Get Free Anonymous BitTorrent With ItsHidden
Written by Ernesto on July 26, 2009With anti-piracy outfits warning those who share copyrighted content and ISPs threatening to pull the plug on alleged offenders, many file-sharers have decided to protect themselves by going anonymous. To accommodate this growing demand, ItsHidden is now offering a free VPN targeted at those who want to protect their privacy online.
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. The most common and widely used privacy services are VPNs that allow users to connect to the Internet while hiding their own IP-address.
These services, such as The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator, usually charge a recurring monthly fee to pay for bandwidth and hardware bills. However, this week a new player entered the VPN market, offering their services for free – no strings attached.
Named ItsHidden, the free VPN solution has opened up a BETA test to the public, who can now privatize their Internet traffic – including BitTorrent transfers – in next to no time. ItsHidden was set up with torrent users in mind, allowing them to hide their identities from ‘third parties’ who choose to snoop on their activities.
“It has been created to put some rights back in the favor of the user and that includes us,” David from ItsHidden explained to TorrentFreak. “There are so many bodies, mostly unelected that seem to have full access to the most intimate of online details with little or no justification and more importantly, no evidence.”
The service encrypts the connection between the user and ItsHidden’s servers and prevents anyone from reading this data as it is sent or received. We were further assured that no data logs are kept of the user’s transfers. The best news is of course that it’s totally free, and they hope to keep it like this in the future.
“It is a free service, we will of course have to limit in some way eventually to stop the whole lot collapsing, but we will always have a free account. The paid account would be geared at about $5 and will add port forwarding and other features,” David said.
During the BETA phase the service uses shared IP-addresses, but once they have completed more testing ItsHidden will be able to issue static IPs. The servers are all located in The Netherlands at present, but they will spread to other locations once the service is out of BETA.
We have of course tried ItsHidden ourselves and the service is offering good speeds for a VPN, although this might differ based on the user’s location and the load on the network. Right now, we are hoping that it wont collapse once thousands of new users flood the network. Fingers crossed.
Previously: Music Industry Groups Threaten Hunger Strike Over Piracy
Next: Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
136 Responses
Interesting, but if they keep it free, it will fail.
The bandwidth costs are extremly high.
This looks good and free!
I get 1MB/s from btguard.com, what kind of speeds do you get with this?
Cool, I’ll give it a whirl.
Wow… This actually works! Hopefully this will work in the long run. :P
Please keep me updated on this as I want to know if this is 100% secure.
Bandwidth cannot be free. There has got to be strings attached.
A way to create a free BitTorrent anonymiser would be:
1. Host the actual .torrent files on the p2p network, no thepiratebay.org required to host those small files.
2. Do all tracking through DHT
3. Proxy download through other users and seed a certain amount of GB to get higher priority on that anonymous proxy sharing. This third part is the most cvomplicated, it will require to use more download and upload bandwith to work, but it will probably not have to require 2x more bandwidth. Advantage of this algorithm would also be better seeding by the users to gain that faster access to more stuff. Handling of this has got to be p2p though perhaps a system of trusted servers for storage of ratings and user credits could somehow be setup. It could be a chain of servers and an encrypted and secure system. Basically would prevent the dissemination of fakes and would manage the basic ratios to give people with good ratios automatic higher download speeds.
“128 Bit Secure Connection to ensure privacy over all networks”
Hmmm. . .
Just got it running
7 Hops to my French Server and 44ms on ventrilo which is around the same 10/10 At moment about to launch a torrent.
Just ran a torrnet getting 700-750KBPS out of my 8mbps full so top marks on that while doing other things Skype/Vent and a few IRC Servers so great! Just keep it up and free.
sounds like a great replacement for SecureIX which I used for awhile and was also free.
Works great, hope they can keep it free.
Is all traffic guided through this connection once innitiated? Just curious.
looks great, but after it hits sites like slashdot, digg, reddit, etc.
i doubt it will have nearly enough bandwidth to keep things going smoothly. plus unless they figured out a way to pay for bandwidth it’s over in no time unless they start charging or making some changes.
but for now awesome service! just tried it for simple web browsing, worked just great!
Looks good.
Interesting.
