Last month, the American Assembly, a non-partisan public policy forum affiliated with Columbia University, released a paper titled “Copyright Infringement and Enforcement in the US” which came to the same conclusion. To define the local piracy culture researchers conducted 2,303 telephone interviews, and they found that roughly half of all adults can be branded a pirate.

Sharing files among friends and family is the most common form of copyright infringement, and just over 13 percent of all respondents admitted to using file-sharing software such as BitTorrent to download content. File-sharing seems to be most popular among the younger demographic as can be seen in the graph below.

A section of the report that particularly piqued our interest concerns the use of tools to hide ones IP-address online. The original report shows that about 5 percent of the general population use these tools, but we expected this figure to be significantly higher among file-sharers.

The American Assembly was kind enough to share additional data with us which confirmed this suspicion. Among the people who use file-sharing software, little over 15 percent use tools to hide their IP-address online. In other words, one in 7 file-sharers in the US is anonymous.

Further analysis reveals that in particular younger adults hide their IP-addresses. A quarter of all file-sharers between the ages of 18 and 24 say they share files anonymously, while less than 5 percent of file-sharers older than 44 years hide their IP-address.

TorrentFreak talked to several VPN and proxy providers who all say they have witnessed substantial growth throughout the past year. The leading BitTorrent VPN and proxy service BTGuard even doubled its customer-base during the past 12 months.

“BTGuard has been consistently growing since we started. Compared to 2010, we increased by around 200% in 2011. The growth has really picked up lately which I contribute to SOPA and other censorship efforts,” BTGuard’s founder says.

“We grew 25% this month. If SOPA or something similar actually passes, the flood of Internet users seeking asylum from oppression would be staggering to say the least. Hopefully that doesn’t happen, the Internet is far more important to us then business.”

This uptick is not limited to the US either. All around the world BitTorrent users have become more aware of their privacy, as a survey among Pirate Bay users recently confirmed.

Although the data obtained through the American Assembly survey says nothing about people’s motivations to download anonymously, it is indeed safe to assume that the increased talk about anti-piracy laws, copyright alerts and file-sharing lawsuits are high up the list.

In the US alone over 250,000 BitTorrent users have been sued for alleged copyright infringements because their IP-address was captured by anti-piracy outfits. And in the coming year millions of sharers are expected to receive warnings through their Internet providers as part of a deal the major ISPs struck with copyright holders to educate and punish BitTorrent users.

A promising outlook for providers of VPN and proxy services, but whether these measures will have a significant effect on the prevalence of piracy remains to be seen.

Source: 15 Percent of US File-Sharers Hide Their IP-Address, More to Folllow

If you’re not using BitTorrent through a proxy or VPN, there’s a good chance that the rest of the world can see without asking.

YouHaveDownloaded is a new Russian-based service that claims to track about 20 percent of all public BitTorrent downloads. However, they go a step further than just collecting IP-addresses and file-names by exposing all the harvested information to the public on their website.

People who visit the site immediately see their download history, as far as it’s available in the site’s database. In addition, they can also search for files or IP-addresses to find out who’s downloading what. At the time of writing the database has information on 51,274,000 users who together shared 103,200 torrents.

TorrentFreak got in touch with Suren Ter, one of the site’s founders, to find out why they decided to create this spying tool.

“We just want to remind people that the Internet is not a place to expect privacy,” he says. “Nowadays many people use it without understanding what information they leave behind. Also, even those who understand choose to ignore it quite often.”

The Russian developers created the site partly as a wake-up call. Those who don’t want this kind of information to be public should take steps to anonymize their traffic, and do that right. This message is also reflected in the site’s ‘privacy policy‘.

“Baby, this is the Internet. There is no such thing as privacy around here. You are sitting in the privacy of your own house, clicking links, reading stuff, watching movies. It may seem like you are pretty much alone, but smart nerds are watching you. They watch your every move. You are not human to them. You are a target — a consumer,” it reads.

Jokes aside, the site does indeed make people aware of the public nature of BitTorrent, something that can’t be stressed enough. Of course not everyone will be happy to see that their information is being exposed, so the developers also offer an option to de-list an IP-address.

Apart from exposing download habits the developers are also considering the creation of a more private file-sharing protocol. They already have a theoretical concept based on Bitcoin’s technology, but a workable piece of software is still very far away.

“The general idea is similar to what Bitcoin does. The key is to have an anonymous and reliable identity for each peer, and a Bitcoin-like signature chain algorithm will help,” Suren said.

The developers are currently trying to find out how viable their idea is, and then they’ll decide whether they should continue working on it or not. For now, they’ll keep on tracking dozens of millions of downloaders, for all the world to see.

Update: For those who have dynamic IP-addresses the service is obviously going to show content that someone else has downloaded.

Source: I Know What You Downloaded on BitTorrent….

The Cybernorms group researches how the Internet creates new social norms in society, and to what extent these norms are or should be reflected in relevant legislation. Ultimately, the researchers hope the collated knowledge and insights will help legislators draft more sensible laws.

In just a few days 75,000 people responded and TorrentFreak was given the opportunity to share some results on the topic of anonymity. The respondents were asked whether they use services to make their BitTorrent downloads anonymous, or whether they were interested in using such services.

The results of the survey reveal that nearly 70 percent of The Pirate Bay users utilize a VPN or proxy, or are interested in doing so in the future. Of this group 4.8 percent already use a paid service, while 13 percent use a free solution. Another 51.5 percent do not use an anonymizer service, but are interested in doing so in the future.

Only 18.4 percent of the respondents said they were not interested in appearing anonymous online, and the remaining 12.4 percent weren’t familiar with terms like VPN, or were undecided about their usefulness.

