TorrentFreedom Offers 100% Anonymous and Unrestricted BitTorrent
With a militant style more associated with the crew of The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreedom promises to put the user back in control, by offering a new BitTorrent-optimized, zero-logging, 100% anonymous VPN service, guaranteed to punch a hole through throttling ISPs. Be quick for a free account!
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)
Previously: Free The Pirate Bay, Wear Yellow for Sharing
Next: The Pirate Bay and Filesharers Backed by Swedish Politicians
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For those interested, I just viewed the Apache logs of his server using a link on digg.
well, thats pretty much blown his whole operation down the toilet.. oh dear.
I AINT DOIN THIS THEY DONT HAVE NO SIGNUP FOR GAY REDNECKS… THIS IS A VIOLATION OF MY RIGHTS!
Im sure one of Faust’s animal molesting friends could give you free membership Bubba,or maybe one of his drug traffiking friends. Take your pick!
Here’s a question about this service, relakks, and others that are sure to come in the future. The assumption is that they protect you, because if the cops come in and say - give me all your logs - you’re safe because they don’t have anything in their logs. But… if you’re sharing the same IP as folks that use the service to browse kiddy pr0n and animal pr0n and all that (who would be naturally attracted to a service like this as well)… then the cops reeaaally have justification to get a warrant to come crashing in on the server room with full access to do whatever they want. so, then, they just snoop in on the traffic at the server and BAM. you’re busted anyway.
just a thought.
Oh. My. God.
Sorry to break it for you but I see two fundamental problems with this service.
1. So, you *trust* these guys?
How do you know this is not some
RIAA sponsored initiative to
monitor/catch a lot of
filesharers at once?
2. You may not like the laws but
don’t assume law enforcement
is stupid.
I’ll elaborate on 2 and explain how
this technical implementation is
trivially broken:
1. Arrest all staff
2. Leave the platform running so
users don’t get suspicious.
3. Analyze the platform
4. Add your own monitoring code
to the software that creates
a nice logfile, linking real
ip addresses to real filenames.
This has been done before (back in the BBS days) and should work in this case just as well.
Remember admins: Law enforcement doesn’t have to ask for your logfiles. They can put you to jail
and alter your software to create their own logfiles.
Remember kids: Your traffic passes through their servers. Whoever owns the servers can watch and analyze it.
Remember everybody: The *only* known approach to true anonymity on the internet would be onion routing as implemented by TOR and freenet.
Unfortunately the overhead of this
approach makes sharing of large files rather infeasible.
If you really want to understand who Faust or Fausty is, then look up Doug Spink. He’s a total scumbag…
Crazyness they left server status up, looks like they took it down. Here is a google cache of it: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:d4ARg-esnQUJ:www.torrentfreedom.com/server-status/+http://www.torrentfreedom.com/server-status/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
Have you seen the perl script that is used for starting the vpn at a unix? Urls like http://www.torrentfreedom.com/scripts/version.php?username=username&password=password with the following wget make me nervous. Where’s the ssl getting things like configuration or userkey?
Security? Kind of plaintext login is very very poor! Goog luck doing a better job!
PA
[quote comment="286005"]Crazyness they left server status up, looks like they took it down. Here is a google cache of it: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:d4ARg-esnQUJ:www.torrentfreedom.com/server-status/+http://www.torrentfreedom.com/server-status/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us/quote
Hahahahaha.
Fausts arrogance seems directly proportional to his technical incompetence.
Faust,time you found another occupation man.You really suck at this one.Maybe you should stick to drug smuggling.
Oh wait!You suck at that too.
Maybe a paid informant to the FBI?Yeah,thats more your skill.
[quote comment="285863"]Oh. My. God.
Sorry to break it for you but I see two fundamental problems with this service.
1. So, you *trust* these guys?
How do you know this is not some
RIAA sponsored initiative to
monitor/catch a lot of
filesharers at once?
2. You may not like the laws but
don’t assume law enforcement
is stupid.
I’ll elaborate on 2 and explain how
this technical implementation is
trivially broken:
1. Arrest all staff
2. Leave the platform running so
users don’t get suspicious.
3. Analyze the platform
4. Add your own monitoring code
to the software that creates
a nice logfile, linking real
ip addresses to real filenames.
This has been done before (back in the BBS days) and should work in this case just as well.
Remember admins: Law enforcement doesn’t have to ask for your logfiles. They can put you to jail
and alter your software to create their own logfiles.
Remember kids: Your traffic passes through their servers. Whoever owns the servers can watch and analyze it.
Remember everybody: The *only* known approach to true anonymity on the internet would be onion routing as implemented by TOR and freenet.
Unfortunately the overhead of this
approach makes sharing of large files rather infeasible.[/quote]
Finally an intelligent comment. Mr. Reality is absolutely correct. And you don’t have to go back to the BBS days for an example. There’s a much more recent case that followed those exact steps. Two words: Elite Torrents. After the raids, the FBI and Justice Dept. took over the servers and kept them running to track all connections coming in or out. And you bet your ass they kept very detailed logs. How many people connected to it before it became well known that the Feds were operating it? Quite a few, I’m sure. Now, of course it was a bit easier for them to take control since the servers were on US soil (Idiots!), but the point is that whether it’s Norway or Timbucktoo or Antarctica, the steps Mr. Reality pointed out are not just possible but have been carried out.