There is one more good thing in world of secure connections. It is called Veiled and is something like a plugin for browsers developed by HP Security Labs. And it is easy to set up Darknet for secure anonymous information sharing over insecure network. And it will be free and probably even open sourced too :)
Veiled goota look it up, never heard of it. You think ItsHidden is good, couldnt they just be using this to track users.??? How are we sure its legit?
What’s to stop the middleman from snooping on people’s activities?
nice find, but its pretty slow. took 10 seconds to load up google, and more on other sites. it’s still free.
Just set it up and its working great.
Lack of port forwarding is a small issue at the moment.
The speed is comparable to non-vpn with my isp, which gives priority to secure traffic.
What’s to stop the middleman from snooping on people’s activities?
Interesting. When I ran a lookup trough Whatismyip.com it a pornsite appears as hostname.
Hopefully this will work good mate. I am testing it out now. I was thinking about getting another vpn but I will try this one out first. I think its the deal where you try then after you get used to using it, they will ask prob for like $5.00 or so.
This is not sustainable, as the bandwidth costs will rise with the number of users and cost.
Something like OneSwarm is far more sustainable because every user contributes transit for other users’ streams. Also, something like Tor but with everyone being a relay (not exist) would be more sustainable too.
And, as the above commenter says, what’s to stop the middleman from snooping on people’s activities? This service does not even try to make snooping impossible, as it has a single point of failure.
This is not sustainable, as the bandwidth costs will rise with the number of users and the amounts of transfers.
Something like OneSwarm is far more sustainable because every user contributes transit for other users’ streams. Also, something like Tor but with everyone being a relay (not exist) would be more sustainable too.
And, as the above commenter says, what’s to stop the middleman from snooping on people’s activities? This service does not even try to make snooping impossible, as it has a single point of failure.
Sounds good, but I’m wary about a catch hidden somewhere.
**NEWS** Port Forwarding is not enabed during BETA, it will be available after testing is complete – Thank You!
Hard to test to see response time to torrents vs not under a vpn without open ports. So far, max out (64 KB) on no vpn connection with popular torrents, with vpn an no port forwarding after 10 min I get 12.8 KBs. Implement port forwarding on beta or service can’t really be compared. Thanks anyway, I will test random torrents that I want and see what happens with speed and such.
For some reason i can’t get it to work on my OS X laptop, can login on the website but my VPN won’t connect, anyone else have this problem?
Shrug. It didn’t work for me. It’s probably getting hammered.
Server & Network Information
Hostname: static01.gayforit.com
so i ws testing the service.. speedtest.net, whats my ip and… thats what showed up as hostname
hum?????
wth?
Eh I made an account but I want some proof that this will end up a quality service. Static IPs would be great too can’t wait for now.
But right now you can’t even port forward which makes things difficult.
Also it has a PayPal logo at the bottom this will become a pay service eventually because IP blocks and servers aren’t cheap.
I’m curious – when I have this enabled I don’t need to filter traffic via PeerGuardian2 anymore right ?
Answer to one of the question about middle-man attack : connection between you and VPN is 128bit encrypted so it’s almost impossible to do man-in-the-middle attack.
Of course putting fake serwer + fake getaway will do the trick but thats hard to do ;)
I know that it is encrypted but how do we know that, only through their word right?
I put it on on my laptop. Works fine. No problems though ports are closed. Running Vista.
Another thing. Having the same IP means that I get blocked from posting comments here because we all share the same IP! :D
There is no way they’ll be able to keep it free, at least not for long. I have to say though that I am mildly impressed with what I have seen so far.
Remember the last time that tf linked us to a vpn service that was to good to be true? Its in the related articals for me.
O and lol @23.
@dhst
No, I believe you’re wrong. The link between you and the VPN service may be protected, but you have no way of knowing what the VPN service provider, acting as exit node, is doing. That’s the middleman I was refering too, the VPN provider, so if you’re logging into your non-encrypted websites, sending emails, downloading torrents, logged into your private torrent site, whatever, you have no way of knowing whether the VPN provider is snooping on your line. You need end-to-end encryption for that (that would be a fully encrypted link between source and destination).
Am I wrong?