Looking at some of the regional differences a few interesting patterns appear.

Pirate Bay users from North America and Africa are most anonymous, 22.6 and 21.2 percent respectively. Within North America there are some striking differences as well. Only 14.7 percent of the Canadians use BitTorrent anonymously, versus 24.7 percent in Central U.S.

Within Europe there’s a great variation between the use of free and paid anonymizer services. In Russia free services (11.2%) are favored over paid services (1.9%), but in Northern Europe Pirate Bay users are more likely to use a paid (8.2%) than a free (7.7%) service.

The largest group that say they do not care about anonymity online can be found in Central and South America, with 27.8 percent. This group is the smallest in the U.S. and Oceania with 14.7 and 15.6 percent respectively.

Finally, we see that the more often people upload files themselves, the more likely they are to do so anonymously. Nearly a third of the Pirate Bay users who upload files nearly every day use an anonymizer service, versus 14 percent of the people who never upload files at all.

Overall, the results of the survey show that the vast majority of The Pirate Bay users do value anonymity, but that many of these users are currently not downloading and sharing anonymously. However, this could change at any time.

“We interpret this as a type of readiness by quite a lot of people in the file-sharing community to become more anonymous. This could happen when the risk of getting caught would increase or perceived as a more significant threat,”Stefan Larsson, co-founder and researcher at the Cybernorms research group told TorrentFreak.

There is definitely a large number of potential clients out there for proxy and VPN services, and with the increase of lawsuits and three-strikes policies this group may become even larger.

Source: The Pirate Bay Users Long for Anonymity

There are dozens of VPN providers, many of which carry marketing on their web pages which suggests that the anonymity of their subscribers is a top priority. But is it really? Do their privacy policies stand up to scrutiny? We decided to find out.

Over the past two weeks TorrentFreak contacted some of the leading, most-advertised, and most talked about VPN providers in the file-sharing and anonymity space. Rather than trying to decipher what their often-confusing marketing lingo really means, we asked them two direct questions instead:

1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold?

2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?

This article does not attempt to consider the actual quality of service offered by any listed provider, nor does it consider whether any service is good value for money. All we are interested in is this: Do they live up to claims that they provide a 100% anonymous service? So here we go, VPN providers in the file-sharing space first.

VPN providers marketed strongly in the P2P space

BTguard

Response to Q1: “It’s technically unfeasible for us to maintain log files with the amount of connections we route,” BTguard explain. “We estimate the capacity needed to store log files would be 4TB per day.”

Response to Q2: “The jurisdiction is Canada. Since we do not have log files, we have no information to share. We do not communicate with any third parties. The only event we would even communicate with a third party is if we received a court order. We would then be forced to notify them we have no information. This has not happened yet.”

BTguard website

ItsHidden

Response to Q1: “No logs, they are not kept. Even system logs that do not directly link to users are rotated on an hourly basis.”

Response to Q2: “The company has recently been sold and falls under the Jurisdiction of the Seychelles. As such there is no requirement [to log] within that jurisdiction.”

ItsHidden website

TorrentPrivacy

Response to Q1: “We have connection logs, but we don’t store IP addresses there. These logs are kept for 7 days. Though it’s impossible to determine who exactly have used the service.”

Response to Q2: “We have servers in Netherlands, Sweden and USA while our company is based on Seychelles. We do not disclose any information to 3rd parties and this can be done only in case of a certain lawsuit filed against our company.”

TorrentPrivacy website

Ipredator

Response to Q1: “We don’t store the IP at all actually. It’s in temporary use for the session you have when you’re connected but that’s it. We’ve had very few issues with not having logs, but not keeping them makes it safer even for us since we can’t accidentally give out information about anyone.”

Response to Q2: “We fall – mostly – under Swedish jurisdiction when it comes to the service. When it comes to organisational stuff (who keeps the data, who owns the service, who owns the server, who owns the network etc etc) it’s very mixed, intentionally. This is to make it hard and/or impossible to legally bully us around if that would be the case.”

“We can’t be easily shut down, and we can’t be pressured by courts to implement stuff we would oppose. For end-users this is not affecting them in a negative way at all, only the opposite.”

Ipredator website

Faceless

Response to Q1: “We do not log any IP addresses and no information about what data is accessed by our users, so we have no information that could be interesting to third-parties.”

Response to Q2: “We have servers in The Netherlands and our company is based in Cyprus. If authorities would contact us we would have to tell them that we have no connection logs or IP-addresses saved on our systems.”

Faceless website

General VPN providers

AirVPN

Response to Q1: The company carries no identifying logs.

Response to Q2: “Jurisdiction is in the EU, under most circumstances Italy (country of the company and home of the person legally responsible for data protection), but applicable law may be one of the EU Member States where the servers of the network are physically located (no servers are in Italy),” AirVPN told us.

“We don’t share any information with anyone.”

AirVPN website

VPNReactor

Response to Q1: “Only for 5 days to stop abuse[..]. After 5 days we have absolutely no way to match any IP address or time stamp to any users. Privacy and Security is further enhanced for individual users because their VPN connections are basically lost in the crowd.”

“Our free VPN users share a block of IPs when they connect to the internet via VPNReactor. So at any given time hundreds/thousands of our VPN users that have active connections could all be sharing a single IP address. None of our VPN users are assigned individual public IPs.”

Response to Q2: “We strive to be upfront and transparent with our logging policies for the benefit of our VPN users.” Logs seen by TorrentFreak seemed to confirm no identifiable information being stored.

“We are a U.S. based company and are bound by U.S. based court orders,” VPNReactor continued. “However, if a U.S. based subpoena comes in requesting info for activity that occurred more then 5 days prior, we have absolutely nothing to provide as our logs would have expired off. Request for connection details outside a U.S. based court order will be fully ignored.”

