News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

February 14, 2008

geekery

How to hide your BitTorrent traffic on your Mac

Posted Feb. 14, ’08, 11:00 AM PT by Cyrus Farivar
Category | Geekery

120px-Azureus.pngMacworld’s Mat Honan, the author of a great new series on network neutrality, has a set of concrete suggestions in part to show you how to hide your BitTorrent traffic from prying eyes.

As he points out: “In other words, all too often, if you want full use of the bandwidth you pay for while also protecting your privacy, you may need to take matters into your own hands.”

So here’s the solution:

One of the first lines of defense is to begin encrypting your BitTorrent traffic. This essentially means that the data you send and receive will be scrambled as it passes across the network, making it difficult for an ISP to detect that it is BitTorrent traffic. One of the most popular BitTorrent clients for the Mac, Azureus, has tools to perform this automatically.

Begin by launching Azureus, and selecting Preferences from the Azureus menu. Highlight the option for Mode, and switch from Beginner (the default setting) to Advanced. Expand the Connections option and click on Transport Encryption. Finally, check the box labeled Require Encrypted Transport. Click on Save, and you’re finished.


5 Comments

vnoel Author Profile Page said:

Thanks for pointing this out. The popular Bittorrent client Transmission also allows encryption.

Also, thanks for your blog, it may be one of the most informative mac blogs around. You often succeed in digging out unique tidbits, instead of simply parrotting the majority of general mac blogs.

February 14, 2008 11:36 AM
sdkay said:

like vnoel almost said, Transmission has this functionality, and I wholeheartedly suggest using it over Transmission, having used both.

Azerus used to have the upper hand in actual functionality, but the gap is mostly closed now. There's probably some deep wizardry that you can only do in Azeurus (which is why I keep a copy somewhere on this HD), but for general torrenting, Transmission has it covered. It's much more Applesque.

Related to the article, I *think* that the default setting is to only allow encrypted torrents, but it might just be to prefer them.

February 14, 2008 12:15 PM
sdkay said:

>and I wholeheartedly suggest using it over Transmission, having used both.

Err, rather, "and I wholeheartedly suggest using it over Azureus, having used both."

February 14, 2008 7:33 PM
D'bug said:

Encrypting traffic does NOT hide the use of bittorrent protocols, it only hides the contents of the particular data file(s) being transmitted.

Azureus is considerably more powerful than Transmission, although novices may be intimidated by the full feature set. That is the main reason it has settings for the user proficiency level.

Some commercial torrent sites try to entice users into paying subscription fees by claiming better or "direct" download speeds than seen for the same torrent on TPB (the most popular public site). What they're doing is listing multiple trackers within a torrent and then having their (paid) tracker configured to leech but not seed to those on the public system. The more capable torrent programs, such as Azureus, allow editing and removing the offending tracker URLs from a torrent file, disabling the leeching. There are countless other innovative features that enhance the usefulness of the program as one gains greater understanding.

I like Azureus being cross-platform too, giving us the ability to use the same free software on OS X and Linux (Ubuntu in my case), and Windows (when visiting friends that haven't switched yet).

February 15, 2008 10:00 AM
Mark U. said:

@D'Bug:

Transmission is cross-platform too (although it's not available on Windows as yet).

February 15, 2008 2:52 PM

Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: