy (to combat spying) and encryption (to combat throttling)—though many torrent clients have encryption built-in as well.

Downsides of Using BT Guard

First, BTGuard isn't free. At $7/month (as little as $5 if you pay for a year in advance), it isn't very expensive, and we think it's well worth it if you want to torrent anonymously. A law suit settlement, if it comes to that, will cost you at least a couple thousand dollars, which equals a couple decades of BTGuard subscriptions, so keep that in mind, too. The other potential downside is that piping your downloads through another service may decrease your upload and download speeds. How much depends on what torrent you're downloading, who from, and a lot of other factors, but just know that it's a possibility. In my experience, more popular torrents stayed at their top speed of 1.4 MB/s (my bandwidth cap) with a proxy, while other less popular torrents (which flew at 1.4MB/s without a proxy) would fluctuate around 200 or 300 kB/s with BTGuard in place. Again, though, a little longer wait on downloads is well worth the protection you get.

Lastly, proxies aren't supported by every client, which means you'll have to use one with more advanced features. uTorrent (for Windows) and Vuze (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) both support proxies, but sadly Mac and Linux favorite Transmission does not.



Download BT Guard 

The servers are located in Canada but should be able to handle high speed transfers globally. We briefly tested the download speeds from India and were able to max out our connection, with an occasional downswing. So it looks good but only serious downside is that it is not free. But If you need the anonymity,it is still reasonably priced




About Shaunak

A tech lover who loves writing and sharing with people.

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