VPNReactor website

BlackVPN

Response to Q1: “We do not keep any logs about our users internet activities including which sites they access or what data they transfer. We also run log cleaners on our systems which removes the IPs from logs before they are written to disk,” the company told TorrentFreak.

“For tax and legal reasons we do store some billing information (name, email, country), but it is stored with a third-party and separate from the rest of BlackVPN.”

BlackVPN say they hold a username and email address of their subscribers and the times of connection and disconnection to their services along with bandwidth consumption. Logging is carried out as follows:

“On our Privacy Servers, NL & LT we don’t log anything that can identify the user, but on our US & UK server where we don’t allow sharing copyrighted materials we do log the internal RFC1918 IP that is assigned to the user at a specific time,” BlackVPN explain.

“So to clarify, we don’t log the real external IP of the user, just our RFC1918 internal one, this we have to do to comply with local laws and to be able to handle DMCAs.”

Response to Q2: “We operate under the jurisdiction of the Netherlands and we will fiercely protect the privacy and rights of our users and we will not disclose any information on our users to anyone, unless forced to by law enforcement personnel that have produced the proper legal compliance documents or a court order. (In which case we don’t really have a choice).”

BlackVPN website

PrivatVPN

Response to Q1: “We don’t keep ANY logs that allow us or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user our service. The only thing we log are e-mails and usernames but it’s not possible to bind a activity on the Internet to a user.”

Please note: PrivatVPN also offer use of a US server for watching services like Hulu. IP logs are kept when users use this service.

Response to Q2: “Since we do not log any IP addresses [we have] nothing to disclose. Circumstances doesn’t matter in this case, we have no information regarding our customers’ IP addresses.”

PrivatVPN website

Privacy.io

Response to Q1: “No logs whatsoever are kept. We therefore simply are not able to hand data out. We believe that if you are not required to have logs, then you shouldn’t. It can only cause issues as seen with the many data leaks in recent years. Should legislation change in the juristictions we operate in, then we’ll move. And if that’s not possible, then we’ll shut the service down. No compromises.”

Response to Q2: “We span several jurisdictions to make our service less prone for legal attacks. Servers are currently located in Sweden. We do not share data because we don’t have it. We built this system because we believe only when communicating anonymously, you can really freely express yourself. As soon as you make a compromise, you are going down a slippery slope to surveilance. People will ask for more and more data retention as seen around the world in many countries recently. We do it because we believe in this, and not for the money.”

Privacy.io website

Mullvad

Response to Q1: “No. And we don’t see why anyone would. It would be dishonest towards our customers and mean *more* potential legal trouble.”

Response to Q2: “Swedish jurisdiction. We don’t know of any way in which the Swedish state in practice could make us behave badly towards our clients and that has never happened. Another sign we take privacy seriously is that we accept payments in Bitcoin and cash in the mail.”

Mullvad website

Cryptocloud

Response to Q1: “We log nothing at all.”

Response to Q2: “We don’t log anything on the customer usage side so there are no dots to connect period, we completely separate the payment information,” they told us.

“Realistically unless you operate out of one of the ‘Axis of Evil Countries” Law Enforcement will find a way to put the screws to you,” Cryptocloud add.

“I have read the nonsense that being in Europe will protect you from US Law Enforcement, worked well for HMA didn’t it? Furthermore I am pretty sure the Swiss Banking veil was penetrated and historically that is more defend-able than individual privacy. The way to solve this is just not to log, period.”

Cryptocloud website

VPN providers who log, sometimes a lot

VyprVPN

VyprVPN is the VPN service connected to and offered by the Giganews Usenet service, although it can be used completely standalone. In common with many other providers we contacted, VyprVPN acknowledged receipt of our questions but then failed to respond. We’ve included them here since they have such a high-profile.

The company policy says that logging data “is maintained for use with billing, troubleshooting, service offering evaluation, [Terms of Service] issues, [Acceptable Use Policy] issues, and for handling crimes performed over the service. We maintain this level of information on a per-session basis for at least 90 days.”

On Usenet forum NZBMatrix several users have reported having their VyprVPN service terminated after the company processed “a backlog” of DMCA notices which pushed them over the “two-strikes-and-out” acceptable use policy.

So, does VyprVPN log? You bet.

SwissVPN

We included SwissVPN in our survey because they are well known, relatively cheap and have been used by those on a tight budget. To their credit, they were also the fastest company to respond. They are one of the few companies that do not make anonymity claims.

Response to Q1: “SwissVPN is being operated based on Swiss Telecommunications and Personal Data Protection Law. Session IP’s (not visited content, websites, mail, etc.) are being logged for 6 months,” the company told us.

Response to Q2: The company responds to requests from 3rd parties under Swiss criminal law (pdf).

SwissVPN website

StrongVPN

This company did not directly answer our questions but pointed us to their logkeeping policy instead.

StrongVPN do log and are able to match an external IP address to their subscribers. We have included them here since they were the most outwardly aggressive provider in our survey when it came to dealing with infringement.

“StrongVPN does not restrict P2P usage, but please note sharing of Copyrighted materials is forbidden, please do not do this or we will have to take action against your account,” they told us, later adding in a separate mail: “StrongVPN Notice: You may NOT distribute copyright-protected material through our network. We may cancel your account if that happens.”

StrongVPN website

Disappointing: VPN providers who simply failed to respond

In addition to the above, TorrentFreak also approached a number of other fairly well known VPN providers. It’s not clear if our questions were simply too tricky to answer in a positive light or whether there was some other reason, but disappointingly none of them responded to our emails, despite in some cases having acknowledged receipt of our questions.

