TorrentFreak

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BitTorrent: Bypass any Firewall or Throttling ISP with SSH

On some networks it’s impossible to use BitTorrent. For example, if you’re at work, school, or connected to Comcast or a public hotspot. But there’s an easy solution to overcome this problem. By using a secure connection (SSH), you can bypass almost every firewall or traffic shaping application.

Here’s a relatively simple 3-step guide that will show you how to set it up.

I wouldn’t recommend BitTorrent over SSH as a permanent solution since it will cripple the servers of the SSH providers. If you’re looking for a long term solution check out a VPN service such as BTGuard.

1. Get an SSH account.

You need an SSH account in order to get this working. You can try one of these free shell providers from this list.

2. Download, Install and Configure Putty

Download Putty, store it somewhere on your computer and run it. In the session screen enter the host name, the port number (22), and tick the connection type box (SSH).

ssh putty tunnels

Next, go to SSH –> Tunnels, enter a source port and tick the dynamic box. I’m using port 23456, but you are free to choose any post you like as long as it’s available.

ssh

When you’re done, it might be a good idea to save the session so you don’t have to enter the info next time you run Putty. If you’re ready, hit the “open” button in the session screen. A command-line interface will pop-up so enter your username and password that you received from your shell-provider, and you’re done.

3. Configure your BitTorrent client.

The last step is to configure your BitTorrent client. I will show you how it’s done in uTorrent and Azureus but other BitTorrent clients use a similar setup.

uTorrent: go to Options > Preferences > Connection. Enter your port number (I use 23456), socks 4 or 5 as type, and localhost in the proxy field.

Azureus: go to Tools > Options > Connection > Proxy Options. Tick the “Enable proxying of tracker communications” and “I have a SOCKS proxy” box. Next, enter your port number in the port field (I use 23456) and localhost in the host field.

utorrent ssh configuration

When you’re done, restart your BitTorrent client and you’re ready to go. BitTorrent over SSH tends to be a bit slower than your normal connection, but it’s a great solution when BitTorrent connections are blocked or throttled.

For those on a Mac OSX, please check out this great tutorial (which in part inspired this article) for more details. It includes instructions on how to do this on a Mac, using Azureus.

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  • Ezekiel Crowe

    Continuing proof that however many millions are spent on techniques to throttle the p2p community, the tried and true combination of human ingenuity and too much spare time can overcome anything.

  • Yatti

    Ill try it soon.

  • davdavon

    My ISP throttles BitTorrent but this didn’t help…

  • http://torrentfreak.com Ernesto

    [quote comment="187302"]My ISP throttles BitTorrent but this didn’t help…[/quote]

    Which ISP are you on?

  • Brian

    My university blocks common torrent ports and most arbitrary ports are firewalled or show up as “NAT OK?” in Azureus. Would this solve the problem?

  • Ranger Bob

    YOU ROCK DUDE! I can now reach Demonoid.com again from Canada!

  • Seanie
  • http://torrentfreak.com Ernesto

    [quote comment="187309"]My university blocks common torrent ports and most arbitrary ports are firewalled or show up as “NAT OK?” in Azureus. Would this solve the problem?[/quote]

    It should, let us know if it works!

  • bernie

    any thoughts on os X? I might add ever thought I port port forward on the WAP I can never go green with Azureus, any thoughts?

  • Ranger Bob

    Seani… erm SSH.

    “Secure Shell or SSH is a network protocol that allows data to be exchanged over a secure channel between two computers. Encryption provides confidentiality and integrity of data. SSH uses public-key cryptography to authenticate the remote computer and allow the remote computer to authenticate the user, if necessary.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Shell

  • Scott

    I’m at university in London and they have the most stringent network policies I’ve ever come across. I had to check the box “Use proxy server for peer-to-peer connections” to get it to work. This does mean all the traffic is going the proxy though which makes it a lot slower. Oh well, I can finally download my shows from America again.

  • h33t

    silenceisdefeat.org probably did not design their service for bittorrent

    according to their site they have a server colocated on 10Mbps (i assume uncapped). how far does 10Mbps get you as a bittorrent proxy?

    oops

  • k3lvin.key.as

    I hate torrent download. I like rapidshare, megaupload …
    So I create a site give to all mems around the world can use Premium Account(s): It’s Free !

    http://k3lvinmitnick.blogspot.com

  • Poxek

    Incredible! My (sucky) college normally blocks all torrent activity, and now I can get torrents to work! Granted, only 10kB/s, but that’s better than 0 by far!

  • Hacker

    Confirmed, working ;-) This also works great as a browser proxy ;)

  • dtstuff9

    VPNs are so much better and easier and free!

  • freako

    VPN free? which ones? most of them are free but give a bandwidth limit. :S

  • inaequitas

    Tunneling things over SSH is a good idea in many situations to increase your level of security. Browsing, grabbing e-mail when on unsecured wifi etc.

    However, some ISPs block and/or throttle all encrypted traffic [known to me is Rogers in Canada]; while this was aimed at slowing down people using torrent encryption, it has negatively affected SSH usage in some places. So YMMV.

  • Monkey

    I understand that secure shell is encrypted and everything but would this increase my security downloading torrents on a college campus? I have gotten a few cease and desist letters from the DMCA dept at my college because they some how tracked me but with this and peer guardian what is my level of safety?

  • alexa

    I’ve had good experiences with vpntunnel (www.vpntunnel.co.uk). They charge $20 a month but I get 16Mbit/sec seeding and downloading!!

