Because of this reality, it is important for torrent file sharers to find ways to protect themselves from litigation, prosecution, bandwidth shaping, and malware. The following tips should help you make your torrent experience safer, private, and more secure.

Disclaimer: Downloading copyrighted media without the owner’s permission is illegal is some countries. Under no circumstances is this article intended to encourage illegal activity, and there are no guarantees that this information will protect you from any legal action.

1. Port Forwarding

Every modern router has some form of port forwarding that you can use for your bittorrent client. With it, you can circumvent ISPs that may block common torrent ports or limit their bandwidth usage. Using port forwarding, you could, for example, forward your BitTorrent traffic through the standard web port (80). Some torrent clients also support randomizing of ports so that they will use a different one every time you start them.

2. Limit Downloads and Uploads

Since many ISPs now limit the amount of bandwidth you can consume within a month (or even at certain times of the day), it is important to not let your torrent downloading and uploading go unchecked. Torrent clients like qBittorrent have features that allow you to limit the number, speed, and even time of day that downloads are allowed.

3. Encryption

Encryption is all about privacy. There is no reason for anyone, even your ISP to know exactly what sites you are visiting or what files you are downloading. Most torrent clients support some type of encryption for the data and/or header information. It is important to note that encryption will not mask your IP address, so anyone spying on the torrent (i.e. actively connected to the tracker) will still know you are downloading it, but anyone trying to spy on your Internet traffic in general will not be able to see what you are doing.

4. Filter Lists

There are plenty of organizations that are known for their snooping or malicious intent. With an IP filter list, you can completely block them from connecting to you as peers, thereby eliminating any chance of them monitoring you and catching you in the act of downloading something. This may also help reduce the chance that you will connect to a peer that sends out harmful data or malware.

5. Proxy or VPN

Of all of the security measures on the list, this is by far the most effective. By routing your torrent traffic through a proxy or VPN, you can completely hide yourself from the outside world. Used in combination with the other tools on this list, your torrent downloading will be virtually covert. Proxy providers usually charge a subscription fee, and they will require you to either download a specially configured bittorrent client or reconfigure yours to use their proxy (often utilizing a SOCKS5 protocol).

Your privacy, however, is only as secure as the company offering the service. If they are under investigation or are willing to sell your information, using their services may not help you at all. Therefore, it is a good idea to ask around and do your research before using a proxy or VPN service.

Privacy and Security

The media often associates BitTorrent with illegal file sharing, but there are numerous legitimate organizations, from Linux distribution developers to content delivery networks (CDN), that make use of bittorrent technology. Furthermore, many free media distributors who use open licenses, such as Creative Commons, use bittorrent to help reduce their bandwidth costs.

With a little effort, you can use the above-mentioned tools to help you take back your right to download and share legitimate content and software, while also maintaining your privacy and security.

Update: Look like someone has taken over the project. It is now call TVShows 2.

Are you one of those people who love watching TV but find it difficult to set your time to match your favorite shows? Then maybe you are also one of those who rely on the internet to catch up with the latest episodes, and watch them at your own convenient time.

Among the many available ways, torrent might be the most popular one. But, no matter what method that you choose, the effort of tracking and downloading TV torrents manually requires quite an endeavor. Luckily, there are some applications that you can use to automate the process. One of the most popular applications is java-based multi-platform TED – even though it’s a bit resource-hungry. But, if you are a Mac user, you can use a native Mac app called TV Shows.

Let The Show Begins

TVShows is a simple app that will let you “subscribe” to TV shows’ torrents. It will use a background process to periodically check the availability of the torrents, so you don’t have to open it all the time. This app will not download the actual files, so you will need a separate torrent client to do that.

When you open the app for the first time, TVShows will update its list. You can manually update the list by clicking the “Update List” button on the menu bar.

There are tons of shows on the list that you can subscribe to. But before going through the subscription process, let’s take a peek at the “Preferences“.

You can see two tabs here. The first tab is “General“. Here’s the place to enable/disable TVShows. You could also set how often the app should check for the availability of new episodes of the shows that you’ve subscribed to.

The “Torrents” tab is where you define the quality of the movies that you want to download and the location where you want to save the torrents. Please note that the higher the quality that you choose, the bigger the size of the movie files. Normal quality is the default choice which gives you good quality movies with acceptable file size.

