Skip to main content

uTorrent 3’s privacy settings doesn’t keep you private

A few days ago, the uTorrent team released an updated build of version 3 (which is still under development) with several privacy features. The new build featured a new Privacy option under Preferences that excited many BitTorrent users. There were three options under the new privacy heading, one of which reads “Do not share your IP with peers”.

utorrent3-privacy

This somewhat suggest that users could hide their IP addresses from fellow BitTorrent users. The general consensus was that the new feature made BitTorrent transfers completely anonymous. If true, this would be a huge breakthrough for BitTorrent and could essentially turn the tables on anti-piracy groups and media houses.

Well, I have some news to share. You might like to sit down first. TorrentFreak today burst the bubble saying that the privacy options were an unfortunate choice of wording.

After conducting some tests it seems that for regular BitTorrent users this option does very little. When downloading a torrent file, other people in the swarm still get to see the IP-address of users who have this option enabled.

From our testing it seemed that the option was only effective for peer-to-peer communications that go beyond the downloading process, such as DHT and PEX. The new privacy features do not eliminate the need for an anonymizing proxy, on the contrary, they are specifically there for people using proxies.

This was confirmed by BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris, who told TorrentFreak. “This is actually related to not ‘over-communicating’ IP-addresses with other peers – for example when connecting to clients using a proxy, peers might have a habit of forwarding on their IPv6 address. “This option is intended to simplify privacy settings in some edge cases.

Actually I’d agree its not ideally worded right now – we’ll probably clarify the label shortly,” Morris added.

So there you have it. Now go renew your VPN account.

Related: Security flaw makes PPTP VPN useless for hiding IP on BitTorrent

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Record CPU and Memory Usage Over Time in Windows?

Whenever the computer is lagging or some application is taking too long to respond, we usually fire up task manager and look under the Performance tab or under Processes to check on processor utilization or the amount of free memory available. The task manager is ideal for real-time analysis of CPU and memory utilization. It even displays a short history of CPU utilization in the form of a graph. You get a small time-window, about 30 seconds or so, depending on how large the viewing area is.
17 comments
Read more

How to Schedule Changes to Your Facebook Page Cover Photo

Facebook’s current layout, the so called Timeline, features a prominent, large cover photo that some people are using in a lot of different creative ways. Timeline is also available for Facebook Pages that people can use to promote their website or business or event. Although you can change the cover photo as often as you like, it’s meant to be static – something which you design and leave it for at least a few weeks or months like a redesigned website. However, there are times when you may want to change the cover photo frequently and periodically to match event dates or some special promotion that you are running or plan to run. So, here is how you can do that.
1 comment
Read more

Diagram 101: Different Types of Diagrams and When To Use Them

Diagrams are a great way to visualize information and convey meaning. The problem is that there’s too many different types of diagrams, so it can be hard to know which ones you should use in any given situation. To help you out, we’ve created this diagram that lays out the 7 most common types of diagrams and when they’re best used:
Post a Comment
Read more