Over the past months interest in these privacy protection services has surged. However, for some less technically skilled people all the talk about privacy settings and IP-leaks may prove to be too much.

The latter group is now catered for by TrafficPrivacy, a new and fully anonymous BitTorrent client that launched this week. Feature wise the client is relatively limited, but unlike others it has a fully configured and dummy proof anonymity option built in. Simply enter your login credentials and everything just works.

“TrafficPrivacy’s mission is to provide users with real 100% protection and anonymity without additional settings, which can be quite difficult for non tech savvy users. That’s why we include protection into a tiny BitTorrent client,” TrafficPrivacy’s Alex told TorrentFreak.

As with other anonymity services a long term subscription to TrafficPrivacy doesn’t come free. The service is currently priced at $6.95 per month, but there is a 7-day free trial available for people who want to give it a spin before committing to it longer term.

Contrary to VPNs or BitTorrent proxies, users will have to swap their current BitTorrent client for the TrafficPrivacy software. This is a deliberate choice from the makers, as it’s the only way to guarantee that all the privacy settings are properly configured.

With Vuze, uTorrent and other clients people often forget to use the right settings or get confused by the terminology, which can result in their true IP-address leaking out. The new client’s goal is to avoid this.

“The target audience for TrafficPrivacy are users who put a lot of value on their safety and anonymity, but do not want to configure all the complicated settings. We want to keep everything as simple as possible and let users feel safe without tinkering with various privacy options in current BitTorrent clients,” Alex says.

TrafficPrivacy BitTorrent Client

One thing to keep in mind is that TrafficPrivacy only offers anonymous BitTorrent transfers. Other traffic, such as that generated by a web browser, will be linked to the user’s regular IP-address. Users can see if anonymity is turned on directly from the client, but it’s always wise to verify it through an external service that checks the BitTorrent IP.

To guarantee the user’s privacy the company says it doesn’t keep any connection logs that can be traced back to individual customers. Also, if the TrafficPrivacy servers happen to go down the client will stop working entirely.

“If TrafficPrivacy server goes down, all downloads stop and it doesn’t leak the real IP-address,” Alex informs TorrentFreak.

The TrafficPrivacy team are no newcomers to the security scene. The new client was developed as part of the existing TorrentPrivacy proxy/VPN service, but when the new client was finished they decided to turn in into a completely new product and a brand of its own.

While TrafficPrivacy might not appeal to all BitTorrent users, its ease of use and simplicity will probably be welcomed by those who are less technically skilled.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In April of this year BitComet was the first of all major BitTorrent clients to offer a stable 64-bit version. The 64-bit version allows for larger disk caches, something that may benefit heavy-duty downloaders.

A few months before that, BitComet introduced another noteworthy feature called VIP-downloading, which enables users to download torrents that are accelerated by BitComet’s servers. The service is basically a private connection to a high-speed seedbox which accelerates the downloading process of healthy swarms.

Today, this VIP service is expanded with the option to download all torrents anonymously. Instead of only accelerating regular BitTorrent transfers through Bitcomet’s servers, the “anonymous” downloads will be handled by BitComet’s VIP servers exclusively, hiding the IP-address of the user.

“If VIP members enable anonymous downloads our remote servers will initiate all peer and tracker communications and download the data on behalf of the VIP member, so the member’s actual IP address isn’t shared with any of the peers or trackers,” BitComet’s spokesperson told TorrentFreak

“Our VIP servers are state of the art commercial servers on some of the worlds fastest connections. There are no imposed speed limits, the only account restrictions are on a flat-rate basis,” TorrentFreak was told.

The catch, and yes there’s always one with anonymous downloading, is that the service comes at a cost. Aside from the free trial, BitComet offers plans with 10GB and 100GB limits for $4.99 and $19.99 respectively. Depending on one’s download behavior this could be a good deal, but heavy downloaders who are only interested in anonymity (and not acceleration) may be better off with an unlimited BitTorrent proxy or a VPN account.

Starting today, anonymous downloads are supported by the latest Beta versions of BitComet. Thus far there’s plenty of interest for the VIP service. In fact, huge demand for the VIP free-trial accounts initially crippled BitComet’s servers which forced the developers to temporarily limit the offer to long-time BitComet users. We assume that the demand will only increase with the added anonymity feature.

If no significant issues arise in the coming weeks, anonymous downloads will be added to the upcoming 1.28 release of BitComet.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Although the role of Twitter and Facebook in the recent revolutions in the Middle East is often exaggerated, the social Internet did bring an important change. Hashtags and Facebook groups don’t do much on their own, but new web services have certainly made it much easier for people on the streets to share information with the outside world.

A new project started by the P2P-evangelists at VODO is set to take another big step forward in this regard. They aim to make it possible for citizen journalists to broadcast video to an audience of millions, totally anonymously and virtually invulnerable to censorship.

Named SPARKD, the video streaming tool has joined Mozilla’s MoJo contest, which was set up to encourage novel approaches to news gathering and reporting. Through the contest SPARKD hopes to be awarded a fellowship with one of the participating news organizations which include the BBC and Al Jazeera.

In short, SPARKD allows the public to anonymously stream or upload video from whatever device they have available, and then share it on various decentralized indexes. The distribution of the streams is based on P2P technology and handled by peers, which means that it’s nearly impossible to shut down once the information is out.

According to VODO founder and Steal This Film director Jamie King, SPARKD can be an essential tool in a time where citizen journalists are increasingly silenced.

“It’s clear that public distribution of certain kinds of key information has the potential to contribute to social change. Look at the role of citizen journalists in Egypt, and how this fed through to public awareness of the situation, strengthening the local movement,” King told TorrentFreak.