Subscribing To The Shows

Now let’s continue to the subscribing process. To find the show that you want to subscribe, you can browse the list manually and pick few of the items. But, if you already know what show that you want, the easiest way is to use the search feature. Write down the title of the show and the result will pop up on the list pane. Next, click the “Subscribe” button to start.

The subscription window will open, and you can choose to start your subscription with the next aired episode (perfect choice if you’ve already followed the show manually) or to start from anywhere within the episode list.

If the show that you want is still in the beginning, there’s a chance that you can start from the first episode. But, if the show has gone for some time, you might still need to catch up with the early episodes manually.

Repeat the “Search and Subscribe” process for the other shows that you like.

After that, all the shows that you are subscribed to will also be listed on the main window, along with information about “the last seen episode“. You can also find the “Unsubscribe” button next to it should you want to stop following the show.

When TVShows Meets Transmission

The next step that you need to take is to integrate the subscription system with a torrent client. The most popular choice for Mac users is Transmission.

Setting up Transmission to pick up torrents from TVShows is easy. Open the “Preferences” and go to the “Transfer” tab. Check the “Auto add” box and set the location to watch torrent files to be the same as the location where you save downloaded torrents in TVShows.

After that, you can leave the system to run automatically. Every time there’s a new episode from the show that you are subscribed to, TVShows will download the torrent, and Transmission will pick up the torrent file and download the movie file. But please note that you have to keep Transmission open in order for it to download the movie files.

So far, the system work flawlessly and has saved me a lot of time. But, if you know another system that work best for you, please share them in the comment below.

When dealing with someone who is tech savvy, it is easy enough to send them a torrent file or use a public file sharing site. However, if you need to keep your email more private or are dealing with someone who isn’t as savvy as you, emailing large files can be a problem. Securely Send is an easy to use solution for sending large files via email.

If you have ever used a file sharing service, you know they can be a little spammy looking. That is one of the areas Securely Send excels over others. I would feel comfortable sending even the least tech savvy people I know a file through Securely Send.

Sending a file

To start, you need to fill in your email address, then the receiving email address. You can send the file to multiple people if you separate the addresses with a comma.

The next window will ask you to create a password for your free account. The free account lets you send 3 files up to 200MB per month.

Add a subject and a message and press Next. If you do not fill in anything here, a default message and subject will be inserted.

Press the Select File button. A window will pop up where you will need to find the file you want to send. Double click the file to add. To add more than one file, hold Ctrl and click on each file then click Open.

Once you select the file or files you would like to send, click Upload. Depending on the size of the file(s), the uploading process may take a bit to complete.

The final screen will show you a message telling you the file will be stored for 10 days and a link to the page to download the file.

Possible uses

Even though 200MB doesn’t seem like a lot of space, keep in mind an average MP3 is around 2-5MB. This is large enough to send a short video.

I did some looking to see what the size of some files I had on my computer were that I may need to send someone. Here is what I found:

• HTC Desire Froyo Update for US Cellular – 171MB

• A folder with 58 high resolution pictures – 65MB
• A few podcasts – 20MB average
• A folder with 15 different WordPress themes to look at. – 186MB

Each and every one of these files or folders may need to be emailed at some time, yet will not send using standard email. If you are using a service like Gmail, you have around a 20MB limit.

Conclusion

When I have used other services, they seemed to be littered with ads and buttons everywhere. It is hard to find the actual download button a lot of the time. For Securely Send, both the sending side and the receiving email and download page are very clean and easy to navigate.

The upload and download speeds were great. Like I mentioned earlier, I would definitely  recommend Securely Send if you need to send a large file to someone who isn’t very techy.

If your method of sending large files is easier, tell us in the comments.

Installing Apps

To install an app simply click on the “Apps” button on the μTorrent sidebar and select the app you would like to install.

Before clicking on “Install” you can choose to view the description of the app by clicking on the app icon. This will open a new window with the description of the app.

Once you start installing the app, it will download and install automatically.

To launch the app simply click on it in the sidebar. Some apps may require additional permissions before they launch (e.g. uBrowse, uMap and VLC).