Gives me about 4mbit. It’s really good for being free and my own bandwidth is at 8mbit so it’s not much of a difference anyway :D
damn its fast and getting around Bell canadas throttling nice
I had aready defeated that by using mlppp . but have it turned off and still getting getting 458 kb/s
using it on windows 7 OEM lucky me
Hostname: static01.gayforit.com
whats with us all connected to a gay porn site?
I turned on ItsHidden while i was downloading a torrent. before i turned it on i was downloading at around 300kbps. now 100 kbps :( it was too good to be true
went from 1700kbps to 400kbps with itshidden, not so good
I can’t seem to connect to it.
It keeps saying it can’t connect to remote machine.
Anyone else having trouble?
Works perfectly ! Took a few minutes minutes to set. Got a not so bad speed (30kbs).
Anyone had any luck setting this up in Ubuntu?
Has anyone got this working in ubuntu?
i got it to work at 700kb/s i have a 1mb
For normal browsing so far this is working great. However as more & more people use it for p2p it’s probably going to slow down..
Here’s a speedtest:
http://speedtest.net/
Damn I feel stupid, here’s the real speedtest:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/526024558.png
heres my speedtest on the VPN http://www.speedtest.net/result/526035187.png
Doesn’t work with Vista 64-bit
i can’t get this to work on ubuntu =\
so what are the Terms and Conditions that they make you agree to when signing up?
Yea its definately slower than without vpn, i’m on 12mbit fios right now and vpn slowed down to about 100kbps download rate…
wow, this is free and fast.
@frankie
should I infer it doesn’t work with windows 7 64bit too?
@47 i no thats what i wondered too.. and i love how the website looks like shit that someone just threw together
WOW! this is just amazing. I was previously throttled by my ISP when using bittorent (on other protocols *http, ftp)i had full speed), and now i have full speed on bittorent too. I can’t thank this company enough!
Seems they are saturated now, my speeds have dropped and browsing is getting a little unreliable.
Yay! Facebook at work :P
I’ll test with Vista Ultimate 64bit in a while to confirm that it doesn’t work with 64bit. I think it does but let’s see.
This works great :O
But I don’t think they gonna be online so long :( They have free accounts and no ad’s how do they get money to the bandwidth?
And I trust my VPN alot more than I trust them, and c’mon people everyone can afford a VPN (It’s don’t have to cost more than 5$)
works fine on Vista ult x64
Yes, I have tested it already on Vista 64-bits and it works.
But I don’t trust them either. You have to sign the “terms of service” without reading them.
Has anybody bothered to read the FAQ? – In there they explain how to setup your machine to access their VPN. However, when it gets to the point that you have to enter your username/password – it tells you that you get these “after your purchase”
Shape of things to come?
@ 31 :
Yes, you still need to use PG2 or some other IP-blocker.
Using a VPN does not prevent you from connecting to fake-swarms .
it works speeds are okish no portforwarding bit of a issue also make sure that file and printer sharing is un ticked in networking do this by click on vpn icon propreties networking same as when you set up a relakks vpn connection pptp
Right now, we are hoping that it wont collapse once thousands of new users flood the network.
Which is why we decided to publish an article about it, so that as many people as possible know about it, join, and wreck overall speed.
amidoinitrite?
so what are the ‘terms and conditions’ when i want to create an account?
Terms and Conditions are nowhere to be found. Site clearly has been trown together with Joomla seeing they didn’t even bother to change the icone. Not a very trustworthy start.
Works fine and fast for my using Fedora 11. That’s just great… hope it’ll last for long!
sending all your data through an unknown entity sounds like a great idea lol
now you mentioned it, they got rid of the joomla icon :D
it looks to suspicious for me…
I am sitting in Australia. Just got on to this. Our Internet here is incredibly slow. I cannot see any difference. If anything my connection is faster.LOL. Hope there really are no strings attached. Might even be worth a small fee the way our government (the moron minister Steven Conroy) is going.
apparently they are part of port80.com different ip range and domain name was registered with different people
http://www.speedtest.net/result/526288700.png
i am using OSX Leopard. after using the faq i still get an error saying that the server does not exist…
@77, you have to use vpn.itshidden.com, not the adress they give in the guide.
