Hardware Private Torrent Trackers

[xakota]

GBATemp, I need your help. Please provide me with an article that talks about why it is safer to download from private trackers. Safer as in, not getting letters sent to your house about copyright infringement

 

[viz]

you really are not safe when using bitorrent, regardless of the settings/software you use.

check into Usenet providers that offer SSL, however usenet is not free

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_tracker#Private_trackers

 

[Adr990]

Didn't Peerblock make you a lil' safer for this kind of stuff?

 

[fishykipper]

yes peerblock makes it a little safer (providing you've configured it correctly). But its really unsafe compared to Usenet!

 

[boondoklife]

The fact that it is a private tracker does not mean that it is necessarily safer, if anyone can join the private tracker then you might as well use a public one. Now if you are using a "Real" private tracker, meaning that only you and a select (invite only) group are using it, then it is safer than a public one. The logic behind this is, if it is really private then only people you trust will be on it and chances are they will not turn you in since they too are using the same network.

Now this also relies on the crux that you are using a torrent client that supports encrypted peers so your ISP can not sniff your traffic and see what you are doing. This last bit also goes for news groups, if you are not using an encrypted connection to the news server then you might as well just email your ISP and tell them what you are doing.

Another option if you wanna try to throw money at the problem to make it go away is to use a VPN to connect to the torrents/news groups. This generally is not cheap but is a very safe route, assuming your VPN host is not in a DMCA honouring country.