1. TED

I have been watching videos on TED.com ever since the site launched. Some of the most riveting talks on the internet can be found on this website. So, it was no surprise that the first app I installed was the TED app.

This app simplifies the process of downloading and viewing TED videos on your computer. All you have to do is launch the app and select the video you would like to “Download“.

The video you have chosen will immediately start downloading on μTorrent.

2. uBrowse

uBrowse is a simple app that displays a list of all your downloaded torrent files.

The app is useful as it provides a simple list of all your torrents and all the files within the torrents as well. You are able to launch all these files by clicking on “Open“. Alternatively, you can browse the location of the torrent by clicking on “Show“.

This app ensures that you do not have to waste time hunting for a particular torrent you have downloaded earlier.

3. uMap

uMap is a novel app that allows you to view where the peers (seeders and leechers) of the torrents you are downloading are located.

Once launched, you can view all the peers on a world map. You can organise the map to display the peers by Client, Swarm, or Country.

4. Virus Guard

Virus Guard is an essential app for every μTorrent user. Instead of having your computer’s antivirus scan each and every file, you can simply use Virus Guard (powered by bitdefender) to scan the individual torrent file downloaded. Virus Guard even allows you to scan within ZIP, RAR and TAR archives.

When you first run Virus Guard it will update its virus definitions file. After the definitions have been updated all the torrents you are downloading will immediately be scanned. In the future you can choose to scan all your torrents or simply scan an individual torrent by selecting it and clicking on the Virus Guard icon in the main toolbar.

I would also recommend you select “Start Virus Guard when μTorrent starts“, since download torrents can be dangerous as they may be laden with malware.

5. VLC

VLC is the standard media program that every computer user must have. It is no different on μTorrent, where we recommend you install the VLC app to view your downloaded media.

The app displays all your downloaded audio and video files in a simple list. You can launch and play any of the files by simply clicking on them and hitting “Play“.

Conclusion

The μTorrent App Studio is a great enhancement to an already robust piece of software. Much like extensions on Firefox, the ability to add apps onto μTorrent allows the user to customise the client to their liking. However, the App Studio is quite limited. As of this writing, there are only 17 apps available. Once developers start making more apps for the App Studio the functionality of μTorrent  will increase dramatically.

Let us know which apps you like to use with μTorrent.

The problem is, even with all the convenience of the net, tracking several shows simultaneously is a tedious job. For each and every show, you have to regularly visit the torrent site every week, search for the show that you want to download, acquire the torrent, and finally download the episode. Multiple that with the number of shows that you follow and you will get a major headache.

Luckily, TED‘s here to save the day.

The Torrent Episode Downloader

TED is the short for Torrent Episode Downloader. The app is a multi-platform java application that will work under Windows, Mac, and Linux. TED’s job is to help users track down and download torrents for multiple TV shows. Basically, all that you have to do is set up several shows and forget all about it. TED will do the rest.

To set TED to track a show, click “Add Show” icon from the toolbar.

TED will show you list of popular shows. Click one of them and you will get all the necessary info about the show. If you want to “follow” the particular show, you can choose to start from the next available episode, the last aired episode, or custom episode. There’s also option to download the episodes in HD quality.

If you choose Custom episode, TED will show you all the available episodes and you can choose which one(s) that you want to get.

It’s possible that the episode that you want is not on the popular list. If that’s the case, you can click the “Add a custom show” button under the show list and then add necessary data about the show. Start from the name of the show and the Season and Episode number.

Next, add the Feeds addresses. These are the places where you will get your show from.

You can use the RSS address that you already have, or let TED generate the addresses automatically for you. Click the “Plus” button and choose either “User defined” for manual address or “Generate” for automatic list of addresses.

The “Filters” tab will help you filter the episodes. You can choose the size range of the file, minimum number of seeders, and filtering keyword.

The “Schedule” tab is otional. It will add episode scheduler from Epguides and TVRage. If you choose popular shows, TED will generate this ones for you automatically.

Let TED Get The Episodes

After finishing the configuration, you can let TED get the episodes of your show(s) automatically, without the need for you to interfere. Further customization is available from the “Preferences“.

The “General” Preferences will let you set the interval between episode search, place to save the torrent, and whether you want your default torrent to pick up the file download automatically.