But even with that, i can’t Authenticate with OSX
It didn’t work well for me I can upload around 70KB/s but I get nothing on download. Not that beneficial when I could be uploading 800-900KB/s Oh well back to uploading.
download 974.1 KByte/sec
upload 44.1 KByte/sec
Advanced Proxy Test
rDNS FALSE
WIMIA Test TRUE
TOR Test FALSE
Loc Test FALSE
Header Test FALSE
DNSBL Test FALSE
btw on those who say this is going down
I see this more as an advertising stunt they will probably start putting caps on the free part and then you will have to pay to download more the article already mentions $5-a-month subscriptions for getting extra features
@81
Uh, of course.
They even said that themselves in the article.
seems to work very well!
give them a chance! they’ve offered something, for free. Stop being so bloody negative people
“Right now, we are hoping that it wont collapse once thousands of new users flood the network.”
//facepalm//
Then why the hell do you post it here .
@82
for 90% of the commenters here it’s not so of course I guess
sounds like a good deal but did not work for me..could not log into their system..overloaded perhaps?..
@88
Yeah, same with me.
lost about half my connection speed but hay for a FREE VPN is it not worth it???? hell i think so
Who’s behind this project?
Do they keep any logs of IPs?
free..yeah rite.
“…As you have probably guessed, just about anything ‘free’ should set off warning bells — there is a dark side to all of this.” (Bill, CEXX)
Works beautifuly so far. I would be more than happy to pay $5 for such a services.
Sounds too good to be true. Free bandwidth?
Don’t some people ever stop moaning? Speed seems good from here esp. for beta.
This is Incredible! This is my first vpn service, and it has sped up my connection by nearly twice as fast! I’m impressed…but I doubt they will keep it free forever.
I just set it up, thank you very much TorrentFreak! :)
WTF,have any of you tried to do a background check on these guys??????
ultravpn is totally free.
https://www.ultravpn.fr/
enjoy
http://www.speedtest.net/result/526627269.png
Normal: 1.3mb
VPN: 1.0mb
’nuff said
welcome to the party itshidden.com and thanyou
looks interesting.
ubuntu guide
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7690350#post7690350
doens’t work with vista 64 and xp 32 ???
wtf is this really working !
I got this working in Ubuntu. You can following my steps here:
http://ubuntu-chronicles.blogspot.com/2009/07/jaunty-vpn-itshiddencom.html
DO NOT TOUCH ITSHIDDEN.
it stinks of a russian scam.
AND I WORK FOR ANOTHER VPN
it stinks of competition
ItsHidden is NOT who they claim to be!!!! I emailed Port 80 Limited
“Hi Mike
No – this has nothing to do with us at all, and they are most certainly
*not* Port 80 Limited as they claim to be.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention
David Scholefield”
From itshidden.com:
**NOTE: We are a Limited company Registered in the Seychelles and are in no way connected with Port80.com or the UK company Port 80 Limited.
I have always recommended a good privacy service be used while online!
RT
http://www.anon-web-tools.tk
I rather them than the UK gov collecting every site i go to tbh
Enjoy your copyright infringement notices. I’m not saying if they are bad news or what but you should all be extremely suspicious. How do you know they won’t make money by selling your IP address to the RIAA ?
Various posts have asked ‘how can it be provided for free?’. At the bottom of the page at http://itshidden.com/Support/VPNXP.html it states 8. Enter your ItsHidden user name and password (you’ve received these after completing your
purchase, and you can also find them in your receipt e-mail) and click “Connect”.
It hasn’t moved past “Authenticating” for me. I’m on Mac OSX 10.4.11 BTW.
I duno, at first it seems great but it is kinda fishy jsut to prop up out of nowhere. I dont think I will be using this until I get some more information on it.
@ 109
What are the chances of them choosing “Port 80 Limited” as their name when there is another notable “Port 80 Limited”?
They are doing it to confuse those who quickly read or are unaware of whats going on.
As someone said, they could easily be selling our IPs to the RIAA or other anti piracy groups.
I guess most of you guys missed the terms of service:
“In these terms and conditions, “your user content” means material (including without limitation text, images, audio material, video material and audio-visual material) that you submit to our website, for whatever purpose.
You grant to us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use, reproduce, adapt, publish, translate and distribute your user content in any existing or future media. You also grant to us the right to sub-license these rights, and the right to bring an action for infringement of these rights.