  • Ajay

    I use http://www.your-freedom.net/
    it works with openvpn

  • Ink

    Most free shell providers have severely limited bandwidth and hardware specs.
    If a bunch of ppl start using those free services to tunnel their traffic through them they’ll sooner or later disable tunneling altogether.

    And keep in mind that even though the ssh provider isn’t able to read your incoming connections the outgoing onces are not encrypted and clearly readable. So if I was one of those free providers I’d start throttling bw and/or connections… which is pretty easy on *nix there are even ap2p kernel patches.

  • Mr. Nutty

    Sounds dandy till traffic blocking and shaping occurs with SHH connections.

  • Ink

    I don’t think they can do that Nutty (or at least they shouldn’t) most businesses even small onces encrypt all their traffic (http, ftp, tunneled db connection and all that).

    And all this traffic is indistinguishable from tunneled ssh traffic. In fact most of that is based on open-ssh.

    That would even slow down websites when you order from amazon.

  • ChrisCocker

    Damn you for abusing a nice shell provider for p2p. That’s about as “good” as using TOR für torrenting. >:(

  • Josh

    Read the silenceisdefeat TOS they sure wouldn’t like filesharers:

    http://silenceisdefeat.org/tos

  • Anonymous

    Hey dumbasses:

    “Participating in activities including but not limited to spamming, port flooding, network scanning, distributing copyrighted works or using SD systems for any other type of illegal activity is strictly prohibited.”

    “Violators of any of the terms expressed above will have their account immediately
    terminated from SD, and in the event that illegal activities have occured, law
    enforcement authorities will be contacted and provided with any information felt to be
    useful in a thorough and complete investigation.”

    So no, do NOT abuse free unix shells to tunnel P2P. What the hell were you thinking?

  • Ink

    Write first think later… wasn’t that always the TF motto?

  • Thanks

    for being a complete jackass!

  • Alex

    This DOES NOT WORK! After creaing the dynamic tunnel it says…

    channel 3: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed

    in the terminal window, which indicates that the ability to create dynamic port tunnels is disabled.

  • KGFROMCANADA

    Can I play WOW using this method?

  • Hobo J

    I want my $1 back!

  • Hi

    GREAT IDEA

    NOT

    Abusing other servers through illegal downloads, not to mention this will be incredibly slow considering most free servers will only have x mbit to their discretion.

    Fucking useless blog shit

  • canuck

    Bad idea. It violates their TOS and slows down their free network. Soon none will exist because of p2p abusers. I hope they put a bandwidth cap on each shell account if they don’t have one already.

  • nosmoke

    [quote comment="187584"]Hey dumbasses:

    “Participating in activities including but not limited to spamming, port flooding, network scanning, distributing copyrighted works or using SD systems for any other type of illegal activity is strictly prohibited.”[/quote]
    I didn’t see ANYONE encouraging ANYONE to break ANY laws with this tutorial. Its clearly about getting through throttles and firewalls. If YOU choose to abuse any service, that’s down to you.

    If you’re unhappy about silenceisdefeat being used, suggest another service FFS and be HELPFUL to other users.

    Anyone can pick faults, c’est facile

  • Teebee303

    Cant I do this myself? I mean by setting up a Linux computer at home with SSH-server, and then tunnel into that?

    You should write a guide on that. Ubuntu comes with SSH-server already installed.

    I whish I knew how to do it with a home server.

  • wut

    any other services to abuse then?

  • tks

    my school filters ssh packets…any way around this?

  • Myztry

    Using SSH for P2P is a bad idea. A mere $1 won’t fund the service, but it will provide traceability through the banks.
    The interesting thing is it effectively tunnels you to have a different ISP. That opens a whole can of worms, especially if the provider is in another jurisdiction.
    Some uses could be:
    1. Accessing export denied (by IP) material. (US – encryption, China/US – embargo)
    2. Locating your apparent presence outside of the jurisdiction (DCMA, etc).
    3. Bypassing content filters, even of your local router.
    4. Allow an apparent point of access to move countries by changing proxy. In mere seconds.

    A whole heap of stuff government could get nasty about!

  • Ink

    @nosmoke

    First of all it already abuse if you use this kind free service to tunnel your legal torrents through it. It will still kill the service bandwidth costs money!

    And secondly we all know that torrenting is all about legal downloads right? None here uses it for anything else so posting this peace of shit article on a popular torrent site… which in terms of course got to digg a few minutes later will of course not lead to abuse for illegal stuff.

  • youcanhaspickelz

    ssh or seedbox on the cheap-

    vps4less.de
    shinjiru.com

    no violation of TOS there. have fun.

  • njvic

    This article also assumes that port 22 is open for outbound connections from inside the firewall… Any decent organisation has this blocked (only ports with an operational need to be open are open, for either direction).

    If you can find an SSH provider that accepts SSH connections on HTTPS port then you are home and hosed (assuming you are abiding by their TOS of course) as it’s extremely unlikely that any firewall has this port blocked for outbound connections.

    That’s how I connect to home at any rate.. I have my home SSH server listening on port 443. The place I am currently contracted to runs an ISA firewall so I also need a local proxy for which I use the GPL’d ntlmaps.

    Works great!

  • HiP.P

    one quick …. has any of the people that cant use bittorrent try running it through Tor?

  • Cuthbert

    Wouldn’t it work by using Relakks?

  • Stuff

    @HiP.P

    Depends if they want the torrent to complete sometime this century.

