A few factors converged and I made what it a pretty rare decision to try out a paid online service, Torrent Freedom. It’s really a great idea for a business (I wonder if it’s working out for them money-wise). The short form summary is that they create a sort of “ISP within an ISP”. The purpose of which is two-fold: 1. all of your traffic is encrypted 2. all of your traffic appears to originate from, and end at, their servers.
The first impetus towards wanting something like this was the news late last year that Comcast (my ISP) was screwing with their customer’s traffic.
Comcast is forging TCP RST packets which cause connections to drop (a technique also used by Internet censorship systems in China). These packets cause software at both ends to believe, mistakenly, that the software on the other side doesn’t want to continue communicating.
I knew this to be true because while running my Bittorrent client (Azureus), I noticed that once I was seeding, I had practically zero upstream traffic. In other words, my share ratio was close to nil. I, of course, figured I had messed something up, though for the life of me couldn’t figure out what. Not to mention it worked fine when used with another ISP. Comcast recently announced they would, by the end of the year, end that practice. But as this EFF article points out, ISPs will probably continue to fuddle with your traffic in some form without your knowledge. So, unless Comcast decides to start throttling all encrypted traffic (i.e. Canadian ISP Rogers), Torrent Freedom is a nice fix.
Another contributing factor is my plain curiosity to see something like this work. I’ve recently tried (though not a complete success yet) to create a VPN for my dad to use to connect to his office network while working remotely. The open source method for accomplishing this is OpenVPN, which is the code on which Torrent Freedom is built.
Torrent Freedom works by connecting you to their virtual network and assigning to your machine one of their IP addresses. Once connected, all traffic first travels to their servers, and is then forwarded along to its ultimate destination. The response routes back to their servers and is then forwarded back to you. It’s a definite excessive amount of hopping packets around, but it works.
To confirm this, I visited What Is My IP Address and saw a map pinpointing my location in……Holland. I followed the Visual Traceroute link and saw the traffic start at the site’s California server and end in lovely Bennekom, Netherlands.
The same page, from a different computer in the network, mapped me correctly to my hometown. Niffty.
The final piece in my decision to sign-up with Torrent Freedom was so that I could download TV shows without too much worry. I was reading through the comments at this Lifehacker entry, and noticed plenty of people reporting some form of “gotcha” when downloading HBO, NBC etc. shows. I had figured (naively) that because I never downloaded movies or music, I was pretty far removed from the “cease & desist” movement. The TV in our house has rabbit ears, and that’s it. But my wife and I love picking TV shows, downloading entire seasons, and making our way through them, one episode at a time (usually during that all-too-brief window of time between both kids in bed asleep and us not yet setting the alarm clock).
One last thing I wanted to show is the EULA you have to agree to when installing the Torrent Freedom client.
1. Some of the code in this client is opensource, and some of it has been custom-written. Please don’t steal the custom bits - we worked hard to build good code to extend the core OpenVPN technology. If you want to use it, contact us and we’ll license it to you. Just don’t steal it.
2. We can’t promise you that this little application will solve world hunger, untangle string theory, or teach humans to live together in peace. Instead, this client application is provided to you “as is” - just like a used car, only without the used part, and without the car.
3. If the application suddenly becomes possessed by a demon and does horrific things to your computer, please don’t sue us as it’s not our fault. We’ve tested it and we’re pretty sure there’s no demon-friendly backdoors, but we can’t pay you if it goes haywire, sorry.
May you walk the path in peace and find true wisdom along the way.