BitTorrent Bible-Whole Scenario
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Presenting .................
The Bittorrent Bible
Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for what you do with the
information contained within this guide. If you decide to act like
a retard, then you get what you deserve. If you decide to be a
pirate, then you should be ready to accept the consequences and
walk the plank if you get caught. Ok, now let’s begin.
Table of Contents:
1. What is bittorrent
A. acceptable clients
B. software you need to acquire before you continue
C. Expectations of a responsible torrenter
D. Tweaking your client
2. Recognizing file types.
3. Burning.
4. Passwords.
5. Questions.
6. Backing up DVD’s.
7. Ps2 issues.
8. Corrupted downloads.
9. Finding torrents.
10. BitTorrent and Firefox.
11. Covering your arse.
Section 1. What is BitTorrent?
I’m not going to make this more complicated than it needs to be. BT is a peer-to-
peer network based on the idea that many people sharing a single file is more
productive than a single host for a single file. It was not designed as a haven for
pirates and copyright violation, it just happens to be really good for it.
The network is BASED on the idea that EVERYONE shares 100%, that means
that if you download something, you stay connected to it until you’ve shared
100% of the bandwidth (or more, the more the better) you’ve downloaded. So
what if your connection is much faster DOWN than UP, you got the file, so help
other people get it. The more people who are sharing (seeding) a file, the faster it
goes for everyone.
Before you can do much with .torrent files, (the files that point you to the spot on
the network where everyone’s grabbing the file) you need a client…
A. Acceptable Clients
Some people are going to disagree with me, but IDRFC, or “I don’t really care”.
This guide is set up to give you the best overall experience with the BT network,
and so I’m sharing my observations about what’s out there.
A BitTorrent client is a piece of software that acts as the vehicle between your
computer and the bittorrent network. There are dozens of choices, I’ll share my
opinions.
1. Shad0w’s original client/BitTornado- great piece of software. Probably the
fastest overall client. Also has the fewest features. Not really good if you want to
do more than 1 file, or if you need to schedule your downloads. Will run on just
about any system, doesn’t require lots of power.
2. ABC- overall a pretty nice piece of software. I don’t use it personally, but lots of
people do. It’s ok. It doesn’t have UPnP capability, which I will discuss better.
Might want to avoid this one if you have a router and you’re uncomfortable
editing the settings of it. Uses C++ instead of java, so it’s stable and doesn’t need
a powerful system.
3. Azureus- Another very popular client. This has recently become my client of
choice, but I don’t recommend it to people who don’t have strong computers.
Supports UPnP, NAT traversal, scheduling, and it’s very very easy to start a
torrent and seed it yourself. This client uses the Java VM, and as such it’s
available to just about every computer platform (linux, windows, mac), but the
java VM has a nasty habit of bloating the longer it runs. It WILL slow down your
computer after extended downloading/uploading.
4. BitSpirit- A very rare client that I used for quite a long time. It has just about all
the functionality of Azureus, but uses C++ instead of java. It’s really a very nice
client, but starting a seed isn’t really easy, there’s no support (unless you read
Korean) and some torrent sites don’t support it.
5. BitComet- This client is gaining in popularity. I don’t like it. Here’s why. It uses
a variation on the original client that was never intended: multi-tracker
announcing. Think of it like this: A torrent is hosted by a tracker. The tracker
keeps track of everybody uploading and downloading the file and their
information. Trackers can have hundreds of thousands of users at one time. This
client announces you across every tracker connected to the torrent, as an
attempt to get you more speed. I’d say about 20-50% of the time, it works. The
issue is, you’re getting more than your share, plus you’re sticking your butt on the
line. You run a MUCH greater chance of getting busted with a multi-tracker-
announcing client than you do otherwise. Other than that it’s a solid client, has
scheduling and UPnP support, doesn’t use JAVA.
>>>Update: at the request of MensaMan, lokitorrent.com VIP, I am adding that
multi-tracker announcing *could* be the future of torrenting, as it decentralizes
the tracker. If it becomes more widely accepted, I’ll go with it. It’s my opinion that
it was added to this client to cheat and get better downloads, but all’s fair in love
and piracy, I suppose.