  • gally

    old!

  • HiP.P

    [quote comment="187638"]@HiP.P

    Depends if they want the torrent to complete sometime this century.[/quote]
    Easy. Just asking. I ment non-peer to peer connections.

  • HiP.P

    meant[quote comment="187646"][quote comment="187638"]@HiP.P

    Depends if they want the torrent to complete sometime this century.[/quote]
    Easy. Just asking. I ment non-peer to peer connections.[/quote]
    *meant …. spelling *shakes head*

  • David

    DAMN YOU, leechers. That is NOT for what free shell providers are for. Get a vsever or whatever you like, but DO NOT ABUSE services others provide for free.

    Thanks to you, Tor has become almost unusable.

    Now you are effectively DESTROYING another piece of infrustructure that was very useful for a lot of people.

    Grow up guys.

  • Ink

    If you’re not talking about peer connections why ask?
    Tor works with a website so it will of course work with a tracker both use http (usually).

    It would even work for peer connections Tor is a socks proxy it works with everything… if the app has no option just socksify it.

    You can even set an exit point…

  • HiP.P

    [quote comment="187648"]DAMN YOU, leechers. That is NOT for what free shell providers are for. Get a vsever or whatever you like, but DO NOT ABUSE services others provide for free.

    Thanks to you, Tor has become almost unusable.

    Now you are effectively DESTROYING another piece of infrustructure that was very useful for a lot of people.

    Grow up guys.[/quote]
    Its not just leechers the use Tor for non-peer to peer connections …. I use to use it at Uni then when I got home I would seed

  • Ink

    @David

    Dude I don’t think anyone uses tor for actual peer connections… I use it everyday and it works fine.
    Other than that you are right ;).

  • HiP.P

    [quote comment="187653"]If you’re not talking about peer connections why ask?
    Tor works with a website so it will of course work with a tracker both use http (usually).

    It would even work for peer connections Tor is a socks proxy it works with everything… if the app has no option just socksify it.

    You can even set an exit point…[/quote]
    Using it for peer to tracker connections. Sorry didnt explain that in my first question.

  • Jay

    Thanks for the info, though I wish to use this for something other than bittorrent (Final Fantasy XI). There’s a firewall set up at work, and I’ll I want to do is simply log in, but they have a weird set up here. Unable to connect yet to silenceisdefeat.org, but working on it.

  • David

    @Ink: Yes there are people who do p2p over Tor. Actually, that’s a HUGE problem for the Tor network.

    Anybody, please DON’T DO THAT. It sucks. It breaks infrastructure others rely on. Tor has been build to foster free speech, to safe dissidents from prosecution, and to secure democracy – not to spread another series Desperate Housewifes.

  • HiP.P

    [quote comment="187676"]@Ink: Yes there are people who do p2p over Tor. Actually, that’s a HUGE problem for the Tor network.

    Anybody, please DON’T DO THAT. It sucks. It breaks infrastructure others rely on. Tor has been build to foster free speech, to safe dissidents from prosecution, and to secure democracy – not to spread another series Desperate Housewifes.[/quote]
    Hahaha nice come back… Made me smile

  • youcannothastor

    dude, leave Tor out of this. it’s actually the only worse abuse of a good resource for pirating known to man.

    besides, as much as the US govt loves people hiding things, running a Tor server while pirating goes up as the dumbest way to get caught, ever. “hi, i’m from the us govt. we traced back to this exit point on the Tor network. oh, and what’s this 3tb server got on it? kthx!”

    do you want to be known as the dumb fuck who one upped jammie?

    ed: based on this articles ferocity on digg + del.icio.us, i’d guess there are more morons out there every day.

    glhf.

  • HiP.P

    meh just asked a question?
    oh well

  • Dan

    Just FYI, if you’re on a college network, try downloading the Vidalia Bundle. Set a HTTP proxy in the uTorrent settings to localhost:8118, and this will allow uTorrent to connect to the trackers. I have this set up with my college campus network and it works like a charm.

  • TorUser

    [quote comment="187680"]meh just asked a question?
    oh well[/quote]
    Tor is serious business

  • Aanr

    The author of this is a complete tool. He must think we (ISPs) are stupid. Humm lets see. A user sucking tons of bandwidth on an SSH connection? Gee that guy must be typing a lot. There is no way we would ever figure out what is going on there.

  • DK

    [quote comment="187621"]Cant I do this myself?[/quote]

    You ask and shall receive:

    http://blog.davidkaspar.com/archives/2007/02/howto-free-secure-web-browsing-and-access-to-home-network-using-openvpn.php

  • Ink

    Aanr who do you think decides things at the big ISPs? Not technicians.
    Managers who have constant problems opening their email client!

    Your comment show that you basically know nothing about the business… which might actually mean that your are part of some ISP decision making machine but if that was the case you wouldn’t post here and if you were a tech you would know what you are actually talking about.

    So go away.

  • Anonymous

    [quote comment="187690"]The author of this is a complete tool.

    He must think we (ISPs) are stupid. Humm lets see. A user sucking tons of bandwidth on an SSH connection?

    Gee that guy must be typing a lot. There is no way we would ever figure out what is going on there.[/quote]
    Or though this has a point an ISP would notice a lot of upload.

