FileShareFreak THE source for BitTorrent & P2P Tips, Tricks and Info.

Let’s face it: There are hundreds of free web proxies out there that provide anonymous surfing. Of these, most will even unblock MySpace, Gmail, FaceBook or any other no-no when surfing from school or work. Some have taken this a step further and allow for signing into your MSN, AIM or Yahoo! messaging accounts - conveniently through an anonymized (and secure) SSL version of eBuddy.com. Others allow for sending anonymous emails and newsgroup postings, even YouTube viewing. But is there really a "best" web proxy? We’re not sure about that; there’s pro’s and con’s to each one. Either way, here’s our picks for the Top Ten best free web proxies on the Internet, and why.

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What To Look For When Purchasing a VPN Service

It all depends what you’re looking to do with it. For simple anonymous browsing, some providers offer this for as little as $5/month, or even for free. But if you want a total Internet traffic anonymizing experience, a premium VPN account is a better way to go - there’s no IP numbers to configure into the webapps, and no software to install - just set up the VPN and it’s done! Other VPN selling points include:

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To successfully bypass a BitTorrent-blocking university or the evil throttling of a bad ISP, the use of a seedbox is more than adequate. Another solution is to incorporate a VPN (Virtual Private Network) service, and tunnel all of your Internet traffic through a new IP address. Not only will your ISP be unable to "see" what you’re sending & receiving, but your home IP is kept out of the torrent; or anything else for that matter. Essentially, a VPN anonymizes all of your traffic.

We’ve touched on the subject of VPNs here at FSF before, but never actually ran any conclusive testing to prove that not only does it work; but more importantly, to verify BitTorrent transfer speeds. For this, we purchased a month of VPN service, anonymized the PC and ran some speed tests on both public and private trackers. As expected, the results were unsurprisingly very good.

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Restrictions brought on by your ISP or network (workplace, school or global location) may result in the inability to surf certain torrent sites. Perhaps your IP address has been banned by a tracker (and the website) for inappropriate behavior. Or maybe you’d just feel much safer being anonymous while surfing torrent sites. Bypassing all this is simple enough - just visit an anonymous web proxy (or CGI proxy) such as anonymouse.org, type in the URL and start torrenting. But if you’re a heavy torrent user you may find this to be a major hassle.

Mass-Torrent.com solves this by incorporating a torrent site search paralleled with anonymous browsing. What makes this service unique is that all searching is conducted through the Mass Torrent Proxy, but the results are displayed through an anonymized webpage of the actual torrent site. And it’s fast, too! Unlike most public web proxy services, you probably won’t even notice a difference in pageload times.

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At long last, Phoenix Labs, the company behind the popular IP blocking software for Windows, has come out with a major revamped version for Mac OS X users. This is the first full (non-beta) release in nearly two years - long overdue for OS X users who value their privacy just as seriously as their WinXP and Linux counterparts. PeerGuardian integrates support for multiple lists, list editing, automatic updates, and blocking all of IPv4, (TCP, UDP, ICMP, etc.), making it the safest and easiest way to protect your privacy on the Internet.

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For years now, Anti-P2P organizations have been polluting BitTorrent with fake peers and bogus torrent files, which send out fake or corrupt data in order to slow down file transfers and/or log the IP addresses of users who ’share’ the torrent. This is typically rampant on a communal BitTorrent level through publicly-accessible torrents from popular sites such as ThePirateBay, mininova, Isohunt, et al. Consequences range from those laughable (but sometimes scary) DMCA notices sent from your ISP; cease-and-desist letters; and even worse, pre-litigation letters from any company under the RIAA / MPAA / IFPI “umbrella”.

To significantly reduce your chances of connecting with malicious peers, the integration of IP Blocking is crucial to P2P safety. This can be approached through third-party software, including PeerGuardian2 or Blocklist Manager - but it can also be handled client-side through IP blocklists. µTorrent supports IP blocking at the BitTorrent protocol level - and it’s a great solution for Vista users who don’t yet have the option of using an external program such as PeerGuardian2.

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The first thing that PeerGuardian users notice when upgrading to Windows Vista is that the old PG2 doesn’t work. That being said, the PhoenixLabs team has been hard-at-work on a Vista solution, and thus far have come up with a working beta-release of PeerGuardian3 (called RC1-Test2).

Installation - Vista users

Download the latest version from http://phrosty.phoenixlabs.org/pg2-rc1/. The current release is “pg2-rc1-test2.exe“. NOTE: This beta release has been tested with all versions of MS Windows, although it is not recommended for anything other than Vista at this point in development. Non-Vista users should ideally opt for a “stable” release from the http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/ page.

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ProxyWay is a very good (Free) all-in-one solution for anonymous web surfing. Never again will you have to visit those slow CGI anonymous proxy websites (anonymouse.org, proxify.com). It offers the same features of a CGI proxy through software incorporated seamlessly through any web browser. The reason ProxyWay stands out among other anonymous web solutions is that it features multiple proxies working together simultaneously in the background. Not only does this put to shame the speeds of browser-based proxies, but it also acts as a dynamic proxy chain to provide an even higher level of anonymity. With ProxyWay; feel free to do your online banking or secure shopping - something that nobody in their right mind should ever do through a public CGI proxy.

