Filter the Web!

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Keywords: anonymous P2P, filtering, traffic shaping, Bittorrent, anonymous Bittorrent.

Filter the Web!

The world is full of people who want to take away things which are useful. My wife steals my cookies and now AT&T wants to filter the P2P protocol (in the future) in cooperation with the RIAA, the recording industry association of America and their twin, the MIAA, the same for movies and TV.

Now I know I should burn in hell if I ever download TV from home here in Taiwan via P2P and so I never do it. And I know the world would be a darker place without all these mega stars like Brittney Spears (the music industry is in a permanent crisis, both P2P downloads and CD sales are dropping) and it would be a damned shame if instead the gifted musicians in your local pub would sell a record or two, but, being a good citizen I don’t download. I am also not interested in buying CD’s, copy protection (against my legal car-copy) and stuff scared me away long ago (yes, I know there's a way around it, but I'm angry anyway).

But Bittorrent and other P2P protocols are also used for perfectly legal applications. Linux versions (that’s another OS, not Windows), game patches (World of Warcraft, I was told) and even handy little free applications can be downloaded with it (and also fan filmes like Star Trek New Voyages: go for it, they don’t have the real McCoy, but the real Chekov and Zulu). So if you want to download your perfectly legal applications even if blocked by a provider (nowadays there are already providers stalling P2P traffic) or want to go through a firewall which stops you from downloading you Linux kernel (because they want to stop illegal music downloads), here would be a way how to do it: LINK. This also gives you a reasonable degree of anonymity, by the way. Do not rely on any paid services for anonymous P2P, usually they don’t work and just take your money.

The solution involves the Bittorrent client uTorrent and a Sunbelt (Keiro) firewall besides Tor. Note that sending large data volumes over Tor is not desired by the Tor network. A commercial version of Tor which officially accepts P2P traffic would be a nice thing in the future, right now Tor is slowed down by unwanted P2P traffic.