  • Anonymous

    [quote comment="187702"][quote comment="187621"]Cant I do this myself?[/quote]

    You ask and shall receive:

    http://blog.davidkaspar.com/archives/2007/02/howto-free-secure-web-browsing-and-access-to-home-network-using-openvpn.php/quote
    think you balled him off the net

  • system

    [quote comment="187618"]
    If you’re unhappy about silenceisdefeat being used, suggest another service FFS and be HELPFUL to other users.[/quote]
    Here’s a suggestion for a service that can be used.
    Get your own dedi or VPS.

    Anyone who can’t accept that they will have to pay for the bandwidth they use is a leech, regardless of how much they seed back on a torrent. $1 does not cover even a tiny part of what you will use on torrents.
    Taking advantage of the good intentions of others so you can get the latest hollywood blockbuster is a pretty shitty thing to do.

    If your ISP wont allow torrents, then either switch or pay up. Don’t act like the world owes you a fast download.

  • Anonymous

    So is there any SSH shell providers that will allows torrent traffic or at least give a fairly good down rate? I’ve only got a laptop (so having a box at home is a no go) and really want to get around the college network restrictions. I’m of course willing to pay for the service.

  • Aanr

    Ink, Uhmmm You are clueless. I don’t think you understood anything I typed. Maybe we will try again and you can grasp a small amount of it and hopefully you will understand.

    You see ISPs employ people who actually use the internets. We do read the same things that end users do and we also do many of the things that end users do. We also know that someone sucking 3Mb of traffic down an SSH connection is not probably someone one checking their mail with a shell account.

    All crap like this will do is lead to a knee jerk reaction by the bigger ISPs.

    If you want to use SSH to download your favorite tv show then great. Just SSH to your own server and not to a free service that is not intended for such activity.

  • HiP.P

    [quote comment="187718"]You see ISPs employ people who actually use the internets. We do read the same things that end users do and we also do many of the things that end users do. We also know that someone sucking 3Mb of traffic down an SSH connection is not probably someone one checking their mail with a shell account.

    All crap like this will do is lead to a knee jerk reaction by the bigger ISPs.

    If you want to use SSH to download your favorite tv show then great. Just SSH to your own server and not to a free service that is not intended for such activity.[/quote]
    agreed

  • Paul

    Anyone who can (and I realise there are some that can’t), should vote with their $wallets$ not their technology and change ISP’s to one that doesn’t throttle.

    I love my new ISP, no throttling, no caps, and it’s even a bit cheaper than the big telcos/cable companys. (It’s Distributel.net FWIW, for Canadians)

  • Ink

    #67 sure you can get a virtual-server or dedicated root server, they all run a ssh-server for the shell, and enable port forwarding but you should keep in mind that all the traffic you cause at home doubles for the root server. That means if you download 1GB your server made 2GB traffic, same goes for upload of course.

    Aanal didn’t I tell you to go away?

  • Tyler
  • Ink

    Dude that is a usenet provider afaik. They use ssl to encrypt traffic from the news server to the client. Has nothing to do with torrenting.

  • cactus

    You’re tunneling bittorrent though silenceisdefeat? What the hell, I would feel like suck a dick if I tried to push that much traffic through a FREE SHELL.

  • Bob/Paul

    This will work great until all the shell providers start throttling the connection speeds.

  • davdavon

    [quote comment="187308"][quote comment="187302"]My ISP throttles BitTorrent but this didn’t help…[/quote]

    Which ISP are you on?[/quote]

    An Israeli ISP, “012 Kavey Zahav”. They throttle everything that isn’t HTTP… BitTorrent, eMule, even http://FTP...

  • catfish182

    This was written 13 months ago.
    Wording may be changed a bit but its the same thing.

    http://whalesalad.com/2006/08/27/tunneling-bittorrent-over-ssh/

  • Be Nice

    Delete the story and change to one that discourages what you first wrote to do.

  • Not working

    Sorry, this trick doesn’t even work. Proxy connect error.

  • system

    $24/month will get you a 1mbit VPS from FDC. That’s just over 300GB/mo.
    With that you can set it up exactly as above.

    $15/mo will get you 250GB transfer with 10GB HDD and 128MB RAM from mabushosting.net, again you can set it up as above.

    Going up the price scale, you can get a full dedicated server from leaseweb, 160GB HDD, 500GB transfer, 512MB RAM and a 100mb/s port for 39 euro/$55 per month.
    This gives plenty of space to run torrentflux on which allows you to grab the torrents at 100mb/s and start seeding while you download to home whenever it suits (off peak for instance). If you prefer, it can also run SSH tunnels.

    If you spend some time looking, you can find links from places like WHT that will get you $5 VPS from mabus and others.

    All the above sell you a slice of bandwidth to use, and are more suited to torrenting than a free shell account. You also wont be wasting the resources of what is basically a non-profit organisation.

  • Burke

    You write a good article and the kids wine.
    Welcome to the internet.

    Education on now the “internets work” might be good here too. For some reason, the people think that they don’t have an IP and cannot be seen what they are sharing when using SSH.. Although, not true this tut is just to bypass the middle man (your ISP) but the end still knows you.

    This does work when done properly. Or others may need a couple diff settings for their network/ISP.

    Quite crying children, get educated before making a f00 of yourselves.

    GG~

  • Fibre

    Don’t waste some guys bandwidth after paying only $1

    Get a VPS from Keyweb/Hosting-IE. Tunnel through it or use rtorrent. Leech from it using SCP.

  • Alex

    PLEASE CHANGE THIS ARTICLE.
    It’s a shame to recommend abusing free shell accounts. The guys that provide such services help others, and already have to fight script kiddes and IRC bots.