6. BitLord- I don’t know who made this client, but they were morons. They used
the BitComet core, added some ads onto it, made it crash routers (although
different routers are picky, some clients do that, be aware. No permanent
damage will occur, you just have to reboot your router and discontinue the
software.), made the interface ugly, and spammed it all over torrent sites
everywhere. Avoid it.
7. There’s a million more, I encourage you to experiment.
B. Software you need to acquire before you continue.
The rest of this guide assumes you have EVERY piece of the following software
installed. If you don’t have it, get it.
• WinRAR
• Nero Burning Rom, version 6.6.0.1 or LATER
• Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools
• Zone Alarm Internet Security Suite/BlackIce/whatever firewall you want.
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus (Norton and McAfee and Panda stink compared to
Kaspersky, I promise it’s the best.)
• AnyDVD or DVD Decryptor. I use both, for different applications. OR
DVDShrink, but this last one isn’t supported by this guide. It’s REALLY
simple to use, so try it for yourself. Good alternative if you don’t have
anydvd and only have nero burning rom, not nero recode.
• Ace’s Codec Pack, or the K-Lite Codec pack
• Firefox Internet Browser
• VLC Media Player
• PGLite, PeerGuardian, or PeerGuardian 2
• The Blocklist Manager
Don’t worry about what it does right now, just get it and install it. MOST important
from that list, WinRAR, Nero, Alcohol 120%, AnyDVD, Firefox, one of the
peerguardians, the blocklist manager, and the codec pack.
C. Expectations of a responsible torrenter
EVERY BitTorrent user should always seed files 100%. That means if a file you
downloaded was 700Mb, you shouldn’t stop letting people upload from you until
you have uploaded 700Mb.
NO ONE should release a password protected .rar as a torrent. It’s lame.
NO ONE should release any spyware or malware containing data across the BT
network, regardless of how it is labeled.
D. Tweaking your Client
Probably the most common question I get asked is “how can I speed up my
downloads?”, and it’s probably also the most answered question in the forum of
ANY given torrent site. I’ll answer your question, and it’s simple. There are 5
basic ways to speed up your connection. I’ll list them, and then explain.
1. Change your default port.
2. Set up port forwarding/UPnP
3. Cap your upload speed.
4. Buy a faster connection.
5. Disable the windows firewall.
Ok, now for the explanations.
1. By default, bittorrent uses a series of about 7-10 ports. Bittorrent traffic
accounts for approximately 1/3 of all internet traffic. Therefore, ISP’s like to
throttle (limit the connection) offered on the default port. Off the top of my head I
can’t remember the default ports, but you need to change them. I recommend
anything above the 16000 area, but you can go as high as 65535. Within your
client, somewhere, there will be a place to set up your default port. For a long
time, I used 49152, because it’s what came into my head one day. Pick a range
between 16000 and 68000 (limit it to about 10 ports, say 1860-1870) and you’re
done, the client does the rest.
2. If you have a router, you have some work to do before you get the best
speeds. Routers like to think they’re firewalls, and so they disallow connections
they don’t like. If you have a broadband connection but NEVER EVER see
speeds over 20k/s, this is your problem. The easiest solution is UPnP enabling,
which is only available to people using windows XP. Some people say it’s
insecure…you needn’t worry if you’re running zone alarm like I told you to.
Some people will tell you to use the DMZ. Don’t do this…it leaves you out in the
open.
To set up UPnP, you need 2 things: 1, a client that uses it, and 2, a router that
allows it. You’ll need to log-into your router via Firefox, Linksys routers use the
address: 192.168.1.1, and I think D-Link routers use 192.168.1.100 to log into the
router. Linksys login is blank, default password is “admin”. D-link is the same I
think, check your router documentation to be sure. SOMEWHERE within the
setup will be a place to “enable” UPnP. On The Linksys WRT54G it looks like
this:
You have to check enable before it works, duh. Now you have to go into the
settings for your client and enable UPnP. Azureus automatically detects and
configures UPnP after version 2.2. BitSpirit and I believe BitComet do as well.