The “Look And Feel” tab allows you to put TED to system tray and to always start TED minimized to tray.

Since there are always many torrents available for each episode of popular show, you can choose to download the torrent with more than minimum seeders or the one with the most seeders. This option is available under “Advanced” tab. You can also choose not to download compressed episodes as some uploaders tend to compress and split the episodes to smaller chunks.

All You Have To Do Is Watch

If everything is done correctly, TED will do the tedious job of monitoring new episodes of your favorite shows from the pre-determined locations. Every time it finds new episode, it will download the torrent and send it to your chosen torrent client. So, all you have to do is wait for new episodes to pop up in your computer and watch.

Should you decide that a show is not worth watching, all you have to do is delete it.

I’ll leave the legality issue to your conscience. TED will help you minimize the trouble of tracking TV shows episodes from the net, but everything that you do on the net is your own responsibility.

1. Transmission

As a baseline for comparison, we’ll start with Transmission, the default client in Ubuntu. It’s reasonably fast and powerful, but it does not include some of the fancier features like web content browsing or support for non-torrent filesharing. If you don’t need anything fancy, Transmission gets the job done.

• DHT Support: Yes
• Magnet Support: Yes
• Torrent Prioritizing: Yes
• File Prioritizing: Yes
• Web Client: Yes
• CLI Client: Yes
• Web Content: No

2. KTorrent

As the name implies, KTorrent is a Bittorrent client for KDE. We’ve covered it in detail previously, as it’s a very capable client, and one of the few that include browseable web content. In this case, there’s a small browser window inside the program and a search box to go with it. A particular useful feature of KTorrent is that instead of manually prioritizing files as High, Medium, Low, you can put them in a simple list of the order you’d like them to download.

• DHT Support: Yes
• Magnet Support: Yes
• Torrent Prioritizing: Yes
• File Prioritizing: Yes
• Web Client: Yes
• CLI Client: Yes
• Web Content: Yes

3. BitTornado

While apparently no longer under active development, BitTornado is a very simple, lightweight client for CLI and GUI that can still get your files fast. It’s missing some of the fancier features of newer clients, but its speed and small footprint keep it a good option for many.

• DHT Support: No
• Magnet Support: No
• Torrent Prioritizing: Yes
• File Prioritizing: Yes
• Web Client: No
• CLI Client: No
• Web Content: No

4. OneSwarm

OneSwarm fills a particular niche in the world of torrent clients. It emphasizes the use of the OneSwarm network of peers instead of the standard torrent model. With it, you can create encrypted connections to people of your choice to browse and share files securely. It’s built on Azureus so it remains a perfectly capable torrent client as well. We’ve covered this useful application before and it remains a favorite.

• DHT Support: Yes
• Magnet Support: Yes
• Torrent Prioritizing: Yes
• File Prioritizing: Yes
• Web Client: Yes
• Web Content: No

5. Deluge

Deluge is a very lightweight and flexible torrent client. It’s intended to blend in with any desktop scheme and generally stay out of your way. Deluge makes a great option for those who want all the power of a full-featured torrent client without unnecessary bells & whistles.

• DHT Support: Yes
• Magnet Support: Yes
• Torrent Prioritizing: Yes
• File Prioritizing: Yes
• Web Client: Yes
• CLI Client: Yes
• Web Content: No

6. FrostWire

To add in a little bit of Gnutella P2P with our torrents, we’ve got Frostwire. It’s open source and built on Limewire so you have access to Gnutella search as well as torrents. This is another one that we’ve checked out in detail previously and it still stands out as a great tool to handle two of the most popular sharing mediums simultaneously and seamlessly.

• DHT Support: Yes
• Magnet Support: Yes
• Torrent Prioritizing: Yes
• File Prioritizing: Yes
• Web Client: No
• CLI Client: No
• Web Content: Yes

7. Vuze

Vuze is a powerful bittorent client cum media player that allows you to search, browse, download, share torrents and playback media files. It has a great library of HD stuffs that you can download for free. We have also covered it previously in great detail. Feature-wise, it is one of the powerhouse, but it does take up lot of memory and system resources which doesn’t make it suitable for old machine.