They include Blacklogic.com, PureVPN.com, VPNTunnel.se [Update: VPNTunnel.se have now responded, see here], Bolehvpn.net [Update: Boleh responded after publication - they carry no logs] and Ivacy.com.

Should the above now feel able to respond directly to our questions, or if there are any other VPN providers reading who would like to be included in a future update, please contact us now with direct responses to the questions above. Apologies to the providers who contacted us at the last minute but were too late to be included in the report – we had to stop somewhere.

Final thoughts

When signing up to a VPN provider it really is evident that their their logging and privacy policies should be read slowly. And then read again, even more slowly than at first. Many are not as straightforward as they first appear (some even seem to be deliberately misleading) and that is the very reason why we asked our own questions instead.

In contrast to the the pessimism generated by yesterday’s report, as we can see from the list above, when it comes to offering real privacy there are plenty of services out there.

Source: Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?

But his plan failed in the biggest way imaginable. HideMyAss (HMA) keep logs and as a UK company when given a court order to cough up information, they do so. After matching timestamps to IP addresses, in the blink of an eye Luzlsec member ‘Recursion’ became 23-year-old Cody Kretsinger from Phoenix. The FBI had their man.

While the outrage from the public has been well reported – many pro-privacy activists accused HideMyAss of becoming SellMyAss – what has not yet been documented is how elements of the VPN industry have reacted to the news.

VPN Council is probably best described as a trade organization for some, but not all, VPN providers. A document obtained by TorrentFreak which was penned by their Chief Information Officer and sent on September 25th, shows they are very concerned by recent events.

“There has been a lot of controversy, especially on Twitter that the actions taken by HMA were the wrong ones to take. I disagree with their consensus and I believe its time to implement tougher security reviews on new clients signing up for any VPN service,” the memo begins.

“Earlier this year several companies in our industry had discussed ideas about a shared fraud database between VPN providers. I believe in light of this incident that a renewed call for this would be a good idea and I’d like to re-open discussions on this because if we all sit back and do nothing and continue on with normal business like nothing happened, these same folks will go around popping off more VPN companies and causing more havoc than we’ve ever seen before,” the memo continues.

“I’m in favor of strengthening our respective industry and protecting it as well. We all share the same responsibility of protecting our legitimate clients and the industry as a whole and I’d be in favor of listening to you folks and seeing what additional ideas you guys have in this endeavor.”

In the days that followed, discussions between the VPN providers went ahead and reached consensus on the foundations of an “anti-fraud database” that would be shared among them.

In a second document titled ‘PROTECTING VPN INDUSTRY: FRAUD DB’ and dated September 28th, the problem of high profile hackers such as those from Lulzsec using VPN services is framed as a “direct threat to business survival.”

The document goes on to suggest a framework for the creation of a centralized fraud database which will enable VPN providers to “assess the quality of orders” for their services.

Items suggested for inclusion in the database (along with the supplied descriptions as provided in the memo) are listed as follows:

Fraud Data (hashed): This is a hashed piece of information that can be used to flag an order as fraud. This information could be: IPs, emails, user names (any other data susceptible of indicating fraud can be added).

Fraud Type: Identifier of the fraud type. We need to agree on fraud types list.

Hits: Number of hits (submissions from different VPN providers) this data has had. This will give more latitude to providers to decide to act on a given database result.

Submitter id: Identification of the VPN provider that has submitted the record.

An API will be created to interact with the database and integrate into payment processing systems.

Action points for the future are noted as decisions on database structure, hashing to be employed, parameters on what activities should be considered fraud and a decision on which VPN providers can access the database and who can update it. It is suggested that a single VPN provider should have responsibility for the entire list and others should have to pay their share of its maintenance costs.

What is clear from the above is that the included VPN providers will begin sharing information they hold on their customers with each other (albeit in hashed form), ostensibly to combat fraud. However, the alleged activities of the Lulzsec member in question aren’t easily described as fraud, and it is far from clear how a database of this nature would have prevented, for example, Sony being hacked.

TorrentFreak contacted the VPN Council and enquired on the depth of their definition of ‘fraud’ since confusingly hacking seems to come under that banner and indeed sparked the apparent need for this database. For instance, would copyright infringement come under that heading too?

“Copyright infringement is not factored into our plans,” VPN Council CIO Jared Twler told us. “This is more about financial payment fraud and network abusers/hackers. This is more to the tune of preventing federal disasters happening on VPN provider networks.”

But of course, when copyright infringement is considered serious enough by the US government it can become a big criminal issue, recent ICE and FBI activity against sites and certain file-sharers and release groups show that.

Clearly the activities of malicious hackers cannot be condoned by the VPN providers and combating fraud is a requirement in many online businesses. But what we see here and in the Lulzsec/HideMyAss fiasco is a clash of ideals that could prove catastrophic.

Most VPN providers sell their services on the notion that by using them the subscriber becomes anonymous. It became crystal clear in September that, given the right pressure, what certain VPN providers are really interested in is upholding the law and thereby saving their own asses from ending up in court. Why this should come as a surprise to anyone is a mystery.

What does come as a surprise is how many VPN providers are allowing themselves to get into this conflict of interests in the first instance. In the HideMyAss case the company clearly held enough information for a 3rd party to match a HMA external IP address and a timestamp to a HMA user account and subsequently a real-life identity.

So, for the purposes of illustration, let’s dismiss the notion that the service was used to attack Sony. Let’s pretend it was a dissident, or a government whistleblower, or some other equally vulnerable individual relying on the service to provide anonymity, as advertised. Let’s be absolutely clear – thanks to the myriad of logs kept by HMA, when someone really needs to count on the service, there is no anonymity that a court order can’t destroy.

