A trio of practical anonymous torrenting options have arrived

It was only a matter of time before the P2P community came up with some workable options for anonymizing our activities. Sure, Tor has been able to do it for quite some time, but torrenting is very taxing on the network and transfers can be painfully slow. Recently, however, three new services have appeared that could provide the privacy protection we've been waiting for.

iPredator VPN - We've known this one was coming for a while. The beta launch date got pushed back quite a bit, but that little courtroom skirmish may have slowed things down a little. In a blog post yesterday, the iPredator team announced that the first 3,000 beta invites have been sent out. If you're in the queue, don't start drooling just yet. There are 179,999 others names lined up.

Furk (pictured) - Find a torrent, paste it into Furk, and you're provided a direct download link. Even with the free account, I still averaged about 275k/s, which isn't much slower than what I typically manage on a straight torrent download (thanks to my ISP). Download links are also passed to you with SSL encryption. Just don't use it to download stuff like what's in the capture - it's there for illustration purposes only, of course...

Paid accounts are just under 10 Euros a month or 24/three months.

BitBlinder - Jay posted about this service the other day. The open source project aims to anonymize not only torrent downloads but also your web browsing. How does it work? Think of your Internet traffic as the fruit in a smoothie. Now take all your friends' fruit, chuck it all into a blender, and press 'liquify'. Pour it into a glass, and all you see is smoothie - you can't tell what's your fruit and what belongs to your friends.

As with iPredator you may be waiting a while to get your invite and download link.

5 disposable email services with RSS support

If you're looking for a little anonymity and security when signing up for download links or invite codes, a disposable email service is a good option. Instead of providing one of your working email addresses, just grab a meaningless temporary one from any of these sites and keep your identity hidden.

These five sites all provide RSS feeds for your address, which is handy. No need to return to the site after registration, just subcribe with your favorite newsreader.

MailCatch - Choose your own address or roll the dice. MailCatch also provides an iGoogle gadget and creates a subdomain (using your address) for quick access to your web inbox. MailCatch also provides temporary forwards, and they've got an FAQ and forums.

MyTrashMail - Offers password protected temporary accounts in addition to the traditional public variety. Note that the Firefox "toolbar" they offer requires you have the Google toolbar installed first. FAQ and about links are prominently displayed.

FilzMail - Sports a clean interface featuring puffy, web 2.0 images. Create your own address or generate a random one and messages are available for 24 hours (which can be extended).

Incognito Mail - The option for minimalists. Choose or generate your address, and it's valid for 60 minutes. No FAQ or TOS is posted. There are a number of other services that look very similar to Incognito Mail, offering different time limits.

DodgeIt - Ok, maybe this is the one for minimalists. You pick the address (no random generator), you check for messages - they're deleted after seven days.

Do you use a different service? Share it with us, but stay on topic - make sure it supports RSS!