Some clients don’t support UPnP at all.
Basically, UPnP allows the program to tell the router “Hey, I want traffic on this
port, gimmie”, and the router will let it happen. If you can’t use UPnP, then you
have to use port forwarding, which is a hassle, especially if you’re on a local
network and won’t always have the same local IP address.
To use port forwarding, you have to access the settings in your router and find
the section called “port forwarding”. On the Linksys WRT54G, that screen looks
like this:
Here, you label the “application” whatever you want, the “Start” and “end”
settings to whatever range you want to use, set protocol to “both”, since some
new clients can use UDP and TCP for their protocols. In IP address, you put in
the value for your local IP addy. To do that, you press START, then “control
panel”, then network connections. Double click on your network icon and you’ll
get a window that looks something like this:
Now click on the “Support tab”. The number that’s circled here is what goes in
the “IP” box on your port
forwarding.
3. Cap your upload speed. I can’t stress this enough. I’m glad you want to share,
but do it intelligently.
I’m going to teach you some math now, so please try to keep up with me.
In computers, we have bits, bytes, kilobits, kilobytes, megabits, and megabytes,
gigabits, and gigabytes, terabits, and terabytes. Let’s learn the difference.
A bit is like this: 01 a byte is like this: 0101010101010101, or 8x longer. It takes 8
bits to equal one byte. Kilo means thousand, so for a kilobit, we have 1000 bits.
For a kilobyte, we have 8000 bits. Generally, you can tell which we’re talking
about by the abbreviation. Kb is kilobit, while KB is kilobyte.
4. Buy a faster connection.
Broadband is expensive, faster broadband is more expensive. Your connection
can only be as fast as your account, so especially if you use DSL, buy a faster
pipe.
5. Disable the windows firewall.
It’s really crappy. Anyone who really wanted access to your computer could do it
with the firewall running, it’s more for your peace of mind than anything else. If
you’ve downloaded Zone Alarm like I told you to, you won’t have any problems,
as windows lets it become the default firewall. It doesn’t like p2p, and it has a
nasty habit of nagging the hell out of you when it’s disabled and randomly
reasserting itself. Oh well, get ZA like I told you to.
For more help for users of Azureus, try the Azureus wiki:
http://azureus.aelitis.com/wiki/
Section 2. Recognizing File Types
There are a lot of common filetypes in the bt world, because everyone has their
own personal preferences about what programs are best. I’ll go over the most
common ones.
• .rar, .001, .part1, .zip, .sfv, .s7, .tar.gz
o These are all files that winrar can deal with for you. In most cases,
you can find the file within a group that’s just called “.rar” or “part01”
and right click on it, and choose “extract here” or “Extract to
xxxfilenamexxx/”, which will put the extracted file in its own folder
within the existing folder. .sfv is a recovery record which can be
used to repair (sort of) a broken rar archive. If you fail to click on the
.rar or the part01 file, the extracted file will be incomplete if it
extracts at all. Be warned, pay attention.
• .bin and .cue
o These are disc images. They can be burned using any popular
CD/DVD writing software, or they can be mounted to a virtual disc
using Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools. Check out the next section
for help on burning images with Nero.
• .iso, .ccd, .mds, .mdf, .nrg
o These are also all cd-image formats. Follow the guide in section 3
for burning with nero or mounting with Alcohol 120%.
• .avi, .mpg, .mpeg, .rm, .mov, .mka, .mkv
o These are all movie formats. AVI’s are usually Divx’s or Xvids,
installing the codec pack will allow you to watch them on Windows
Media Player or the VLC player, your choice.
o .MPG and .MPEG are generally video cd files, super video cd files,
or kvcd files. They’re usually slightly lower in quality than Divx/Xvid,
but if you burn them using nero’s “video CD” option, you can
actually usually watch them on your DVD player. To do that, load
nero, select “CD” from the drop down menu at the top left of the
wizard screen, then select “Video CD” from the menu below. Add
your mpg and burn, it will play on your computer and should play in
your dvd player. MOST legitimate releases of vcd’s are in bin/cue
format so you don’t have to fool w/ getting the right settings.
o RM’s suck, don’t waste your time. .Mov’s are horrible too, avoid
them.
o MKA’s and MKV’s are the “Matroska” video format. This format is
seeing increasing popularity, but I wouldn’t exactly call it
mainstream just yet.
• .vob, .ifo
o These are DVD movie files. If someone packages a dvd like this,
they’re dumb, but you can still get the movie. Check out Section 3
for more info.
• .nfo, .readme
o These are text files provided by the people who package the files
that tell you how to install them. They will tell you where the crack
is, how to apply it, what the serial number is, etc. Windows XP tries
to open .nfo’s with the Windows System Information Viewer tool.
So, the first time you try to open one, right click on it and choose
“open with”. Select notepad from the list and then “always use
selected program to open this kind of file”. You can do this with any
file type in windows, although sometimes you have to hold down
shift and then right click.
Section 3. Burning. DVD’s and CD’s, not yourself. Please.
A. Burning vob/ifo’s.
To do this, open nero and select “dvd” from the drop down list at the top
left of the wizard screen.
o Then select “Video DVD” from the window below that, and click
“new”.
o Then place ALL the files into the VIDEO_TS folder.
o Some people will tell you to put something in the AUDIO_TS folder,
ignore them, they’re dumb. AUDIO_TS is for hi-fi audio-DVD’s only,
so ignore it for video.
o Select “burn” and away you go. The movie should play in your dvd
player.
• .mp3, .ogg, .flac
o Obviously, these are audio files. If you don’t know that, go back to
third grade.
B. Burning CD/DVD image files
o When the program starts the wizard opens. Choose “open”.
o Then in the next window, change “filetype” to “all files”.
o Navigate to the folder where the file lives, and pick the .cue, the
.iso, the .mds, the .ccd, the .nrg, or whatever the file type is.
o Select OK, and this window will pop up.
o Click “burn” and you’re golden.
C. Mounting with Alcohol 120%
This guide works almost the same for Daemon tools, although Daemon tools
requires a plug-in from its site to be able to right-click on files. The theory is the
same though, you just run the program to mount instead of right-clicking if you
don’t have the plug-in.
You can also mount just about any image file using Alcohol 120%. You may have
to go into the “general” settings for Alcohol and associate all the image types with
alcohol.
After you’ve installed alcohol, your computer will have a “Virtual Drive”, which is
basically an imaginary cd/dvd drive on your computer. It tricks your system into
believing it has another cd drive, which you can directly mount files on. To do
this, install Alcohol 120%, restart, and navigate to the location of your .cue, .iso,
.ccd, .nrg, .mds, or whatever other image file you want and right click it. I have
alcohol set up to give me 3 virtual drives, but by default it only gives you 1. You
can have up to 37, but that’s a little nuts if you ask me.
Select “mount image”, choose the virtual drive, and it’ll automatically load the file.
In fact, if it’s software or a movie, the windows autoplay utility will probably open
and ask you what you want to do next. Now to watch the movie or install the
software, you simply double click the image in “my computer” of the
corresponding virtual drive. It behaves just like a cd drive. Nice, huh?
Section 4. Passwords
Passwords suck, but there’s a trick. Almost every torrent site has a forum. Every
forum has a “search” option. Search for the file you’ve downloaded and need a
password to, or find the specific torrent’s page and read the comments. It’s
usually there. Search before you post about it.
Second, the password is usually contained w/I the filename. For example in the
file name
“Adobe.Acrobat.6.Professional [torrents.dl.am].rar” the password would probably
be “torrents.dl.am”, it’s usually in the brackets. Try that before you spam for the
password.
Section 5. Questions
Questions!?
This guide is far to l33t for you to have any questions. If you do, SEARCH THE
FORUM first, then ask in the shoutbox or post a new forum thread. 80% of all
forum post questions have already been answered 5 or more times.
Some people have trouble with large files because they’re still using FAT disc
storage types. Don’t be dumb, use NTFS. That’s your only solution if you get
errors on big files. Sorry.