Many VPN companies argue that they don’t log the sites visited but some logs are necessary to make sure that ‘criminals’ can’t abuse their services. But logs don’t discriminate. Quite simply, criminal or not, if a VPN provider logs the external IP addresses they hand out to a user along with a timestamp, subscribers are not anonymous.

But while all VPN providers have a duty to uphold the law and be accountable to the government in the country where they are based, not all of them are required by law to carry logs – so they don’t. But who are they?

If you’re a VPN provider and take privacy seriously, contact us immediately to be included in tomorrow’s VPN anonymity report. We’ll ask you two very simple but crucial questions.

Source: VPN Providers Mull ‘Fraudster’ Database In Wake of Lulzec Fiasco

The services discussed in this post range from totally free to costing several dollars a month. The general rule is that free services are generally slower or have other restrictions, while paid ones can get you the same speeds as your regular connection would.

VPN (strongly recommended!)

Hundreds and thousands of BitTorrent users have already discovered that a VPN is a good way to ensure privacy while using BitTorrent. For a few dollars a month VPNs route all your traffic through their servers, hiding your IP address from the public. Some VPNs also offer a free plan, but these are significantly slower and not really suited for more demanding BitTorrent users.

Unlike the other services listed in this article, VPNs are not limited to just BitTorrent traffic, they will also conceal the source of all the other traffic on your connection too. BTGuard, StrongVPN and Itshidden are popular among BitTorrent users, but a Google search should find dozens more. It is recommended to ask beforehand if BitTorrent traffic is permitted on the service of your choice.

BTGuard (strongly recommended!)

BTGuard is a proxy service that hides the IP-addresses of its users from the public. The service works on Windows, Mac, Linux and as the name already suggests, it is set up specifically with BitTorrent users in mind. Besides using the pre-configured client, users can also set up their own client to work with BTGuard. It works with all clients that support “Socks V5″ proxies including uTorrent and Vuze. In addition, BTGuard also includes encryption tunnel software for the real security purists.

After these words of praise we’re obligated to disclose that BTGuard is operated by friends of TorrentFreak, but we think that should be interpreted as a recommendation.

TorrentPrivacy

Torrentprivacy is another proxy service for BitTorrent users, very similar to that of BTGuard. It offers a modified uTorrent client that has all the necessary settings pre-configured. The downside to this approach is that it is limited to users on Windows platforms. TorrentPrivacy is operated by the TorrentReactor.net team and has been in business for more than two years.

Anomos

“Anomos is a pseudonymous, encrypted multi-peer-to-peer file distribution protocol. It is based on the peer/tracker concept of BitTorrent in combination with an onion routing anonymization layer, with the added benefit of end-to-end encryption,” is how the Anomos team describes its project.

Anomos is one of the few free multi-platform solutions for BitTorrent users to hide their IP-addresses. The downside is that it’s not fully compatible with regular torrent files as Anomos uses its own atorrent format. Another drawback is that the download speeds are generally lower than regular BitTorrent transfers.

On the uTorrent Idea Bank, more than 1,600 people have asked for the Anomos protocol to be built in to a future uTorrent build, making it the second most-popular suggestion overall.

Seedbox

A seedbox is BitTorrent jargon for a dedicated high-speed server, used exclusively for torrent transfers. With a seedbox users generally get very high download speeds while their IP-addresses are not shared with the public. Once a download is finished users can download the files to their PC through a fast http connection. FileShareFreak periodically reviews several good seedbox providers.

Shhht

And then there’s Usenet.

—

Feel free to drop us a comment if you think we left something out, or if you have experiences or recommendations you want to share.

Source: 5 Ways To Download Torrents Anonymously

The most common and widely used privacy services are VPNs that allow users to connect to the Internet whilst hiding their own IP-address, making BitTorrent transfers completely anonymous.

ItsHidden is one of the rare free VPN solutions currently available. It launched July last year and TorrentFreak has learned that less than 12 months later the service already has 300,000 members with a free account.

Update: Itshidden stopped offering free accounts but TorrentPrivacy currently has a limited free trial available here.

Besides the free accounts, tens of thousands of people have signed up to the paid option. These benefit from additional features and no bandwidth restrictions, which is probably the preferred choice for heavy downloaders.

A while ago we spoke with David, one of the people behind the service, who told us that they set their VPN up with BitTorrent users in mind.

“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. No data logs are kept of the user’s transfers, which makes it as private as it gets.

Of the 300,000 free users that signed up in the past year, 56,262 log in on an average day, transferring thousands of gigabytes. Due to the overwhelming interest in free accounts, ItsHidden had to disable new signups a few months ago, but they are currently allowing new members to join again.

Source: Free ‘BitTorrent VPN’ Grows to 300,000 Members in a Year

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: Millions of File-Sharers Hide Their Identities Online

The results of the survey clearly showed that avid file-sharers would rather hide their identities than stop downloading. And indeed, more and more BitTorrent users are seeking ways to protect their privacy online, rendering all the newly proposed anti-piracy laws useless.

TorrentPrivacy and BTGuard are just two examples of services launched in the past year, targeted at concerned BitTorrent users. The goal of these and other anonymity applications is clear; hide the IP-address of the file-sharer so he can’t be tracked down while swapping files.

Currently in beta, The Pirate Bay’s Ipredator uses the same tech platform as the VPN service Relakks. For a few dollars a month it routes all your traffic through its servers, hiding your IP address. Ipredator is currently limited to 3000 users but according to the Pirate Bay team there are another 180,000 users on the waiting list, eager to join.

