Technology Reviews

Are you troubled by the firewall at your workplace or schoool or college? Unable to download your favourite songs or movie or software using torrent clients?Tried tweaking utorrent(or other torrent clients) , but still no effect?

Here is a small procedure which might be the solution to your problem……..Read on…….

Though different firewalls have numerous methods to block the torrents, assuming you have tried most of the basic methods of trying to unblock the torrents ,this method might work for you.Also assuming that your problem is not downloading the .torrent file and you already have the .torrent file with enough seeds. ( you may use numerous online proxies available on net to download .torrent file if your network firewall doesn’t allow you to download .torrent files.

Follow these steps:

1. Solution for blocking BitTorrent protocol - Protocol Encryption

Firstly you need any torrent client (bittorrent,vuze,utorrent etc) with the facility of PE (protocol encryption).Using protocol encryption allows you to prevent ISPs from identifying the data being sent through the P2P client.

How to do it:

For Windows users, I recommend uTorrent. I like it because it’s lightweight and straightforward but still supports the needed features.

http://www.utorrent.com/downloads

For Windows/Mac/Linux, Azureus(now called vuze)is also another option

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/download.php?os=1

I would display the procedure with utorrent.Similar steps can be followed in other torrent clients.

Options > Preferences > BitTorrent > Protocol Encryption ( last frame)

Outgoing: Enabled ( you may also try the option -‘ forced’)

Allow Incoming Legacy Connections: Checked

If you’re not using uTorrent, it shouldn’t be hard to find something like that in your client’s configuration.

2  Solution for  blocked tracker connections and  blocked download of .torrent extensions - Proxy Server

What we need is a connection to a proxy server.There are numerous proxy servers available online which one may use.Utorrent(or other proxy clients) lets us proxy the tracker connection without proxying the actual peer to peer connection.This lets us hide a connection to the trackers , thus the torrents can see who to initiate the transfer with. The PE is enabled already so it tunnels the the data with the encryption and provides the cover for the data.

How to do it:

There are numerous proxies on the net to work with.You may obatin their list by googling them but I tried many of them and none seemed to work perfectly with my torrent client.Some didnt support torrent clients ,some had download limits. So I used proxy software called Your Freedom.

• Register here.
• Once you register and verify your account by clicking on the verification mail , it’ll let you use its numerous servers.
• Download the software from download section.
• Configure the software and it’ll automatically select the appropriate server based on various conditions like your geographic location,your connection etc.

Use Wizard to configure YourFreedom.

3.Configure torrent client :

You also need to configure your utorrent to enable connection through server of Yourfreedom. With uTorrent :

Options > Preferences > Connection > Proxy Server

Type: Socks4

Proxy: localhost

Port: 1080

(make sure you have “use proxy server for peer-to-peer connections” UNchecked)

Open YourFreedom and click on Start Connection tab.Thats it, done. Now see your torrents downloading your favourite downloads.

Note: It has been noticed in some cases that the speed using the proxy is not as much as using the torrent client without firewall.But nonetheless, it is better to compromise a bit on speed rather than unable to download at all.