BTGuard is an easy to use proxy service that adds an extra layer of privacy to your BitTorrent transfers. The service is designed for BitTorrent users who don’t want their ISPs or any third party to log or throttle their IPs or traffic.

BTGuard reroutes all your BitTorrent traffic through their servers in Canada. This means that anyone who connects to you via BitTorrent, even the MPAA or RIAA, will see BTGuard’s IP, and not yours.

BTGuard does not have any bandwidth or volume restrictions, and while we briefly tested the service (from Europe), the speeds were almost equal to an unsecured connection. Setting it up is fairly easy, the only thing you need to do is enter the username and password provided by BTGuard, and you’re ready to go. Please note that this is only a proxy service, so the traffic between the user and the server is not encrypted, which means that ISPs can (potentially) still monitor it.

TorrentFreak asked one of the founders of the project why they launched the service, he told us: “More and more, people find their privacy being invaded on the Internet and we find it to be a very disturbing, unethical trend. There are some countries that still actively protect privacy, one of which is Canada.”

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Sandvine, manufacturers of BitTorrent throttling technology has seen its first quarter sales drop 88% in a year. After achieving 42,000% growth in 5 years, the company - best known for providing the technology which put Comcast into the spotlight recently - has seen its value plummet 42% in a single day.

When Comcast introduced the Sandvine traffic shaping solution, it hoped it could quietly interfere with its customer’s BitTorrent activities without getting too much attention. Unfortunately for them, their actions didn’t go unnoticed, and during August last year we broke the news that this ISP does indeed mess with it’s customers internet connections.

Since then, things have gone from bad to worse for Comcast, as their customers started to realize that this ISP wasn’t giving them what they paid for. As a result, Comcast are now being sued and annoyed users formed a coalition to challenge the company to try to claim compensation. All of this is on top of a FCC hearing which deemed that Comcast uses ‘hacker-techniques’ to interrupt BitTorrent traffic, techniques which are employed via the traffic management ’solution’ from Sandvine. Essentially, the Sandvine system allows Comcast to inject forged reset packets into BitTorrent transfers which makes seeding impossible - good news for ISPs who don’t want to give their customers the bandwidth they paid for, but bad news for BitTorrent, and even worse news for supporters of Internet neutrality. Read the rest of this entry »

In the US, several universities have banned filesharing applications such as BitTorrent, mostly under pressure from the RIAA. A university in the Netherlands has taken a different approach. They use uTorrent to distribute software and OS updates across 6500 workstations, and end up saving a lot of time, money and resources by doing so.

The BitTorrent protocol was designed to save companies time, resources and bandwidth while distributing large files. For some reason this aspect of BitTorrent never really got off the ground. Until now that is.

According to an article in the weekly Dutch magazine Automatiserings Gids, the Dutch university INHOLLAND uses BitTorrent as a network management tool to distribute software to 6500 desktop computers in 16 different locations throughout the Netherlands. Instead of distributing software updates and images from several centralized servers, INHOLAND now utilities the efficiency of BitTorrent, and uses all the computers in the network to help distribute the files.

Before they decided to use BitTorrent, more than 20 servers were needed to distribute 25.6 TBs of data to the desktops, and even then it could take up to 4 days to update them all. Now, with BitTorrent, this process has speeded up significantly, and all computers are updated with the latest software in less than 4 hours. The data doesn’t have to be distributed from one location, since all the workstations connected to the network actively help in the distribution. Read the rest of this entry »

Several BitTorrent developers have joined forces to propose a new protocol extension with the ability to bypass the BitTorrent interfering techniques used by Comcast and other ISPs. This new form of encryption will be implemented in BitTorrent clients including uTorrent, so Comcast subscribers are free to share again.

BitTorrent throttling is not a new phenomenon, ISPs have been doing it for years. When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic most BitTorrent clients introduced a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. This was the beginning of an ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers, which is about to enter new level.

Unfortunately, protocol header encryption doesn’t help against more aggressive forms of BitTorrent interference, like the Sandvine application used by Comcast. A new extension to the BitTorrent protocol is needed to stay ahead of the ISPs, and that is exactly what is happening right now.

Back in August we were the first to report that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds. Comcast of course denied our allegations, and ever since there has been a lot of debate about the rights and wrongs of Comcast’s actions. On Wednesday, Comcast explained their BitTorrent interference to the FCC in a 57-page filing. Unfortunately they haven’t stopped lying yet, since they now argue that they only delay BitTorrent traffic, while in fact they disconnect people, making it impossible for them to share files with non-Comcast users.

In short, the Comcast interference works like this: A few seconds after you connect to someone in a BitTorrent swarm, a peer reset message (RST flag) is sent by Comcast and the upload immediately stops. Most vulnerable are users in a relatively small swarm where you only have a couple of peers you can upload the file to. Read the rest of this entry »