Running a VPN network for hundreds of thousands of hungry BitTorrent users will prove to be quite a challenge. The infrastructure and bandwidth required by a service targeted at file-sharers is significant, not to mention costly. This undoubtedly leads to problems.

The aforementioned Relakks saw its subscriptions double in just a month when the controversial Ipred law came into effect in Sweden this April. This surge in subscriptions led to to major problems with support and updates according to Relakks’s chairman Jan Erik Fiske.

Unlike more traditional VPN services, BitBlinder recently introduced a free solution. Instead of routing the traffic through a central server BitBlinder passes it on through multiple peers. Each peer in the chain only knows the IP address of the next person in the chain, not the original requester/sender.

A few days after its launch BitBlinder had signed up more than 30,000 new users. Right now registrations are temporarily closed to make sure everything runs smoothly for those already using the service, and while they iron out bugs. “We want to make sure it works, and is secure for everyone,” Josh Albrecht, one of the creators of BitBlinder told TorrentFreak.

Because of the increasing interest in anonymity, the Swedish ISP Alltele decided to offer a free service to conceal the IP-addresses of its customers. According to Alltele’s CEO Ola Norberg thousands of users have downloaded the application, which nearly killed the server it was running on.

These examples clearly show that the scare tactics of the entertainment industry are not going to work. There is no doubt that with every new anti-piracy initiative introduced, more and more users will find their way to one of the many anonymizing services out there.

Instead of stopping the pirates in their tracks the entertainment industry has simply inspired a new ‘industry’ worth millions of dollars.

Source: More BitTorrent Users Go Anonymous

A good VPN service offering unlimited data transfers and healthy speeds usually costs around $10 to $20 per month, so when a new service launched this week, offering all this for a one-off payment of $29.00 (introductory price), it warranted further investigation.

According to their website, the people behind VPN4Life are entrepreneurs “striving to free the world from ISP monitoring, government restrictions, and capitalism’s growing influence on the Internet, one account at a time.” Offering unlimited bandwidth and 128 bit encryption through servers in the UK, Germany and Singapore with a 99.7% uptime guarantee, it certainly looked attractive. The official site carries little detail, so we contacted VPN4Life and asked a number of questions.

First of all, the $29.00 payment looked like an introductory offer, so how much would the service cost normally? VPN4Life told us the 20mb/sec fully BitTorrent compatible unlimited bandwdith PPTP service would cost “between $45 and $50″, while confirming that the payment is indeed a one-off for a lifetime subscription.

Since there is no privacy policy on the site we asked a few questions along those lines. VPN4Life told us that they do not log what any of their customers do. We asked about the lack of a displayed Terms of Service and their response was it wasn’t needed. “Customer pays, we provide VPN,” they told us, while assuring that they would never divulge any customer information to 3rd parties, since they have nothing stored to give them.

$50.00 for life sounds an amazing offer – but is this super-low price sustainable? The immediate difficulty with a lifetime subscription is that once off the ground, the company is then responsible for providing a service to thousands of members forever who paid very little in the first place. More and more new signups are then required to pay for the spiraling hardware and bandwidth costs and since VPN4Life offer unlimited bandwidth, it’s difficult to see how the whole operation can be sustained.

As far as the real costs of bandwidth go, we spoke with Bruce at VPN provider Perfect Privacy who told us: “There is a reason why we currently charge about EUR 10.00 to EUR 15.00/month (depending if you pay for 3 or 24 months in advance), namely that 1 mbps of dedicated bandwidth in the West costs about EUR 10.00 to US$ 15.00 at the very minimum. In Asia it costs about US$ 80.00/mbps. That’s US$ 1,500 (U.S/Europe) to US$ 8,000 (Asia) every month just for 100 mbps.”

In the face of these figures, the VPN4Life offer starts to look vulnerable indeed. “How are they going to pay for their ever increasing bandwidth needs if the number of paying members becomes ever smaller in relation to the total number of members?” asked Bruce, rhetorically. He has a very, very good point. It looks impossible, much like the classic pyramid scheme.

Some might feel that at $50.00 this service is worth a try but I strongly believe that if something looks too good to be true, then it probably is. Time will tell, but I won’t be changing provider, that’s certain.

Update: Important – Anyone considering purchasing should read here first

Source: Company Offers Lifetime Anonymous BitTorrent For $50.00

Born out of the VPNTunnel Project, the TorrentFreedom ‘manifesto’ is an interesting document, particularly if you’ve ever worried about being tracked, traffic shaped, blocked or censored on the Internet. With a suitably clandestine feel, the manifesto states:

“Today, there is a nexus of Schumpeterian creative destruction to be found at the asymptotic fringe of intellectual property law and networking technology. Everyone says there is an ‘arms race’ between the unwashed filesharing masses and the forces of Big Brother – we like to think of ourselves as the suitcase nuke for the little guys.”

TorrentFreak got in touch with ‘Faust’ of TorrentFreedom to find out what on earth they’re talking about.

TF: Tell us about this ‘creative destruction’ and what inspired you to create TorrentFreedom.

Faust: It’s all but trite to point out nowadays that we’ve undergone a revolution in how human knowledge is created, stored, and shared. And, much as Schumpeter himself had predicted, the creativity unleashed has more than made up for the detritus of old forms of information transmission that now scatter the landscape like broken, forgotten toys. This is as it should be. The backlash from the praxis of stasis threatens to drown the organic reinvigoration that innovation technology has always brought forth – there would be no 95 theses without Gutenburg, remember.