    Now you suggest doing p2p over these accounts. You want to serve your community at the cost of other communities. I simply can’t believe that.

    You completely undermined my trust in TorrentFreak. I seriously hope the other authors are not that lame. Get a clue, Ernesto. Grow up. Learn the internet some day.

  • Alex

    [quote comment="187784"]people think that they don’t have an IP and cannot be seen what they are sharing when using SSH.. Although, not true this tut is just to bypass the middle man (your ISP) but the end still knows you.

    Quite crying children, get educated before making a f00 of yourselves.

    GG~[/quote]

    All right, Mr. Know-it-all.
    So the ISP does not know who you are if you use a SSH tunnel, huh?

    That’s nonsense, of course. Wether you use a tunnel or not, the ISP knows very well who you are. The traffic is encrypted when using SSH, yes, but of course the ISP still has yor IP, your name, your address, and the SSH server you are connecting to.

    It was YOU who suggested to get educated, calling others “kids”? Well then: Get a clue, kid, before making a fool of yourself.

  • Anonymous

    use http-tunnel.. really fast and used it in my old uni!

  • Tanvir

    Recently Estonia’s computer system was hacked into, and it caused major problems. I wonder if this bypass will make the network vulnerable or not. I just saw a website about Estonia’s Singing Revolution , http://singingrevolution.com.

  • Felton

    My school monitors bandwidth and can tell when you’re filesharing. They can remotely disconnect you from the internet and you have to take your computer to their IT guys to reconnect for a fee. Will this program overcome this problem?

  • Bored

    The F? Why can’t I see the page, unless I go to ‘edit’ and do a ‘select all’? And yeah, I’m using IE, coz I’m checking this page from work..and only IE is allowed. I use Firefox at home.
    This is stupid. Except for the pics and the alternate comments, the whole page is blacked out. Written in black font on black background. I wonder if that’s done on purpose to hide the gist of the article because it’s sort of sensitive..or the page renders perfectly on Firefox (which I’ve no way to check currently).
    Well, if it’s the Firefox thingy..I’d say you got a turd stuck up your snobby ass..coz some readers have IE forced down their throats at work. Good Day!

  • binarybandit

    Dan, that IS tor.
    You should stop.

  • binarybandit

    oh, and rofl Bored, you can’t blame a blog foe IE’s suckiness xD

  • binarybandit

    for*
    I fail

  • %

    [quote]Well, if it’s the Firefox thingy..I’d say you got a turd stuck up your snobby ass..coz some readers have IE forced down their throats at work. Good Day![/quote]

    It’s not this site’s fault that your browser doesn’t follow web standards.

  • system

    Sometimes happens with FF as well, where the background wont load and the page looks sucky.

  • Dan

    Well, that’s the most irresponsible thing I’ve seen in a long time.

    Do the guys at silenceisdefeat know you’re doing this, and that you’ve posted it for the digg/reddit masses to see?

    I’m pretty sure they won’t be happy about a massive extra bandwidth load on their systems!

    Maybe you should ask them first?!

  • kiddies

    Ink stfu,
    Everything Arin said above is true, all that SSH will do is encrypt your traffic stream not obfusicate how much data you send around. In fact its actually going to INCREASE the data sent because now its going to have encryption/signalling overhead on top of your kiddie warez. Every reposte you’ve tried to voice in these comments reeks of a 12 year old ADHD kid. Real nerds listen when their elders decide to bestow some wisdom on the kiddies. And nice more expensive Cisco equipment can do traffic shaping / filtering on protocol not just port usage, so hiding ssh traffic on a https or ssl port will do nothing to hide your attempts. Truth is the only thing that costs money these days is fat pipe.

  • Anonymous

    ‘You write a good article and the kids wine. Welcome to the internet.’

    It is in general a good idea, but the specifics of the article are not good. Using a free shell provider to tunnel p2p traffic is ban manners.

    Why didn’t you suggest something like http://www.http-tunnel.com/ http://www.your-freedom.net/ which specically cater to p2p for a relatively small fee.

  • Sean

    Pretty sure the silenceisdefeat dudes disabled the functionality this morning. I wasn’t able to get it working as of 9:30AM today.

  • Anonymous

    My school has a traffic shaper that prevents p2p and by extension prevents wii games from playing online. Would this method be a possible/acceptable way of making my wii work?

  • Hippie

    Yeah indeed dumbasses, I hope you know why because forwarding that port WON’T ENCRYPT YOUR P2P TRAFFIC! IT WON’T.

    That proxy only for the TRACKER not for the p2p transfer.

    OMFG, you so stupid as my dark shit ass.

    And you dont have to buy a fucking nix shell for that, just use a proxy from that shitload of proxy sites on the internet.

    This is the funniest thing when lil stupid monkeys think they know something and all other stupid fuck following them. So once again IT WONT ENCRYPT YOUR P2P TRAFFIC…

    Zomg…

  • Anonymous

    You guys are a bunch of paranoid bitches. If ISP’s cared they would be bothering me about the 7-800GB in uploads on my 5mb up and 30mb down FIOS.

  • Ink

    Hippie your parents must be related.

    This article is about ISP throttling and the fact that Ernesto is about as smart as you are doesn’t make it any better! Yeah he forgot to check the most important box on the form, so what!? He probably doesn’t even know where the difference is just like you don’t but (and that is the bad thing about this article) he intended to to make it work so that all traffic is pushed through the shell.