“Or look at Wikileaks, and its recent role in revealing the oil motives behind the invasion of Iraq. That should make it harder, I hope, to sell war to the public in the future. But in both cases, the distribution infrastructure is somewhat shaky, and liable to attack,” he adds.

Indeed, one of the main news sources in the Middle East, Al Jazeera, was jammed both in Egypt and in Libya. Similarly, Wikileaks is under constant attack from the U.S. Government via a variety of methods. SPARKD aims to make this type of censorship much harder, or nearly impossible.

“This is why SPARKD, based on a properly decentralized, P2P distribution with BitTorrent and the developmental Swift protocol at its core, can be useful. With peers bearing the responsibility of distribution, and trackerless swarms as the main infrastructure, it’s a much harder channel to censor or attack,” King says.

“P2P is perhaps the most pure realisation of John Gilmore’s statement that ‘The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.’ Nowhere right now is it more important to demonstrate this practically than with citizen journalism,” he adds.

An overview of the details of the project are available on the contest website. One of the most essential aspects is to provide full anonymity for the sources, something that the SPARKD team will accomplish by putting proxies between the original source and the rest of the world.

“The idea is to use a proxy — probably one that the user can select, we have a couple of partners we could work with — to protect the initial uploader as they upload over HTTP. We can arrange it so that we don’t actually know the details of the uploader, so there’d be no point people coming after us to find out who it was,” King told TorrentFreak

Those who are interested helping out, or to pitch their own ideas and suggestions are welcome to contact the SPARKD team.

“If you’re a UI designer, we need you. If you are a P2P-savvy programmer, we need you. If you have an interest in merging social conversation with live video, we want you. We can just about make this happen by ourselves, but this isn’t the point. It’s always great to discover new people to work with,” King says.

The SPARKD team hopes that, by winning the contest, they can get a Beta version out to the public as soon as possible. But even if they don’t win, the project will continue to be developed as planned.

Besides the importance of SPARKD for citizen journalists, the flit technology that underlies it might also be useful for other types of video streaming where the source prefers to remain anonymous. SPARKD is clearly restricted to political purposes, but since flit will be open and available to anyone, we expect to see a few entertainment oriented spin-offs once it is released to the public.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

These findings are the result of the Cyber Norms sociological research project carried out by a group of Swedish researchers. The researchers conducted a survey among Swedes aged between 15 and 25 and found that 10 percent of this group is currently taking measures against increasing online surveillance.

Måns Svensson, PhD in Sociology of Law in Lund, estimates the percentage of all Swedes who are hidden on the Internet to be as high as 6 or 7 percent. If this figure is accurate, it means that there are more than half a million Swedes who already use a service to hide their identity.

The researchers note that file-sharing is not the only reason for people to anonymize their connection, but the results of the survey clearly show that avid file-sharers would rather hide their identities than stop downloading. And indeed, over the past months we’ve seen that more and more BitTorrent users are seeking ways to protect their privacy online, rendering all the newly proposed anti-piracy laws useless.

Contrary to what the anti-piracy lobby had hoped for, file-sharers are not an easy catch. Their calls for harsher copyright legislation are only driving ‘pirates’ underground. According to the Cyber Norms survey, more than half of all respondents said they would take measures to protect their identities if anti-piracy laws in Sweden are toughened, as is currently happening in the UK and France.

Currently, the most common and widely used privacy services are VPNs. These services allow a user to connect to the Internet while hiding their own IP-address. Millions of file-sharers around the world use services like this to prevent being tracked by anti-piracy companies, and this number is increasing rapidly.

The recently launched Itshidden service is one of the few that offer a free service in addition to premium subscriptions. Due to its increased popularity the owners recently had to disable new registrations in order to keep the service running smoothly. In just a few months Itshidden signed up over 100,000 members. Other VPN services report an increase in signups too.

The anti-piracy laws currently being mulled have created a flourishing multi-million dollar ‘online privacy’ industry. In recent months these services have seen a massive increase in customers, with most of them paying around $10 per month to prevent third parties from logging their download behavior.

Perhaps the entertainment industry should invest some time and money in creating legal and attractive alternatives to piracy. Apparently most file-sharers are willing to pay $120 a year for unlimited and unhindered access.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Update: Limited free trial available now.

It pretty much works straight out of the box. First you have to chose a connection point – at the moment they have servers in Europe, USA, Canada. The closer the connection point is to your true location, the faster the speeds you will get from the service. Then, after you’ve chosen a connection point, just click connect and the program will connect to the server. The connection is made through the SSH protocol with 128bit encryption, which prevents traffic shaping and keeps your traffic ambiguous to prying eyes.

TorrentFreak briefly tested the application and it worked surprisingly well. People who are used to uTorrent wouldn’t notice any difference. The download speeds we got were great as well.

Alex, who runs Torrentreactor.net and TorrentPrivacy, told TorrentFreak: “We started the TorrentPrivacy project at the end of 2007. The idea was to give torrent users an anonymous BitTorrent service from a party they can trust. TorrentReactor has been online for approximately 4 years, and we believe that when people see that TorrentPrivacy uses ns1/ns2.torrentreactor.net as DNS servers, they won’t have any questions about a possible government setup of torrentprivacy.com.”

When we asked Alex about his motivation to start the project, he said that he wanted to make it as easy as possible for BitTorrent users to be anonymous, and get the RIAA and MPAA off their backs. “We don’t like the situation where two organizations from the USA believe they can rule the world. The Pirate Bay showed them that other countries have other laws and American laws don’t work outside of USA. We want to be the pain in their asses, and allow users to download what they want without fear of a sudden door knock.”

Sounds great, right? Yes it does, but unfortunately the service is not free. TorrentPrivacy currently has three payment options. $2.95 per week, $9.95 per month and $99.95 per year. I guess it’s up to you whether you think it’s worth it or not.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.