IPRED and Encrypting BitTorrent Traffic

The Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive or IPRED was implemented on the 1st of April in Sweden (yes on the home of The Pirate Bay and no it wasn’t a April fool’s day joke). The law states that copyright holders can ask Internet Providers for downloader’s information, if and only if the copyright holders suspect that you have downloading their content “illegally”.Copyright holders can’t just go to the ISP and ask them for the information of all their customers.

Swedes got a bit scared and it was claimed by BBC that there was a decrease of 33 percent of the countries Internet Traffic. I guess fear doesn’t give you time to reason that the cost of casing downloaders is greater than the benefit. Or maybe is cultural of following the rules. This is and always will be a “cat and mouse” game and based on a article from Wired traffic will go up:

Swedish Pirate Party vice president Christian Engstrom said he expects P2P traffic to rise again, once people figure out how to use secure settings and encryption to share files without revealing their IP addresses to copyright holders.

Although many people can use BitTorrent, even if they don’t know the internals of the protocol and their [BitTorent] clients, it is simple to encrypt the traffic even if you don’t know (or want too) nothing about it. So, below you will find a small guide on how to do it in uTorrent.

By the way if you want to read the IPRED law, here is it.

Encrypting BitTorrent Traffic in uTorrent

This how to, is for uTorrent 1.8.2, but will work for most versions.

First thing, you need to do is go to Options and then Preferences (or Ctrl+P) as show in the image bellow.

Then the preferences screen will appear,  click on BitTorrent option as shown bellow.

Direct your attention to Protocol Encryption and in the ComboBox for Outgoing, select Forced. Then uncheck “Allow incoming legacy connections”.

Let me explain what we have done. First in the Outgoing part we told uTorrent to Force encryption in all outgoing connections. This means that if the other parties don’t have the Protocol Encryption enabled, they will not be able to connect to them. Enabled attempts to encrypt outgoing connections, but will fall back to an unencrypted mode (or Disabled) if the connection fails. This means that if you used Enabled, there is a chance when you can’t find peers using encryption, you will download using a unencrypted (unprotected or transparent) connection. By unchecking the legacy option, we are only permitting incoming encrypted connections.

Final Comments

There you go, now you can sleep well while your computer is downloading all your favorite media. However, it may hurt your download speeds because not everybody is encrypting traffic, therefore it will be less peers from where you can download the pieces of the files. Finally, remember that it takes a lot (of effort and resources) to go after everybody and gather evidence, to then have permission to get your information from the ISPs. In the long run, maybe every download will be done through encrypted connections and don’t is not bad at all.