  • Eric

    Could not get this to work with Azereus on Mac OSX but it works great using Transmission. Getting peak speeds of 150kb/s vs the usual 1-2 kb/s via Comcast.

  • Anonymous

    Help. I tried this, but utorrent was showing red download arrows and would not download from most trackers.

  • Anonymous

    [quote comment="187860"]My school monitors bandwidth and can tell when you’re filesharing. They can remotely disconnect you from the internet and you have to take your computer to their IT guys to reconnect for a fee. Will this program overcome this problem?[/quote]
    Have you ever tried changing your MAC yourself to see if that’s what they’re blocking, or just keep going down like a sucker

  • Anonymous

    you have to remember that sd (silencesidefeat) only allocates 50mb of space for you. they don’t care that you use them for downloading torrents — cris brunner (one of the previous admins) actually wrote an article about this last year: http://www.chrisbrunner.com/?p=115 — (it was on digg) and sd got lots of users — aka money. most of these users don’t know or care that they’re directory quota is 50mb. sd is known to increase the quota for you if you ask — but I never have. in other news: they’re the last free shell (if you use snail mail and stamps to get your account) that allows irc access.

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  • DarkOne

    [quote comment="188266"]Help. I tried this, but utorrent was showing red download arrows and would not download from most trackers.[/quote]

    Same here can’t get ports forwarded, using µTorrent, followed instruction exactly.
    Ports forward fine when not using this method

  • 45455522455454

    4552251415225221144141

  • txf

    or alternatively you could pay for a furk.net account which downloads bittorrent files from the network which you can then get via http traffic…the service works really fast. There is a limit of 22gb per moth though

    still better than nothing and tons better than trying to download through the trickly of bandwidth of a shell

  • hazuzkryst

    [quote comment="187621"]Cant I do this myself? I mean by setting up a Linux computer at home with SSH-server, and then tunnel into that?

    You should write a guide on that. Ubuntu comes with SSH-server already installed.

    I whish I knew how to do it with a home server.[/quote]

    that doesnt change anything. The point of this is to tunnel into annother ISP… one which does not throttle torrent traffic. If you set up your own server, you are still using the same connection to the internet as what you would have if you used your main computer.

    All that does is route traffic through annother computer… traffic that hasn’t improved at all.

  • h33t

    Ernesto, see how they are in pain? see how they complain? you got it right dude (not the SSH proxy server you named … poor guys) you got it right about SSH. they fukin h8 the idea because it cannot be defeated

    there are bittorrent SSH trackers and clients already in the design stage of development. trackers and clients which do all the tunneling automatically. no different from a public tracker network, the only requirement is you must use a SSH enabled bittorrent client

    if you are interested in the future of private SSHaring and want to talk to the dev team let me know

  • Joe

    Yeah, I’m with most of the early posters. If we all jump on these free servers we’ll 1) get super slow connections and 2) stand the chance of being turned in. This is far less anonymous than people might think. And, per the TOS, they’ll turn your ass over without hesitation; I would too.

    I signed up because I like the idea of a permanent shell for a one-time fee of $1 though. I will not be using it for torrents though. Good idea, poor execution.

  • Anonymous

    I would advise against using Silenceisdefeat.org. Their service is well beyond horrible. I feel robbed just giving them my dollar.

  • Rob

    I just felt the Comcast effect this week, I decided to go with http-tunnel free version to test out speeds and it is working so far so good but the speeds aren’t that great, I was wondering if i would see a great improvement going with a shell instead of one of http-tunnel’s paid plans. From reading all of the above I know that some shells would not like p2p going through them but are there some that are widely known (and accept) p2p usage? Thanks.

  • finnsonc

    I can’t get it to work. It putty just says – Unable to open a connection to site …
    Network error – Invalid argument.

  • alexa

    I just use VPNTunnel (www.vpntunnel.co.uk) – it does the same thing only I didn’t need to mess around for 4 hours setting it up!

    It’s fast enough for games, too…

  • maRVIN

    Thank you

  • Ryche

    Real pirates don’t P2P.

  • Crazy

    I tried using putty, and it worked well for about 5min, then it seems comcast shut it down again. I think VPN would be the best way to go, unless I can find another SSH server for cheap/free. Also, can someone recommend a good cheap VPN service in the US?

  • Anonymous

    Hmm, I’m on comcast and it was capping my connection.

    I just enabled encryption in mutorrent, and now it works fine. I take it’s more difficult on a university connection?

  • Wacer

    If you spent half as much time trying to steal and spent it working, they would overlook this.

  • TheSaurus

    Is this even possible if my University only allows http traffic?
    I have to enter proxy.uni-name.tld in my Browser to get a Internet access.

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  • Ed

    I can’t even enter my password for my account, because putty becomes inactive halfway through…

  • Hippo

    This doesn’t bypass a single thing. The reason is that bittorrent uses UDP for most connections, which cannot be proxied by SOCKS 4 or HTTP proxies. SOCKS 5 includes partial UDP support, but it won’t help since bittorrent clients use the proxy setting for tracker connections only.

    Therefore all you will get is tunneled trackers, which will allow you to access trackers on totally blocked networks. But it won’t trick Comcast or any ISP with half a brain.

    How do I know? My linux server is on a slow upload connection (~44 kbytes/sec) and I still get 300+ kbytes/sec on torrents. How is that possible if the bittorent clients pass all traffic through the ssh tunnel? Simple logic disproves all posts using SSH as a tunnel to bypass traffic shaping of p2p connections.