Your user content must not be illegal or unlawful, must not infringe any third party’s legal rights, and must not be capable of giving rise to legal action whether against you or us or a third party (in each case under any applicable law).
You must not submit any user content to the website that is or has ever been the subject of any threatened or actual legal proceedings or other similar complaint.
We reserve the right to edit or remove any material submitted to our website, or stored on our servers, or hosted or published upon our website.
[Notwithstanding our rights under these terms and conditions in relation to user content, we do not undertake to monitor the submission of such content to, or the publication of such content on, our website.]“
@116
such ToS has no legal bearing whatsoever so who cares nobody loses their copyright etc because it’s says so in a ToS
I guess pirates are just dumb.
http://www.whatsmyip.org/
This site saw me. Many others failed, locating me in holland. This one was right
There is a security hole when using itshidden.com
Every user, can see your PC if you are not using a firewall. They can also see your Sharing folders.
See pictures here:
http://www.gbetsis.com/posts/security-hole-in-itshidden-com.html
I must be the only one who reads FAQs before jumping into things head first:
“MAC Support is not available at the moment due to authentication issues.”
whats the difference between this new service and say running pg2 ( peer guardian 2) and using tor for looking for torrents to hide my ip address on torrent sites servers ?? please explain in simple language thanks
@122 (by dc)
The difference is that with this service you are “tunneling” your network connection through their server, such that it will appear to other BitTorrent users as if you are coming from a different IP address, whereas with your approach you are directly connecting with your computer but denying access to people on the PeerGuardian list.
The risk with using a service like this is twofold. First, all your BitTorrent connections through the service are visible to the people running the service (much as all your communications through your ISP are visible to your ISP), so you have to trust them not to track your activities. Second, all your OTHER connections through the service are visible to the people running the service, so if you’re configured to route all your Internet traffic through there (such as happens by default with some VPN implementations) they could watch your other Internet usage, such as what websites you visit and possibly your e-mail in transit.
This doesn’t mean that they WILL watch what you do by any means, but you should be aware that the possibility exists any time you use a VPN you don’t control. Really, this just seems to swap one uneasy uncertainty (are people on your torrent monitoring you?) for another (is the service you’re using to hide monitoring you?)
@121
Connecting my MAC Leopard was a piece of cake using their Howto guide which has now been withdrawn. Ubuntu 9.04 connects ok but I can’t get Firefox to use the connection. In Leopard there is a box to tick which tells it to route all connections through the VPN. I will try the Ubuntu Howto’s referenced above to see if they help.
I’m am going to give this a try and hope it will be pretty good.
Follow me at http://www.twitter.com/thecrypticone
This company *will* be either bankrupt or charging by Christmas. Fact.
It seems they allow you access to everyone else on the VPN.
Basically install a firewall, disable sharing and require a login.
I poked around a couple of computers and it seems some good samaritan is passing out the word with text files so Ill leave it at that.
If the free version does not allow port forwarding doesn’t this make it unusable for BitTorrent?
Other people cant initiate a connection with you.
But you should be able to open a connection with other people though, so it only really slows down the ramp up time.
Judging by previous comments, it sounds like I’m better off sticking to Furk.
I poked around a couple of computers and it seems some good samaritan is passing out the word with text files so Ill leave it at that.
yea i saw that text file on a few shares so i just deleted them lol
I just noticed that this website and thepiratebay are blocked using itshidden.
Is anyone else having this problem?
Haha stellar 128 bit encryption direct from those stellar supporters of the community, Microsoft. Lucky there is no back door there as they share their code with everyone.
Look folks find yourselves someone who uses a product such as OpenVPN. Using a service like this or another that harnesses a ‘closed’ 128 bit encryption is like free diving in the ocean while coating yourself in fish blood. Yes there is a chance you won’t be ‘exposed’ but you are broadcasting what you are doing. Combined with the inherent DNS leak and keys to the ‘backdoor’ provided to The Powers that Be, you may get your 3 minutes of fame on your way to court.
You get what you pay for with security!
The last couple of day I have noticed that now none of my tracker are updating use this server douse any one have the same problem I assume they are blocking them
anyone know a good pay vpn service
wow what a paranoid bunch of geeks some of you are ,
ijwts thanks to the people who are providing this service for free and to torrent freak for the heads up,
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