These examples are some of the best among the dozens of clients out there. If there’s a quality client you’d like to see on the list, let us know in the comments.

A Little About RivetTracker

RivetTracker is a Bittorrent tracker written in PHP. It’s based on PHPBTTracker and includes detailed statistics, user management, browser-based configuration “wizard”, and plenty more. Since it’s PHP, RivetTracker isn’t necessarily dependent on any specific platform. This is the full list of requirements as stated by the RivetTracker website:

• A webserver, Apache is a great one.
• A recent version of PHP.
• The MySQL Database.

In short, it needs a LAMP server to operate (WAMP or MAMP server will also work). In this guide, we will be using Ubuntu 9.10, Apache 2.2.12, and PHP 5.2.10 as a reference.

Prerequisites

If you intend to run this tracker on a professionally hosted server, it should have all the necessary software installed.

If you intend to run this on your own server, you have to follow the article here to install a LAMP server in your system first before proceed.

During the installation of LAMP server, it will prompt you to create a root user, take note of the name and password you choose as we’ll need it later.

Note: Make sure you have installed the LAMP server successfully and verified that it is working before you proceed.

Installing RivetTracker

You can download the tarball from the RivetCode website and save it in your home directory. Extract the tarball (simply right-click on the tarball and select “Extract here“). You should now have a folder full of RivetTracker’s files, mostly in PHP form.

Rename the folder to “tracker” (without the quote)

Next, we are going to copy the tracker folder to your Apache web server. In your terminal:

sudo cp -R ~/tracker /var/www/

Setting Up RivetTracker

To begin the setup, open a web browser and point the URL to http://127.0.0.1/tracker/install.php.

We’ll be proceeding with the second option, letting RivetTracker create the needed database automatically.

In the field where it asks you for your admin username and password, enter the one that you have created earlier while setting up the LAMP server.

If you’re running RivetTracker on a commercial server, you may be able to use your usual login for that host. If not, you will need to contact your web host regarding MySQL access before you can proceed.

Main Configuration

If all went well in the last step (it should have clearly indicated the problem if not), you’ll get a message indicating the database was created successfully, and you’ll see the main configuration page.

Many can be left at the defaults, but there are a few that you’ll want to make sure to check:

• Make tracker hidden: Will force a login to view torrent list
• Persistent MySQL connections: Probably a good idea if you’re running this on your own server
• Upload and Admin user accounts
• Title on index.php statistics page: This will be the main header text on the front page
• Enable RSS feed: RivetTracker can send out feeds about new torrents
• Main website url
• HTTP seeding rate: In short, the amount of bandwidth to sacrifice to HTTP seeding
• HTTP seeding count: How many files to seed at a time
• Timezone

When ready, save the configuration. If the installer throws an error saying that it can’t save the config file, don’t panic. Just save the config.php file with the handy button, and manually copy it to the /var/www/tracker folder (you will need to have root permission).

Delete the install.php file

Now that you are done with the installation, you will need to remove the installer file to prevent someone from accessing it and use it to reconfigure your tracker.

sudo rm /var/www/tracker/install.php

Setting Permissions

To add new torrents and RSS feed, we need to change the permissions on the torrents and RSS directory:

sudo chmod 777 /var/www/tracker/torrents
sudo chmod 777 /var/www/tracker/rss

Note: Setting the permissions to 777 is a TEMPORARY solution. Securely setting permissions for writeable data on web servers is beyond the scope of this guide, and it is highly recommended that you look into that before deploying your tracker live.

You are good to go

Until this stage, if everything go smoothly, you should be able to access your tracker site now. Point your browser to your tracker’s address (http://127.0.0.1/tracker/)

Now’s a great time to test out those users you set up. The first has the capacity to upload but not delete, so let’s upload. Click Add Torrent to Tracker Database and you’ll be asked for a login. Enter the credentials of the uploading user and you’ll be knocked back to the main page where you can go back and get upload screen.

Note: Your tracker URL when creating torrents will be your tracker’s full address, ending with announce.php, such as http://127.0.0.1/tracker/announce.php

Once you’ve got the torrent file entered, the other options can normally be left at defaults. As long as you’ve got the permissions set on the torrents directory in your site’s root, and the torrent file has your tracker URL, you should be all set.