    Still don’t believe me? Open a packet monitor (Wireshark, Analogx Packetmon, tcpdump, etc) and look at the traffic. You’ll see very little going over the tunnel, but you’ll see a crap load of udp going over your normal connection. If you have access to your linux box, run tcpdump and look. You’ll see virtually no udp traffic (meaning the tunnel doesn’t pass udp).

    The only real solution is a vpn that allows you to pass everything (vpn with routing).

  • Hippo

    Turns out I was not completely correct by stating that UDP is the main protocol. I guess I got confused between bittorrent and another service I tunnel via PPTP.

    Regardless, by monitoring the traffic, you will still see that none of it goes over the tunnel. UDP was just a sign since some of my peers are UDP from what I could tell from Wireshark.

  • Logie

    Sandvine wasn’t affecting my comcast until this past week.. Tunneling appeared to work, but when I was looking at the packets I noticed it all still was going through my connection as opposed to through the tunnel.

    I connected to my work VPN and set all traffic to go through that — at which point my port forward was out the drain (resolved my forwarded port to the PIX at work which denied it)..

    So.. Not really sure how to get around this.

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  • xtidix

    [quote comment="187455"]Confirmed, working ;-) This also works great as a browser proxy ;)[/quote]
    Works as a proxy?
    Really?

    How?

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  • Anonymous

    p2p users:

    or you could buy a rapidshare.com premium account for 5/month and max ur net speed :D

    btw anyone know how to get around packet inspection? it’s like novell..and they don’t allow ssh :S

  • Anonymous

    Goto DreamHost.com. They’re having a huge sale. One year for 10$. Get a great website with lots bandwidth for SSH.

  • Palo

    I called in yesterday to see why my SSH was sometimes working and sometimes being throttled based on what I read here on DSLreports. The kind rep over the phone was not sure what I was talking about it, so I mentioned the exact link to this post. He goes on hold for a few minutes and comes back later and I am now speaking to someone who works in the Technical support department who just finnished completing a ticket for the issue, thanking me for reporting this undocumented loophole. The last thing he said before he got off the phone is that Bypassing throttling is against TOS and this will be closed up real soon. I guess the hype was short lived.

  • Anonymous

    metropipe…

  • bigbadbruno

    I’ve got Comcast and I ran through all these steps perfectly. It still says I am not connected , that port 23456 is not forwarded. Do I need to do something with my router? What do I do? I am losing seed ration tremendously because of this. Thanks.

  • bigbadbruno

    I’ve got Comcast and I ran through all these steps perfectly. It still says I am not connected , that port 23456 is not forwarded. Do I need to do something with my router? What do I do? I am losing seed ratio tremendously because of this. Thanks.

  • Anonymous
  • Anonymous

    freebsdcluster.dk/~lasse/sshazureustunnel/

  • big

    how can i keep putty active?

  • Anonymous

    Connection – Seconds between keepalives – 1

    Enable tcp keepalives

    SSH – Kex – Max minutes before rekey – 1

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  • PB

    For a USA VPN provider with no limit on bandwidth try http://www.strongvpn.com I was able to get much better download speeds then the other VPN account providers.

  • Anonymous

    ziv_r

  • Anonymous

    is the site died?

  • Anonymous Coward

    You are a douchebag for posting a link to a US based shell provider for this…

  • Ceri

    Also doesn’t help the poor suckers with unfair usage caps. Ok I admit the ISPs do have some reasons for having caps here in Australia but still doesn’t make them particularly far when you hit your quota within a day.

  • jackass

    you guys suck balls

  • jackass

    fuckers

  • jackass

    bitches

  • jackass

    people who have read this are prostitutes

  • wolf

    [quote comment="211964"]ziv_r[/quote]
    Yep, i’m agreed. Using it u can download torrents everywhere in the world. Even in USA and Australia :P
    I had a real problem with downloading for free. Better to pay a little, and have more fun. With fast speed, to download more. Am i not right, dudes??

  • wolf

    [quote comment="211964"]For a USA VPN provider with no limit on bandwidth try http://www.strongvpn.com I was able to get much better download speeds then the other VPN account providers.[/quote]
    Yep, i’m agreed. Using it u can download torrents everywhere in the world. Even in USA and Australia :P
    I had a real problem with downloading for free. Better to pay a little, and have more fun. With fast speed, to download more. Am i not right, dudes??
    sry, the double

  • Anonymous

    Is it possible to forward multiple p2p ports using this method?

    For instance, I need to open up

    2300 to 2400…47624..6073

    all udp/tcpip

    In order to play this game here @ school.

    Will this work? Do i need to manually add all of the ports (2300-2400)?

  • monnetmj

    hahaha, this is amazing. thank you very much. the only difficult part was finding a free SSH account. This website was great: http://jaguar.garofil.be

  • Slipknotcc

    SWEET It worked for me, I’m fully connected. My campus internet wasn’t letting me get connected but now all works WoOt!

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  • Richtler

    Great idea! Thank you very much! It works like a charm.

  • rye burns

    Does anyone know how to block certain satellite ISP’s from seeing the amount of data that has been downloaded or uploaded?
    For instance Wild Blue only lets me download 15 GB and upload only 5 GB per 30 day cycle.
    Very shabby for todays torrent standards.
    If you exceed the alloted amount they completely stop your connection or make it go barely faster than dial up.
    Any direction would be appreciated as I tend to miss the variety torrents have to offer. But believe you me I WILL STILL continue to obtain my cheap media regardless. Anyone that’s pissed off about that can suck a rotten egg.

