How to Download Torrents Anonymously
Information security and privacy are highly sensitive issues on the internet today. You as a user may assume that when you download files from a torrent service, you are completely safe, but nothing could be further from the truth. In this guide, we will show you how to make your torrenting activities safe from snooping eyes, using solutions like VPN, Proxies, as well as seedboxes.
Torrenting is a fast and efficient way of sharing files over peer-to-peer connections. Seeders and peers provide efficient data transfer to a recipient, using the BitTorrent protocol. While this allows you to get access to a lot of binaries and files ranging from videos to audio, the risks have never been greater. You have to protect yourself if you want to avoid trouble.
Read more: Why using VPN to download torrents anonymously is a must
The Legal Challenges Around Torrents
While torrenting is not illegal, in certain jurisdictions, the government, your ISP, copyright owners or other legal players can take action against both torrenting seeders as well as peers alike.
Perhaps the biggest legal case involving torrents is the case of The Pirate Bay, whose founders were indicted and brought to trial in Sweden in 2008 for their torrent site. The founders were found guilty of infringing commercial copyright, and were sentenced to a year in jail each, along with fines of around $3.5 million. Other torrenting cases against uploaders and users of torrents have resulted in convictions and jail sentences around the world.
LimeVPN
Virtual private networks, also known as VPN services, are one of the most secure ways of keeping your internet activity private, including masking all your torrent uploads or downloads. While VPNs play such an important role in securing your identity and anonymizing your internet traffic, such a level of protection comes at a cost. It’s not rare for VPN services to cost upwards of $10 or $20 a month.
LimeVPN is one of the VPN services that come with a cheaper entry point for users. Its LimeVPN Basic plan gives you full VPN service for just $1.49 a month, billed annually, which is dirt-cheap for VPNs. If you prefer a monthly plan, the basic plan costs $2.99 a month.
For the beginner who is only starting with VPNs, this plan might be the best way to test the waters and find out all that a VPN can do for you. The plan gives you one of 6000 shared dynamic IPs, 2 concurrent users, access to 24/7 support and 20 VPN connections worldwide.
LimeVPN keeps your data private and has a no logging policy. As a result, your browsing or torrenting activities are secure. The network servers aim to provide a low latency level, in order to provide VPN users with great connection speeds. By allowing customers to get all this at a low entry price, LimeVPN is one of the best solutions for letting you download torrents anonymously.
For more advanced users, the Pro plan, for $14.98 a month, will resemble what you have come to expect in most VPNs. It gives the user a dedicated private VPN node, dedicated bandwidth of 1 Gbps, static private 1P, 20 concurrent users as well as access to everything else on the basic plan. The faster speeds will help you download torrents in a fraction of the time that other users will enjoy.
How To Use LimeVPN
With a LimeVPN connection, your data is tunneled through a private, encrypted connection to LimeVPN’s network servers. The military-grade encryption ensures that parties that happen to intercept your data cannot read it. LimeVPN, on the other hand, routes your connection to the data you need to access from torrents or any other website through a virtual network between your computer and the service’s own servers.
Since all your internet traffic is encrypted, the level of security is much higher than with most alternatives. In practice, most VPNs give you access to the same or similar levels of security and therefore provide a good level of privacy for torrent users.
Setting up LimeVPN is straightforward. The software comes with a software client that is used to tunnel your network traffic through the virtual private network. You can download the client, or choose from the other options for connecting to the VPN. Note that this works whether you are using Mac, Windows or Linux, as long as your platform is supported.
Once the client is installed, you can then open it and enter your LimeVPN service username and password, and set up your connection. You can choose a server near you that gives you the fastest speeds. Once set up, you are ready to begin surfing the web and downloading torrents as before, except that now, your torrenting activity is private as well as safe from snoopers
Protecting Your Identity With A Proxy Server
Proxy servers are yet another way to secure your internet connection and download torrents anonymously. Whereas a VPN secures your entire web traffic by routing through the servers of your VPN service provider, a proxy server works on a single connection basis. This means that you initiate a single request, say, for a torrenting website, to your proxy server. Your proxy server then requests the page on your behalf, and then passes all the data back to your computer or other network device.
Proxy servers combine some of the strengths of a VPN service but only work for traffic that goes through your web browser. You cannot use your torrent client without additional configuration in the same way that you could for a VPN if you want to be anonymous. Hence, the proxy server requires a bit more care to ensure you are truly as safe as you think you are. However, the web proxy requests files on your behalf and therefore logs the proxy server’s I.P address instead of your own, helping you stay anonymous. Many torrent clients have configurable connection settings where you can specify a proxy server.
There are many free proxy servers on the internet, allowing you to be anonymous at low cost. The major drawback to be aware of is that many proxy servers, especially the free ones, are quite slow since they serve the concurrent connections of many other users. Where speed is of the essence, they underperform VPN services. In addition, there often are lower thresholds for the file sizes you can transfer through free proxies.
Protect Yourself for better Torrenting
Whether you go for a VPN connection, a seedbox or a proxy server, protecting your internet connection will give you peace of mind. With so many issues around torrenting and potential for lawsuits all around the world, it has never been more important to make sure you are safe. Such measures will be useful for any torrent user who wants to download with confidence.
Rachael Chapman
A Complete gamer and a Tech Geek. Brings out all her thoughts and love in writing blogs on IOT, software, technology etc