As for true security, the best you could hope for is a small out-of-the-public-eye private firm that is pro-torrent or filesharing-friendly to very quietly offer this type of service strictly through word of mouth. Standing in the middle of the town square, beating your chest, and trumpeting loudly (and obnoxiously) to all that you are “unbeatable” or “unreachable” will accomplish nothing but to draw interest from the exact parties you are supposed to protect your customers from. It’s like those corporations that arrogantly proclaim that their company’s computer system is “hacker proof” and “uncrackable”. It takes either a big set of balls or extreme stupidity to paint a large target on your back. I would tend to think that it’s usually the latter.
why isn’t vpnout.com listed as an alternative. It’s been doing the above for months now…
Sorry to all for the double post. Word Press is interfering and delaying again. My apologies.
http://torrentfreedom.com/scripts/
Currently the Malaysian gov. is fighting for its political survival in the upcoming election but if they win they will go back to kissing the MPAA’s ass.
I’ll be needing a VPN that won’t give up my ID for downloading anime or tv series that can’t be seen or cost $50> to buy the DVD just for few ep.
Just another bad Robin Hood. Not buying it.
This shits getting weird. torrentfreedom.com goldens.com trueonlinesecurity.com All the same people, all the same service, anyone got a clue as to whats going on? oh and all the animal stuff at goldens.com is sorta creeps considering what else this guy fausty has going for him. And finally to clear something up that has been said a few times in this forum. You pay via paypal, to eliminate them from seeing your creditcard and stuff. So in theory this all looks good, but there are still a few things that bug me.
Hey, whoever has gotten the free links (and not posers who are just advertising for torrentFreedom);
if there’s any North American college students amoung you: is it really that successful in getting through the campus throttler?
[quote comment="285573"]But then, Faust is all about making profit and to hell with who is paying.
File sharing has, and always will be free. Shitesters like Faust are just proffiting from dumb net users fear of the RIAA. Wake up people! You have more chance of being struck by lightning than be sued for stealing warez and movies.
Would you really want to put your money into the pocket of a drug smuggler/animal molester/scam artist/narc? since Faust is all 4 of these.[/quote]
1. Correct, there is a very low chance of being sued for downloading media; but there is a 100% chance [read: is currently occuring] that lots of colleges and businesses currently mass-throttle all [read ALL, not just bitTorrent] traffic.
2. If he is this creep, then stay the hell away from him; but if you make these allegations, then justify them; give at least a reasonable SOURCE for your allegations; otherwise, you may well just be mafIAA trying to keep users from something that works, or is almost working.
Actually I signed up for the service just to see. So far it is not working on Linux (Ubuntu) with the latest OpenVPN_2.1_rc7as promised (if anyone has it working post your details).
I filed a support ticket. I am guessing I will need to wait until Monday for a reply. But so far from what I am reading the idea is that logging is something they do not do….if that is the case WHY DO I HAVE IN MY ACCOUNT DETAILS A COUNTER OF HOW MUCH I DOWNLOAD!!??
So presumably logging MUST be happening somewhere if this is the case. As it is I tried this out just to see if it is what it claims to be. So far, it is not very easy to setup for anyone but windows users and even then I have my doubts.
And IF indeed the person in charge has the record they do, I can’t really say I trust them very much. And shame on torrentfreak for not doing any fact checking or backgrounds on this guy. Seeing as he ratted out his old cronies, there is a good chance this is a front for the RIAA. Since I have not actually USED the service for downloading anything I am ok :D.
Use Relakks or one of the other services listed. This service is not Free as stated. It was free and only for a month to the 50 victims that got on. This was pure marketing and likely a scheme.
[quote comment="286295"][quote comment="285573"]But then, Faust is all about making profit and to hell with who is paying.
File sharing has, and always will be free. Shitesters like Faust are just proffiting from dumb net users fear of the RIAA. Wake up people! You have more chance of being struck by lightning than be sued for stealing warez and movies.
Would you really want to put your money into the pocket of a drug smuggler/animal molester/scam artist/narc? since Faust is all 4 of these.[/quote]
1. Correct, there is a very low chance of being sued for downloading media; but there is a 100% chance [read: is currently occuring] that lots of colleges and businesses currently mass-throttle all [read ALL, not just bitTorrent] traffic.
2. If he is this creep, then stay the hell away from him; but if you make these allegations, then justify them; give at least a reasonable SOURCE for your allegations; otherwise, you may well just be mafIAA trying to keep users from something that works, or is almost working.[/quote]
Have you not even read this thread? I think the exposure of the lack of security of this “service” is more than enough.
I dont see why i have to do your research FOR you.It isnt rocket science to connect the dots together and find out for yourself that this guy is indeed, who people here say he is, and what he is “into”, and his criminial “affiliations”.
I posted on here to confirm allegations made previously by another poster here because people need to be aware of WHO this guy is, for their owned damned safety and security. I could have quite easily left it alone and said nothing. Its no skin off my nose, and if you had even half a brain, you would see by the posts alone on this thread ( as well as the interview with Faust ) that he is indeed an over-confident, arrogant and evil psychopath who is just interested in making a few bucks.
And lets not even mention the EXPOSED security issues relating to this service, that has been documented on this thread ( and not to mention still in googles cache ).
Source? Just open your eyes is all you need to do.
any words from TF??
Apparently not.
Im still waiting for Torrentfreak guys to post a formal statement concerning this issue.
Most people tend to trust this site for its news and reviews of such things, so it would only be right for the TFreak guys to put the record straight and either confirm or dismiss what has been said here, for their users safety if nothing more.
If they fail to do this, then you, as the readers, should be outraged and send in your discontent viz email to wake these guys up. By publishing the article in the first place, they have opened up innocent readers here to real danger and a risk of them losing their hard earned bucks to Faust.
How about it Enigmax, do we get a statement from you or what?
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