  • umar

    i can’t get user name and password from silenceisdefeat.org because i am from pakistan and i can’t use paypal for donation can i get user name and password without donation plz help me my email is umar_zulfiqar@hotmail.com thanks in advance

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  • Jimmy2222

    It does work, and I’ve avoided the problem of others by renting a VPS (virtual private server) with 300GB of bandwidth monthly, and setting up my own SSH account. All you need is a bit of patience, a bit of Linux experience and, if at all possible, Virtuozzo Control Panel helps for first timers.

    1-Go to a VPS provider, register a domain name (generally cheap). Make sure you have full root access.
    2-Generally they will ask you to choose a password for root… make sure to write it down.
    3-THIS IS NOT SUGGESTED, but you could use the username “root” and the password in putty as is. However you’ll want to setup passkey protection, to avoid people from trying to hack your server. With virtuozzo control pannel you can create a user….

    Lookup openSSH, and the SSHD configuration for more info.

    The beauty of this is you can use it as an FTP server, BT server… the possibilities are virtually endless. It’ll set you back as little as 8 dollars a month… and I didn’t know bugger all when I started, you won’t either, so you have to be willing to “waste” the money, if you can’t figure it out.

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  • mikm

    Hi,
    I wonder when there will be a software so that we can increase download speed of torrents.

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  • Anonymous

    does this protect against RIAA/MPAA

  • xalmon

    Great Trick!, It had been 1 year since my ISP had cut me off from using bittorrent and Thanks to PUTTY!!!! i now can restart my regular downloads!!!

    I m so excited!!!!

  • liketheMix

    My fear is that the company will still be able to see that there is an in-ordinate amount of traffic through my machine, even if they don’t see exactly what it is.. and then the hammer will fall. any tips?

  • Anonymous

    i don’t get it. i run a packet capture and none of the bit torrent traffic is going to the silenceisdefeat server. its going over TCP to the peers directly, which means my isp can see it. and i also see bit torrent handshakes in plain. looks like this is useless. anyone have any other ideas?

  • Karin A

    If you want more information about Relakks (exept from the homepage “www.relakks.com”):

    Jonas Birgersson, the founder of Relakks, is intervjued by Thomas Crampton. Birgersson talks about Relakks and why he thinks it is needed. It’s a good and interesting interview!

    Link to the clip: http://light.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.201364

  • Pissed Off Guy

    Make this on your own dedicated servers *NOT ON FREE-PROVIDED SHELLS*. Damn. Stop being a dumbass. That small free shells for things like mail, irc etc… *Not for SSH tunneling*.

  • gm

    tx for the post but I tried it and it was crap.My uTorrent is usually capable of achieving 500kbps but my highest using SSH was 3kbps.

  • TeenCracker

    The article is good. But you can use SSH even without a shell account. In windows you have a port “443″. Its SSH port. Try it.

  • Banshee

    another option is to use tunellier (http://www.bitvise.com/tunnelier) an unbelievably useful bit of FREE software. It sets up a secure tunnel as demonstrated above with putty. But then allows you to setup any number of port forwarding requests, as well as acting as a proxy for web browsing. We have a VERY knobbled network at work and using this I completely bypass their firewall for everything from torrent to usenet to private mail (port 25 wide open!). I even have firefox setup to use the builtin web proxy option so as far as their logs are converned, all my web browsing is totally legit (through IE) and all my *cough* other browsing goes encrypted through firefox. Tunellier is also a portable app, so I run it from my usb along with firefox so there is not trace on my PC at all. I’m using it to right this, in fact!!

  • Banshee

    I should also point out I do NOT use a free shell account. I have a linkstation live on my home network, you can add an ssh server to that in minutes and I connect tunellier from my work network to that, then use that as my jumping off point. So, no public ssh abuse.

  • Olivia

    How do you get the password after signing up at silenceisdefeat?

  • Mikispag

    You should not use SSH tunnels to convey P2P traffic, especially public SSH servers…

  • Ben

    what speed do u get guys ????

  • Dr. Mike Wendell

    When I configured uTorrent, I had to check the box for Using proxy server for peer-to-peer connections to get it to work.

  • kb38758

    I tried it with my Comcast connection and uTorrent.
    It doesn’t work.
    Tried tweaking the settings on uTorrent; either no up/download at all, or same throttle problem on the browser.
    When uTorrent is running, within 5 minutes the browser slows to a crawl.
    Never happened before I switched to Comcast.

  • Anonymous

    ok

  • jamie

    @23: It already does with some ISPs in UK.

  • john
  • Anonymous

    I did everything in the tutorial. However, when the command window pops up, it says “network error:unable to reach network”

    now what? :(

  • jj

    It is working. but very hard to find a peer and very very slow.

  • Anonymous

    buy a record you lazy fuckers.

  • cactusfrog

    WOOT! comcast is in court over this issue! they are not giving me full internet service because they are blocking torrents therefore i should get my money back because all this time i thought i was paying for the full internet when i really wasn’t!
    looky http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071114-comcast-hit-with-class-action-lawsuit-over-traffic-blocking.html

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  • tking0036

    if your isp throttles your traffic you can enable bt encryption and that should help. In BitTorrent go to settings bittorrent and change the box that says disabled to enabled.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Bboy-Jdck/525740369 Bbøy Jðck

    how on earth do i get a shell account?? please anyone help me out!

  • BTGuard - BitTorrent Anonymously

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