The usually awesome Lifehacker (seriously, best site ever) has an interesting article up today, titled How to Completely Anonymize Your BitTorrent Traffic with BTGuard:
If you’re using BitTorrent without taking special measures to hide your activity, it’s just a matter of time before your ISP throttles your connection, sends you an ominous letter, or worst case, your ISP gets a subpoena from a lawyer asking for your identity for a file-sharing law suit. Here’s how to set up a simple proxy to keep your torrenting safe and anonymous.
BTGuard is, essentially, a proxy service for your BitTorrent downloads. You pay them $7 per month, and you get to route all your illegal downloads through the service. Lifehacker says now you’re completely safe from all lawsuits forever! You can’t possibly be sued for downloading… err… Linux every week, right after Game Of Thrones airs. Right? How cool is that?
Just sign up for an account with your email address. No sweat, right? You’ve got a fake email address. And the mail provider definitely doesn’t keep logs, right? Of course.
Then just pay with your credit card for the low low price of $7 a month. You’ve got a credit card that doesn’t have your real name or billing address associated with it, right? Of course.
Then, log into the site to conduct your illegal activities. The terms of service of the site say that they don’t keep records! It’s right there in black and white! Right next to the part where they get to revoke your license to use BTGuard anonymously if you break the terms of the license, like for illegal activities. Also, right above the part where they get to change the terms of service without notice to you any time they like (probably right about the time they get sued for copyright infringement). I wonder if those changes will include selling you out?
They’re far from a shadowy company operating on the fringes of society. If you want that, you wanted HavenCo.
These guys are Canadian. They’re on Front Street in Toronto. Right here. Also, their phone number is listed on a site called Ripoff Report: it’s 415-762-3688.
151 Front Street is a huge hosting company. I assume that some IT guy has a few extra servers that aren’t doing anything, and since he has access to free CPU cycles and nearly unlimited bandwidth, he runs a VPN and pockets some extra money on the side. Except he apparently doesn’t always encrypt your traffic. So, aside from the part where he has personal information about you, and can sell you out any time he gets in hot water, and takes literally ten seconds to find on the internet, I don’t see why you wouldn’t give this guy money.