So our inspiration comes from a deeper, historical appreciation for the transformative role of new technologies in human social organization. Nobody knows where creativity, academia, and knowledge creation will evolve as our tools allow for more and deeper interconnection between physically disparate peoples – but we do know that hampering that process isn’t part of making a better world for all beings. We’d like to see people keep sharing, keep learning, keep exploring. . . and they can’t do that if there’s roadblocks and threats of censorship every step of the way. Make it easy and make it work, that’s our approach – then the creative destruction can continue apace.

TF: There are number of evils you appear to tackle head on with this service, such as traffic shaping, packet raping, blocking, censorship etc. I expect lots of Comcast customers will be interested as you specifically mention the ‘Sandvining’ technique they employ. How does your system work and how will it benefit each type of problem?

Faust: Metaphorically, the system is quite simple: think of the difference between sending postcards in the postal mail, versus sending sealed envelopes. A postcard can easily be read by anyone along the way, and if they don’t like what it says (or who it is addressed to), they could just throw it out – oops! A sealed letter isn’t vulnerable like that – the contents aren’t readable whilst in transit. Even more than that, our system protects the address (sender and receiver) on the envelope as well – so nobody can block the message just because they don’t like where it’s headed (or where it’s come from).

At a deeper level, our server farm is based in the Netherlands. Everything passes in and out of these machines, and all IP addresses are associated with them. The activities of our customers – once their sessions decrypt and leave our server farm – are fully and unambiguously decoupled from their RL info (including local/physical IP address). Big Brother isn’t going to show up at their doorstep with a fishing-expedition summons or subpoena. We took it a step further, however – we’ve broken the link between RL info and public IP for our customers inside our systems as well – once an account is set up, it is methodologically impossible for anyone to back-connect a given external TF IP address to a customers’ specific account, ever.

TF: You’re called TorrentFreedom so it’s fairly clear which crowd you’re aiming your product act. What sort of dedicated optimizations can BitTorrent users look forward to when using your service?

Faust: We’ve tested the service extensively with just about every BT client out there. They all work seamlessly. We also don’t penalize our customers for running lots of network traffic over TorrentFreedom – there are no monthly caps, and no drama if someone uses a lot of gigs with us. That’s cool – it’s why we built the system!

OpenVPN, in its rawest form, will work with BT traffic – but getting it to do so consistently and smoothly is nontrivial. We’ve done all that work, so our customers don’t need to become experts in subnet addressing, MTU window sizing, and the 100 other little tweaks one needs to do to really make BT over a VPN sing. We also hand out real, public IP addresses – so no port forwarding garbage, just fast connectivity.

TF: Please give us a brief rundown on how your system works.

Faust: On a technical level, it’s an implementation of the TLS-based OpenVPN project’s codebase (which itself implements various OpenSSL crypto algorithms). Starting from there, we’ve created a Java-based client that handles all the encryption and coordinates OpenVPN’s handshake tasks, to ensure that every packet coming and going from our customers’ PCs is tightly encrypted (including DNS queries, unlike pptp). The really cool stuff comes in the firewall-busting tricks that our client has up its sleeve – there’s very few local network configurations that we can’t tunnel through. . . with no customer tweaking of the software needed. We’ve also implemented a rather clever port 443 wrapper so that, unlike many VPN instantiations, the TorrentFreedom service can’t be blocked unless the entire HTTPS capacity is also shut down – unlikely.

We’ve built most everything with open code, and we’re pushing further in that direction (with perhaps full distribution of the source for our client extensions in the works). “Just trust us” crypto isn’t worth anything – if it’s not open, it’s not reliable. We run 2048 keylength RSA algorithms so, to the local ISP or anyone else “listening in” to our customers’ packets, the data all looks like a stream of secure web traffic, back and forth. This is true for ALL IP traffic coming off a machine, all protocols and all applications. So there’s no need to tweak individual applications to get them to “work” with TorrentFreedom – just set up the client, connect, and everything is encrypted all the time.

TF: There are other well known VPN services that say they are strong on anonymity and hide your IP address, yet all of them will give up your personal details at some point. How is TorrentFreedom going to live up to the claim in the manifesto that BitTorrent users using your service will be “just about as traceable as dusty footprints in a windswept street. You can’t subpoena what doesn’t exist” ?

Faust: Ok this is where the rubber really meets the road. An “anonymizing” service that keeps detailed records of their customers’ activities is just a problem waiting to happen. There’s no point in hiding an IP address only to keep records that connect that IP address to the one that’s used to cover for it! And, reality is that there is no place in the world that isn’t subject to some form of legal jurisdiction – just saying “we won’t turn over records” is silly. When the authorities show up – with court orders or guns – and people start talking about jail time and contempt, those records are going to get coughed up, period. Despite our respect for the company overall, Hushmail’s admission that it provides “secure” email information to certain government authorities demonstrates all too well that even a good team will fold if the pressure gets too high – and if they have information to provide in the first place!

We built the system from day one so that there’s no correlation between an IP+timestamp and a username – this means we can’t hand over logs of “who was on what IP at what time”, and therefore the user can’t be tracked back from their online activity. Our payment system is fully abstracted from the operational environment – billing events are passed to the VPN engine via temporary “tokens” that are one-way-factors – there’s no link between the VPN account and the details of the billing transaction, ever.

We keep a little bit of data on file to make sure we can monitor the performance of the system overall, but we don’t have “server logs” like everyone else does. They don’t exist. So, we can be forced to turn over those logs – but they don’t link back to anything. Not to mention all of our operational VMs run in fully-encrypted partitions, etc. Someone seizing any of our servers has nothing but an expensive doorjam for their troubles. Even someone with full access to every machine we have cannot link people to their past network traffic through TorrentFreedom. It’s structural anonymity, at the most fundamental level.

