[tor-talk] Hiding IP address from my ISP

[krugar]

basically, what happens is this:

there are firms (or even government entities) that play along in the
bittorrent filesharing of copyrighted material on behalf of the
copyright owners to learn the other participants of the torrent swarm
(since bittorrent is a peer-to-peer file transfer protocol, you can
learn the IP addresses of other people that up/download the torrent as
well). then they look up which ISP owns that IP address and then,
depending on the country/legislation, they either subpoena the ISP for
your email/postal address, or they notify the ISP and the ISP is legally
bound to send you nasty emails and/or cut your connection on repeat
offenses ("three-strikes").

sidenote: those firms likely have to upload the copyrighted material to
the bittorrent swarm as well, they just do not send nasty letters to
themselves...

if you somehow managed to participate in a bittorrent filesharing swarm
via a VPN, those firms would only see the IP of your VPN server (at
least if everything actually works as intended/advertised). if that
server happens to be in another country were the copyright holder has no
legal standing, they cannot get back at you because the legal system of
that other country allows your VPN provider to not disclose your real IP
address (at least in theory),

there are very few VPN providers that accept actually protect their
customers in that way, even though all of them will claim that they do.
you should look for ones that accept anonymous payments and offer
service from interesting countries (if there are any interesting
countries left, that 3-strikes stuff has been spreading over europe like
a bushfire), but at least the former might change since the
visa/mastercard cartel has started to deny service to VPN providers.

at this point i would love to end with a recommendation for a service,
but sadly, i do not know any. if you find any VPN providers that aren't
running on insecure MSCHAP2, accept "anonymous" money (e.g.
cash-in-a-letter, bitcoin, paysafecard, whatever) and offer service from
jurisdictions that aren't beholden to hollywood, i guess there might be
some people on this list that are interested in that info.

cheers
-k

On 26.07.2013 21:23, jimbarbg at bellsouth.net wrote:
> Thanks Badtik. I was up at the site k mentioned below, and there was a movie I wanted to view, I hit the stream option and here the other day I received an email from them. "We are writing as a courtesy to let you we received notification from copyright owner a person with access to your internet connection may be (unknowingly) participating in illegal file sharing or transfer activities that leaf to this complaint."
> So I just did this one time but I don't ever want it to happen again if I can avoid it.
> I know stay away, but they have good files there.
>
> Sent from my HTC Inspire™ 4G on AT&T
>
> ----- Reply message -----
> From: "Sebastian G. <bastik.tor>" <bastik.tor at googlemail.com>
> To: <tor-talk at lists.torproject.org>
> Subject: [tor-talk] Hiding IP address from my ISP
> Date: Fri, Jul 26, 2013 1:51 pm
>
>
> 26.07.2013 18:41, James Gilreath:
>> Hello, I was wondering if you know of a program that will hide your
>> ip from your isp (our local cable company) when downloading files
>> from a torrent site like the pirates bay.se. Thanks Jim
>>
> Hello,
>
> your ISP knows your IP anyway. They are the ones that assign the IP
> address, though this is an automatic process.
>
> With Tor you can visit the website, preferably with the
> TorBrowserBundle, without your ISP being aware that you visit it.
>
> A torrent site usually offers only .torrent files, which are tiny and
> can be downloaded over Tor (with TBB), your specific example does not
> even do that. There are no files to download (beside the website itself
> with it's images).
>
> Using a torrent client with Tor is not recommended as the client
> probably leaks. Also it would add a constant, massive load to the Tor
> network, which is not good for you and others.
>
> Supposing your ISP dislikes Linux and you want to get a copy via
> Bittorrent, without them noticing a VPN might be a solution. Your ISP
> does not get aware of the websites you visit or where you download
> anything from.
>
> Best,
> bastik