Section 6. Backing up DVD’s
There’s a lot of debate on this one. If you need more help, go to afterdawn.com
and check out their guides. I’ll tell you what I do, and then you do what you want
to do.
You basically have 2 choices:
1. The best choice, Nero Recode + AnyDVD
2. The OK choice: DVD Shrink+ Nero.
I’m only covering number 1, because it works with all DVD’s, all the time,
regardless of protection scheme.
AnyDVD is a program that acts like a device driver. It intercepts the video from
the DVD drive and decrypts it on the fly. Long story short, for your computer,
there is NO SUCH THING as a copy protected dvd ever again. It uses 0% cpu
and barely any system memory, you can leave it run all the time or not. It also
breaks all audio CD protections invisibly. Now you can play any dvd (hence the
name) without WinDVD or whatever software. WMP does just fine.
Nero Recode is a program that automatically resizes the movie based on your
needs. If the movie is too big to fit on a single layer dvd, it’ll make it fit. And here’s
a secret---the movie is rarely bigger than 4.7Gb. It’s the extra features that
nobody ever watches that make it bigger.
Nero Recode is in the “Nero Vision Express” subsection of the “Nero Burning
Rom” area in your start menu. When you load it you see several options.
o Recode an Entire DVD to DVD
o Just what it says, remakes a DVD as a 1:1 copy. This is best for
special editions or season discs for TV shows, since they really
need their menus.
o Recode Main Movie to DVD
o Recodes just the main title on the dvd. Some new dvd’s are tricky
to make this not work, by trying to trick the software into thinking a
smaller video file is the main title. I don’t use it, but you could. It’s
what we’re going to be doing, we just do it a different way.
o Remake a DVD.
o Here’s our choice for tonight. Ignore the other options, they’re not
so useful to us right now.
o Select “Remake a DVD. Now we have this window. Click “import title”.
o Navigate to your DVD drive and click it. The window will automatically
update to show you what’s the main title and what’s the junk. We’re only
concerned with the main movie. If you want to, you can select a file and
then press the green “play” arrow to preview it to see what it is. “Main
Movie” is always what you want, but there might be more than 1 listed.
Preview them to make sure you have the right one. Shrek 2, for example,
has 2 copies of the movie. As far as I can tell, they’re identical except that
1 skips about 7 minutes of the movie. You can usually tell by the duration,
as in this one. I’m going to bet the whole movie isn’t 0 hours and 0
minutes long.
o When you’ve selected it, click “add title” and this window will pop up while
it scans the file.
o Then click finished from the title selection screen.
o Now we’re here:
In this picture there are 4 important elements.
o 1. Compression. This example is 100% of the original, but it might
be smaller if it’s a long movie. I’ve done movies as low as 65.5%
and still had an EXCELLENT copy.
o 2. Audio Tracks/Subtitles. You can leave it with what it has, or if you
want to boost the compression percentage to get a better copy, you
can remove what you don’t think you’ll use. Chances are you don’t
need the foreign language tracks or any subtitles.
o 3. How much of the dvd you’ve used. It is possible to put multiple
titles on one dvd, but this tutorial doesn’t cover that.
o 4. Fit to Target. By default it’s a single layer DVD. If you have a
dual layer burner and you’ve wasted the money for the discs, you
can change it. You can also input a custom value.
o We’re almost done. Click “Next” and select whether you want it to be
burned as an image (it’ll be .nrg, which you can open and burn at your
leisure or mount), save it to hard drive (as vobs and ifos, refer to the guide
in section 3 about how to burn), or to your DVD burner. If you select this
one, it will copy the files to a temporary folder on your hard drive before it
burns. Let it go, and you’re done. I perfect dvd, with no protection, no ads,
no areas you can’t skip, and all the chapters in perfectly. Smooth like
buddah.
Section 7, PS2 issues.
I get asked all the time, “Tom, how do I back up a ps2 game”. I’m going to skip
telling you you need a chip or swap discs. I’m going to advise you to check out
www.ps2ownz.com or www.ps2-scene.com and read. But, I’ll help you back up
your collection.