If you need to remove a torrent, you can do so by logging in as the administrative user and clicking Admin on the main page. You’ll find many other useful things there as well, such as additional statistics and configuration settings.

Now, you can go brag to your friends that yeah, you run your own torrent tracker, but really it’s no big deal.

What does it do?

There are two aspects to OneSwarm – the private, secure, friend-based OneSwarm network, and the standard P2P. The developers took an existing Bittorrent client (Azureus) and heavily modified it to include support for their private network. They added a web client (you can control your file transfers through a web browser, even remotely) and included software for finding and inviting friends into your swarm.

Even if you have no interest in the secure swarm aspect, OneSwarm makes a great torrent client. It’s built on the Azureus classic UI which is a high quality mature torrent client. All the P2P benefits of Azureus matched with the extra functionality of the web client gives OneSwarm a very powerful feature base.

How does it work?

There are two methods of using OneSwarm, a web client and a desktop client. Both are usable immediately after installation, but the developers seem to encourage use of the web client. That’s where I’ve found most of OneSwarm’s unique features. The desktop client is more or less a standard Bittorrent client. So far, I’ve found the web client to be the way to go when working with OneSwarm friend-based transfers, but the classic desktop client gives more options for standard torrent downloads.

Windows users who’d like to use the desktop client instead of web can do so by right-clicking the OneSwarm icon in their system tray and choosing Show Classic UI. Linux users – access to the desktop client could vary widely based on your choice of desktop environment. Because of this, and to highlight the unique features of OneSwarm, this article will focus on the web client.

Getting Started

If your system didn’t take you to the web client automatically, you should be able to access it by opening your browser of choice to http://127.0.0.1:29615/. There you’ll find the opening screen for the OneSwarm web client.

For those who aren’t networking geeks – 127.0.0.1 is the address a computer uses to identify itself. By putting that into your browser you’re telling it “open the web page running on this computer”. The OneSwarm web client runs a small webserver on your machine so you can access the web client.

Finding Friends

The main concept behind OneSwarm is Friend-To-Friend transfers. When you first connect to OneSwarm, you’ll be asked to add friends. The first, and easiest way to do that is to choose “Use Default Settings”. This will connect you to the OneSwarm community server. Within a minute or two, you’ll see names pop into your Friends list. Users of the community server can all see each other, but cannot, by default, see each other’s files. Everyone on the community server is a “limited” friend by default and cannot trade files.

There are multiple other ways to add friends, all of which can be found by using the Add friends button below your contacts list on the left. For me, the GMail/Google Talk option would normally be a great way to add my friends, but as of the time of this writing, that feature does not appear to be working correctly. I have settled for using email invites through the Redeem/Create/View Invitations option.

When my friends get the invitation in their email, they can install OneSwarm and click the link included in the invite to become a OneSwarm friend. For example, I sent an invite to Tara, who has named her computer “Hank”. She downloaded the OneSwarm client, clicked the link in the invite, and now OneSwarm sees us as friends. She shows up on my Friends list as well as the community server with which she’s registered.

Friend Access

As noted earlier, friends by default are set to “limited” status. They cannot see each other’s files or initiate any transfers. Fortunately, removing that limitation is quick and painless. You simply choose Friends from the navigation panel on the left, and you will have the full list of friends. Click the one you want to share with, and remove the check for “Limited”.

From now on, Tara can browse through all the files that I have shared and choose whatever she’d like to download. Speaking of sharing…

Sharing Files

At the heart of any P2P app is the sharing of files. There’s not much point otherwise. To allow certain files to be shared over OneSwarm, you just add those files or directories to your Shared list. On any section of the OneSwarm web client you’ll find the Share button near the top of the screen. This will let you choose what to share. Here, for example, is one user’s files that they’ve chosen to open to the OneSwarm network.

I can download whichever of these files I like and choose where to save them. In addition, OneSwarm appears to have read the ID3 tag information for the music files, and added the album art to the thumbnail view. A nice touch.

I’ve found OneSwarm to be a very elegant, well-designed system. I’ve often looked for (and written about) ways to securely transfer files over the Internet. Some of them are simpler than OneSwarm, but not nearly as friendly and versatile. I’ll be sticking with OneSwarm for a while.

What about you?