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When it comes to the Internet, no matter how overt and honest people are, we don’t want our privacy to be invaded. While President Bush may defend domestic eavesdropping, it doesn’t mean you should. Things have gone from bad to worse - why, we can’t even send an email without worrying about it being intercepted. Every site we visit, every facebook or hotmail login, every search in a browser - it’s all recorded, logged and saved in giant datastore farms, surreptitiously laying-in-wait for that one day where it’s all dragged out and thrown back in our faces. It’s anyone’s guess who’ll be granted access to this datamine down the road.

An exact copy of all Internet traffic that flowed through critical AT&T cables — e-mails, documents, pictures, Web browsing, voice-over-Internet phone conversations, everything — was being diverted to equipment inside the secret room,” - Mark Klein, a 20-year veteran for AT&T, referring to the sixth floor (secret room) in which the U.S. Government & NSA have unconditional access. According to Mr. Klein, there are 15 - 20 more buildings just like it across America, set up the same way. This is just the tip of the iceberg - there aren’t many whistleblowers like Klein that “leak” sensitive information such as this.

Whilst there’s not much one can do about Big Brother™ and his Orwellian cohorts from videotaping you at the local convenience store, or taking pictures of your licence plate at every street corner, or even RFIDing your next born - the least we can do is not let it happen to us in our own living room.

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What is the anoNet?

It is a self-contained private version of the Internet - a “darknet” for lack of a better word. AnoNet is similar to the Tor hidden services (websites that end in *.onion) and I2P’s “eepsites” (sites that end in *.i2p). It is also comparable to Freenet, except that it’s easier to set up, and it’s faster. Users can host their own anonymous blogs, IRC channels, forums.

What runs through anoNet?

Almost every Internet service. BitTorrent, web servers, search engines, email, FTP, IRC, Instant Messaging, P2P file sharing. They’ve tried to create an anonymous alternative to most services currently available through regular Internet. anoNet is not a proxy or ‘tunneling over’ service for Internet applications - it’s all rather self-contained through the VPN service and secure web pages.

Is it anonymous?

It’s probably best to just let the anoNet FAQ do the talking. Our article is about how to set it up and run some programs through it. But yeah, we’re convinced!

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We felt it necessary to give Tor projects its own page on FileShareFreak - more or less for our own convenience (when updating this entry). For those unaware, Tor is two things: First; it’s an anonymizing network used for establishing anonymous communications over the Internet. And second; Tor is also considered a Darknet.

Tor in itself is not a P2P program, but it can be implemented to add anonymous support to just about any ‘Internet’ program that will employ the addition of proxies. Tor adds layers of anonymity through onion routing, similar to both Internet tunneling and proxy services. Adding Tor to a P2P program is fairly easy to do, as long as Tor is already installed, running, and properly configured. Be sure to visit the ever-expanding Wikipedia page for Tor.

Tor Projects

Tor’s success has spawned the development of an entire armada of side projects, 3rd party spinoffs and software addons & plugins. It enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features. Listed below are just some of the projects that support Tor and the Tor network. It should be assumed that many of these require Tor to be installed and running prior to using (unless otherwise noted).

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Free VPN software solutions for anonymous connections & transfers.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) works by ‘tunneling’ over an existing network (for instance, the Internet) for secure and private connections. VPN is notably similar to tunneling networks such as Tor and I2P, with the main difference being that VPN users typically need to create a new network (and add users running the same software) or join existing ones. VPNs allow for secure remote access to the network from wherever there’s an Internet connection.

Technically VPNs have nothing to do with P2P filesharing in the general sense of the phrase. Having said that, some VPN software allow users to establish their own private networks consisting of friends from contact lists, and directly support many existing IM protocols such as MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk and even support secure chat rooms. So if you’re concerned about big brother peeping in on your MSN or Yahoo transfers, VPN software may be the solution.

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(BitTorrent over I2P / BitTorrent over Tor / anoNet)

Using BitTorrent to download files is quite possibly the best method going - both for speed and for sheer content availability. And when used alone, it is also the most vulnerable. All P2P users share each others’ information in order to complete a download - thus opening the door to anyone who wants to acquire that info. This is simply a requisite of the deal, quid pro quo. And BitTorrent is no exception to the rule: IP harvesting (of the shared *.torrent file) is especially easy to do with a modified Bit client.

Solutions:

As mentioned here, using a proxy server is a great way to ensure anonymity over any P2P application, including BitTorrent. But there is an alternative - ‘BitTorrent over I2P’.

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(Freenet / WASTE / Onionland / I2P / anoNet Darknets)

Well, if you’ve come this far, you can see that we’re treading into some pretty deep water when it comes to Internet security and P2P file sharing - perhaps even considered borderline paranoia. As the saying goes, “You’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you”. For many zealots, this is the only way files should be shared.

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Most existing search engines use a ‘centralized’ style of architecture combined with ranking algorithms to generate the ranking of documents crawled in their databases. The best example of this would be the Google PageRank system. However well they perform at generic web page queries, popular search engines are not conducive to finding illegal content on the Internet.

Search engines also log your ’search queries’ including the keywords, IP address and other data of the search, even if you didn’t provide any information. This info is kept in their databases, and there’s no telling how long this info is kept, or what is done with it. Giants like Microsoft (MSN) and Yahoo keep their retention policies private, and Google’s is scrupulous at best.

Want to use the Google Search anonymously? Try Scroogle! They offer free anonymous Google searching through their site. Check it out here.

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