All you need is DVD Decryptor. Stick your PS2 game in your DVD drive and open
DVD decryptor. Select MODE, then ISO, then READ. Select a save directory on
your hard drive. Then click the big button with the arrow on it. Once you’re done,
you’ll have 2 files saved in the folder, a .iso and a .mds. To burn select
MODE/ISO/WRITE, navigate to the .mds file, NOT THE ISO, even though the iso
is the actual image, and then click the burn button. I’ve never had a problem
burning at max speed, but some people can’t do above 1x. I think their problem
is crappy media.
Now, just follow your normal procedure for playing backups, and away you go.
This method doesn’t work on dual layer ps2 games, but they’re so few and far
between that you really needn’t worry about it.
Section 8, Corrupted Downloads
So you’ve downloaded a file, got a million .rar’s, and you’re ready to extract.
One’s broken you say? Crap. You have a couple choices.
You can…delete the specific rar and restart the torrent. It’ll automatically grab it
again.
If you’ve already removed the torrent, you can re-find it and start to DL it again.
Double clicking on the file in Azureus, BitSpirit, or Bitcomet will bring up the “files”
list, where you can specifically select which files you want from the torrent,
obviously just select the broken one.
Lastly, you can load up the first rar into winrar by double clicking it. Choose
“tools” from the bar, select “repair archive” and point it to the .sfv file that came
with the rar group. It SHOULD allow winrar to step over the broken piece and
extract. Be aware that this method will probably result in losing a couple minutes
of your movie, or having a game that won’t work because some files will be
missing/incomplete.
Also, at this point, you can choose “keep broken files” from the extraction screen.
Again, this is NOT recommended for programs/games as you’ll be missing files,
and if done to audio/video/text you’ll be missing a chunk of the middle.
Section 9, Finding Torrents
First off, any torrent site worth its salt has a search area. Use it.
Second there are a couple sites that are clearinghouses for multiple sites. Those
sites are www.isohunt.com and www.torrentspy.com . At the date of publication,
torrentspy was generally giving better results than isohunt. Torrentspy also has a
Firefox search extension available for download, so that you can search straight
from the search area in Firefox.
One last trick. Google it. How you ask? Like this:
Fileyouaresearchingfor filetype:torrent
The filetype:torrent switch tells google to only return answers where you have
your file as a torrent. So, say you’re searching for the movie Gummo (the worst
movie ever made). Go to google and type in:
Gummo filetype:torrent
and see what you get. Nifty, huh?
Section 10, Firefox and torrents
Firefox spanks IE, end of discussion. However, firefox doesn’t like it when you
change clients, and I told you to experiment. Remember that, 25 pages ago?
Well, I did. Lots of firefox users have eventually run into the issue of having the
“ok” button grayed out when they click a torrent. And, after all, you want your
client to automatically open when you click a torrent, right? Well, here’s the
solution and no, I didn’t discover this. It took me half an hour of searching on the
firefox support forum boards. Remember I said search before you ask? Well well
well, lookie what I found:
The Bug:
When you click on a link to download the OK button is greyed out no matter the
option you choose. On here for example, when I try to click on a .torrent link it
was unavailable.
The Solution:
The problem lies in the MIMETYPES. Have you changed your settings as to what
program opens that file type etc? I changed BT apps about 4 times before I found
one I liked.
1. Exit Firefox
2. Navigate to your C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application
Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<whatever folder is there>
3. Open mimeTypes.rdf
4. Do a search for the filetype that isnt working (for example torrent)
5. Delete that section eg.
<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:handler:application/pdf"
NC:alwaysAsk="false"
NC:useSystemDefault="true">
<NC:externalApplication
RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:externalApplication:application/pdf"/>
</RDF:Description>
6. Repeat until all references to that filetype are removed.
7. Save file, and restart Firefox.
Section 11, Covering your Arse.
So in case you didn’t know, lots of people don’t like p2p. They’ll even try to track
you down for using it. These pieces of software cannot 100% protect you, but
they do a good job. If you cannot cope with the consequences of getting a mean
letter in the mail from Universal, don’t download pirated material. If you must, I’ll
explain how to use Peer Guardian to your best advantage.