Now, there’s lots of other VPN services out there and some of them are sorta ok. Most, let’s be honest, are based on pptp – it’s really insecure with several known weaknesses. Plus, it’s closed-source/proprietary, so who knows if it has backdoors or not? The reason people use it is because it’s easy to set up – Windows machines come with it pre-installed. Well, we did the hard work of getting a real VPN implementation (OpenVPN) to work just as easily as pptp – but without the security problems.

Some of the stuff we did is a little complex, behind the scenes, but the end result is a service that’s really easy to set up and use. We’ve got clients for Windows, Macs, and Linux. We don’t limit bandwidth, and we’ve got some very fast servers backing it all up. It’s all done right.

TF: Any final thoughts?

Faust: Using TorrentFreedom for online security is like bringing a machine-gun to a knife fight. . . it might not be ‘fair,’ but the outcome isn’t going to be in question either.

TF: lol ;)

Update: the free invites are gone.

Alternatives: (not free)

Relakks
Smarhide
VPNtunnel

Source: TorrentFreedom Offers 100% Anonymous and Unrestricted BitTorrent

Millions of people around the globe share files and most do so without a second thought for privacy issues. A lot don’t know that it’s possible for people to monitor their online activities and equally, many will know that they can be monitored but chance their hand that they are one in millions and will probably slip under the radar.

For an increasing number of net users, privacy and a level of anonymity is becoming a requirement, especially for those in locales where ridiculous fines and prison sentences are becoming more prevalent. Those faced with the menace of P2P meddling ISPs or those hassled by the nuisance of sites being blocked can solve all of these problems with a VPN – a Virtual Private Network service.

Anyone looking for a Relakks alternative (who doesn’t wish to read my rantings!) should scroll to the section below marked: “Relakks Alternatives”

The Rise and Fall of Relakks

When Relakks burst on to the scene in late 2006 it was heralded as the “world’s first commercial darknet”, promising to hide your online identity in exchange for a small fee. As a big privacy fan (some might say ‘obsessive’), I immediately signed up for this service and have been a customer ever since. Sadly, I’ve had enough.

Although great for web browsing and running one or two torrents at a time, ask it to handle more than a handful of torrents and the whole connection simply stops responding. I’ve seen many other Relakks users with this same problem and to come home from many hours out, eager to sample what you downloaded today only to find a dead connection, it’s an annoyance. When you were supposed to be seeding a friend’s Hip-Hop album all night and it died after 6mb uploaded and no-one got anything, it’s a major hassle and time to complain to Relakks. Again.

Relaxed Customer Service

Any member of Relakks will tell you – their customer support is VERY ‘relaxed’. Send them a complaint or a query – it takes at least 3 days to get a response. My multiple questions about the ‘dropped connection’ issue always resulted in ‘you have a firewall issue’ response and this is a standard response to people complaining about this. The Relakks ‘News/Status‘ page is never updated, it’s useless.

There have been many, many days where service has been sporadic at best but recently the entire Relakks network was down from Friday to Monday so I ran out of patience and complained in my capacity as TorrentFreak writer – surely this would be enough? I wrote a highly detailed email looking for some definitive answers and the great response from support@relakks.com after multiple attempts at different times was: ‘Undeliverable’

Relakks you have lost me – not on price but customer service. I have you emailed you many, many times over the months, you have never solved my problems. Your service is cheap but when I pay for a premium service I expect support – I get better support from free BitTorrent sites. Time to protest by spending elsewhere – if only I hadn’t paid you 12 months in advance.

Relakks Alternatives

VPNOut kindly got in touch to let us sample their service but due to issues with the host PC (it wasn’t VPNOut’s fault) that trial never really got off the ground but already, responses and customer service levels were way above what i’d experienced with Relakks.

Moving on, I came across VPNTunnel and I thought I’d give it a try. Sadly I had the same installation issues as I did with VPNOut but it was at this point where you really appreciate a company who not only wants your business, but is prepared to bend over backwards to get it. With nearly 20 years in sales, I know good service when I see it and VPNTunnel’s blew me away.

After complaining I couldn’t install VPNTunnel’s software (my PC’s fault, not theirs) a customer support guy got in touch within minutes and over the course of the next 24 hours and number of emails later resulted in me receiving a custom version of their software, tailored to my exact requirements! I was back in business and loving the contrast in customer service levels. Now for a trial run.

After loading 3 torrents and allowing each to connect to a minimum of 10 peers, more torrents were loaded, totaling 15. The connection remained stable with a total speed of around 5mbit, which compares to Relakks. Stability remained for all transfers even after simultaneous downloads were initiated on both IRC and Usenet. More speed would be nice but given the choice, I’ll take reliability instead. A generous 50gig monthly limit is more than enough for me.

Relakks (Sweden) do not reveal what information they hold on their customers but say they won’t give it up unless ordered to in a criminal case carrying a penalty of 2 years in jail. VPNTunnel (based in Scotland) obviously keep your payment data but only carry log in information (your real IP address) for 30 days and there are signs this may decrease further to 21 days. Any potential legal action would need to move at an unprecedented speed to have even a small chance of identifying someone.

File-sharers are notoriously difficult to please – they get everything for free and still expect customer service from torrent sites and the like. So when a file-sharer actually puts his hand in his pocket to pay for a service, he expects to be treated well. I think deep down I’m more angry with myself than Relakks. I’ve promoted Relakks for 12 months to thousands of people and then in the end, couldn’t take my own advice.

You weren’t all bad Relakks, you just took me for granted and although I’ll end up paying more with VPNTunnel, it’s worth it, if only to get stability and that ‘wanted’ feeling.

Here ends my first ever Tor-Rant. Deep breaths….in……out….

Source: Getting Stressed Out With Anonymous BitTorrent