Torrenters: Protect Yourselves.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Torrenters: Protect Yourselves.

scorpysue:

If you’re using BitTorrent or uTorrent or any torrenting program, please, do yourself a favor (if you haven’t already) and go to Preferences.

In Preferences, under BitTorrent or uTorrent or the name of whatever program you are using, there should be a section labled Protocol Encryption.

Where it says “Outgoing,” click the drop-down box and select “Enabled,” (also allow incoming legacy connections).

It’s not 100% effective, and apparently Comcast is notorious for seeing through this (but not really doing anything about it), but it can provide some protection against ISP trackers.

In any case, don’t freak out too much about the upcoming July “crackdown” on downloading. One commenter on SuprBay put it really well:

Because, whether they’re evil or not, spending money on systems to cut off your paying customers, to protect the incomes of third parties, is commercially ridiculous.
-adapa

If you’re really worried about all this, I suggest you start doing some research into the older torrenting communities and see what they have to say. A lot of it is jargon speak, but you can usually get someone to explain it for you in laymen’s terms if you need it. Protect yourselves, but don’t worry too much. It’s technically against international law to take away someone’s Internet, according to the UN.

Yes, this whole thing could get very, very ugly, but there is no need to panic. A lot of these sites reporting about the download caps and ISP cooperation are sensationalizing and making it sound more dangerous than it is. We’ve known about the six-strikes thing for a while, and ISPs have already been fond of sending nasty letters to people. Just chill, watch your back, check comments on the torrent to see if people know it’s being tracked by ISPs, and protect yourselves.

Also, ya’ll, get a Peerblocker. You increase your chance of not downloading from known groups who will sue you if you use one. SO GET ONE!