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.

BitBlinder: free, anonymous torrenting may be a reality

There are a few widely-accepted ways to anonymize your browsing or torrent activity, but they all have their drawbacks. TOR is free, but it's poor etiquette to use it for torrents and put a strain on the bandwidth of the nice folks who run TOR servers. Not to mention that it's incredibly, stupefyingly slow. You could get a VPN, but that'll cost you. So, what's the solution to making your torrents free and anonymous, without a huge drag on your transfer speeds? A new open source project called BitBlinder might be the ticket.

BitBlinder is sort of like a private tracker for your anonymous data. A private tracker requires you to upload a certain percentage of data compared to what you download, in order to keep using it. BitBlinder works the same way, requiring each person on the network to anonymize a certain amount of data for others in order to have their own data anonymized for free. To keep your IP address safe, it's passed through several peers before it reaches your target website, but each computer only receives the address of the next peer in the chain, not the address the request is coming from. That way, you don't know who anyone else is, and nobody else knows who you are, which makes it difficult for anyone to track what each person on the network is doing.

BitBlinder isn't just good for torrents, though. It can also be used to hide your browsing activity and get around blocked sites at work or school. BitBlinder comes with an anonymous browser, built on Firefox. It's worth noting that BitBlinder will be a bit slower than browsing without anonymity, but still faster than TOR. It's planned as a cross-platform project, but the Mac version isn't ready quite yet. Registration is required, and there are currently a limited number of slots available.

uTorrent IPFilter Updater v1.5.6 [BINARY INSPIRATIONS]

uTorrent IPFilter Updater (uTIPF) v1.5.6
June 08, 2009
A BINARY INSPIRATIONS Creation
http://binaryinspirations.blogspot.com



Yeah, yeah, yeah...I don't blame you for thinking that there's enough IP filter "updater" programs out there. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the existing tools are outdated, bloated, poorly written, and hard to use.

uTIPF changes all that - it's a quality Python-based program that includes intelligent logic to see if you're already up-to-date, preventing unnecessary downloads that are characteristic of less sophisticated tools. It's powered by the highly-regarded blocklists at blocklistpro.com, and can target both the "normal" and "paranoid" list versions.

uTIPF is designed for all recent Windows platforms, including Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7, both 32 and 64 bit. The author anticipates providing maintenance and support releases for this program indefinitely.

You will need the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package. If you don't already have it, get it at
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=A5C84275-3B97-4AB7-A40D-3802B2AF5FC2

Find private torrent sites accepting users with Trackerchecker

Private torrent trackers are great. If you're after hard-to-find files that don't make it to major sites like Piratebay or Mininova, you've likely tried to locate them on a private site only to learn that they're not accepting signups. I still remember what a pain in the butt it was to keep checking in on Demonoid years ago to see when a few more spots would open up.

Trackerchecker does its best to keep you informed about which sites are accepting new user registrations and which ones aren't. Over 500 trackers are currently supported, and they cover an incredibly wide range of specialties. As you can tell from the screenshot, they're not all SFW, but then again, you probably shouldn't be downloading from a private tracker at work anyway.

The code is easy to understand: green means you're good to go, red means you're out of luck for now. Sites that don't respond to Trackerchecker's queries in a timely manner are given a blue mark. If your desired site is taking signups, click its name to be taken directly to the registration page.

The listings also tell you when the last check was run on each site. Registering at Trackerchecker lets you build a list of favorites, making it easier to monitor only the sites you're actually interested in joining.

It's a great tool to add to your P2P bookmarks.

Google helps found M-Lab to identify ISPs who throttle torrents

Google has joined with the Open Technology Institute to help identify which ISPs are restricting peer-to-peer traffic, launching M-Lab to help users discover whether or not they're being affected.

One of the tools M-Lab will use is Glasnost, a java applet that initiates a torrent transfer between a user's pc and the remote testing server. It compares the results to the speed of a normal transfer to see whether or not the peer-to-peer traffic is being throttled.

If you're curious about your own ISP, run the Glasnost test and see what it reports. You'll have to be patient, though - the recent news about Google coming onboard has increased traffic on the site greatly and it's having a hard time keeping up.

It's good to know that once M-Lab is online they'll have 36 Google servers in 12 locations to help run the tests.

USniff Offers Fast, Multi-Site Torrent Searches

If you're after torrent downloads, chances are you're searching Piratebay, IsoHunt, Mininova, and possibly a few others. Why not save yourself time and effort and search them all in one place?

USniff provides a nicely styled web 2.0 interface for multi-site torrent searches and allows you to query up to eight sites simultaneously. Results load extremely quickly, and I was pleased to see that they sort by number of seeds by default.

It's ajax, so filtering and re-sorting your results is almost instant. The design is totally clean so far, there's not even a single banner ad in sight. You'll still have to click through to the actual tracker, of course, to grab the actual torrents. USniff doesn't host anything...blah blah blah...insert usual torrent search engine disclaimer here.

For anyone looking for multiple options to download that new Ubuntu release (since you're all using torrents for purely legal downloads, of course!), take a gander at USniff.