UPDATE: BayTSP, the paid thugs of the MPAA, have recently announced a new
software that finds original seeders and the first 100 or so peers of a movie file.
In fact, this is NOT a remarkable thing, as all they’re doing is pulling the list of
IP’s off the tracker. Here’s where we get tricky, let me explain.
First, please understand that the MPAA and BayTSP are NOT
government agencies, they’re a private business and a trade union.
Secondly, they can SAY they’re going to do anything, and their millions of
dollars versus your dozens of dollars can be effective at scaring you away.
The FACT is, that your IP can be seen by anyone connected to the tracker.
However, just because you’re connected doesn’t mean you’re moving data.
That’s why, in the past and still currently, baytsp or other agencies will connect to
the tracker and actually begin to download the file, they’ll even seed it. Then,
when they physically connect to YOU and send/receive data from you, they know
you’re transmitting the file. Got it?
Their new software skips the part of proving you’re moving the file, and just
harvests IP’s. Then they send a nasty letter. Running PGlite or PG2 or protowall
or safepeer, etc, will theoretically prevent them from connecting to you assuming
your blocklist includes their IP. It probably does, I’d say 99.9% if you update
weekly.
What does that mean for you? Well, first off, if you’re reading this you’re not
releasing files, so you’re probably safe in the first place. Secondly, they still CAN
sue you, but the burden of proof is on them. You probably can’t afford to defend
yourself, so you get screwed. They can’t PROVE you transferred the file if they
can’t connect to you, and in any decent court, your being connected isn’t proof
enough that you pirated. However, since you can’t afford the lawyer, you hafta
pay.
What can you do? First off, don’t download movies w/I the first week of their
being released in theatres. After that, make sure your blocklist is up to date and
go from there. Remember, you agreed to hold me harmless in this. If you get
caught, it’s your own stupidity, and it’s not my responsibility.
Secondly, don’t download movies the day they come out on DVD either. Give it a
little while.
That’s about all I have to say, just be aware.
Google up PGLite and the Blocklist Manager. One’s from methlabs and one’s
from bluetack, don’t download them from ANYWHERE else, there are tampered
versions that don’t protect you from crap floating around.
As of the day of publication, Peer Guardian 2 had not yet been released. Peer
Guardian release candidate 1.14 was out, as was PGLite. I recommend PGLite,
as it uses the pg2 engine, which runs at kernel level and doesn’t eat your CPU
like PG1 does.
All versions of PG use a file called “Guarding.p2p” which contains ranges of IP’s
that have been identified as being nasty, i.e., people who don’t want you to
share.
PGLite is what we’re using for this demo. It runs from whatever directory you
extract it to. Install the Blocklist Manager. Follow these instructions:
• Open the Blocklist Manger. Go to tools/options.
• Select “App Locations” from the list, click “enable Peer Guardian
Integration” and show it where your guarding.p2p file is. It’s in the SAME
directory where you installed PGLite.
• Now click “Sources” You can choose as many or as few as you want.
Firefox+Zone Alarm blocks all spyware anyway, the wide IANA ranges
aren’t necessary either, but do what you feel like doing. Anti-p2p is a
MUST.
• Click apply, and ok, and you’re back at the main screen. Press “download
blacklists” and let it go.
• When it’s done, and it’ll take several seconds, make sure it’s finished and
then choose “Export/IP Blockers/To Peer Guardian” and it will
automatically overwrite the old guarding.p2p file and replace it. Now run
or restart PGLite if it was already running and download your heart out.
• I recommend repeating this procedure at least once a week.
• Some people will tell you that PG has an automatic utility to d/l the most
recent blacklist, or to use the one from the methlabs site. The truth is that
they update about once a month instead of once a week, and it’s really not
a very secure list. Do it yourself to make sure you’re protected.
• After you’ve done it, run PGLite and load your browser. Try to access
www.riaa.com, if you get a timeout error, then it’s working. If you can get
to the page, then it’s not, and download at your own risk. In fact,
always…download at your own risk.
Ok folks, that’s all there is for now. I might add more
Link:
http://blog.bitcomet.com/post/68554/
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