For BitTorrent users this is a great annoyance, and although encryption helps in some cases, it often is very hard to get around the restrictions.

But according to Jeremy Duncan, senior director for Salient Federal Systems, torrenting over IPv6 is a great way to get up to speed again.

“BitTorrent users are discovering that they won’t have throttled traffic with IPv6,” says Duncan.

“This is an issue for the carriers. They won’t be able to throttle back the IPv6 traffic because they’re not inspecting it.”

Duncan sees the torrenting users on IPv6 as a problem for ISPs, but to the masses the issue sounds more like a solution.

If anyone has tried this successfully, I’m interested in hearing your findings.

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

TorrentFreak has been the proud owner of an IPv6 address for quite a while, which earned us a spot (#33) in the hall of fame. But today the big boys including Google and Facebook are (finally) giving it a 24 hour test run.

In the torrent world there are not that many sites with an IPv6 address, but we learned that EZTV.it added one yesterday, in celebration of World IPv6 day.

The Pirate Bay is also working on IPv6 support, but they failed to make today’s deadline due to network issues. If you want to check if your browser can handle IPv6 connections, you can do the test here.

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

Thus far, these services were believed to adequately hide a user’s IP-address from people they connect to in BitTorrent swarms, but this is not always the case. At the Telecomix Cipher conference a security flaw was revealed that allows third parties to find the true IP-address of someone connected through a VPN.

The security risk is caused by a lethal combination of IPv6 and PPTP-based VPN services, which are very common. IPv6 is the Internet protocol that will succeed IPv4. The protocol is promoted by Windows 7 and Vista, among others, and most people are using it without even realizing it.

The technical details of the vulnerability, explained in this talk (see below), reveal that the true IP-address of users using IPv6 can be easily traced. Even worse, it seems that the Swedish Anti-piracy Bureau may already be using this flaw to gather data on ‘anonymous’ BitTorrent users.

The vulnerability is not limited to BitTorrent either. It can expose people who believe that they are hiding their real IP-address through nearly every connection.

In addition to this gaping hole in VPNs such as Ipredator and Relakks, the talk exposes several other weaknesses from a privacy point of view. Among other things, it is fairly easy to find MAC-addresses and computer names of people who use the same VPN.

The people who run Ipredator are aware of the issue, and TorrentFreak was informed that their users will be notified about the problem. Other VPNs using the same system may want to do the same. From our understanding of the issue, turning IPv6 off should alleviate the threat and make users fully anonymous again.

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