Ipredator and BitComet [Answered, thank you!]

[Veryverydangerous]

Hi,

Will Ipredator automatically change the IP-address for all my torrents, when using BitComet? Is there any way for me to check what IP-address my torrents declare as their origin?

With Regards

Veryverydangerous

Bitcomet v1.15

Unknown connection, but high speed.

Router unavailable to me trough a local network. I suspect NAT.

Windows XP pro sp3.

Windows firewall, avast antivirus, spybot.

[edit. topic, to mark end of thread]

Edited January 23, 2010 by Veryverydangerous (see edit history)

[greywizard]

It will mask your IP by substituting it with one of their own IPs, not only for your BitTorrent client but for any application you use, for as long as you use that VPN connection.

You can find more details on their site.

[kluelos]

Torrents do not have an origin to declare.

[Veryverydangerous]

Greywizard,

Thank you for clarifying that. I have read up on their site and quite a bit more, but I simply don't know enough about the technology to interpret whether or not the line really secures IP for all application. For example, I don't know if an application (like BitComet) would use my original IP regardless of proxies.

Kluelos,

As you have pointed out the flaw in my reasoning I'm sure you understand there are some prinsiples about what information the bittorrent technology passes on, and under which circumstances, that I do not know about. Could I bother you to clarify that, so that I'm able to understand how and why Ipredator will be able to switch the ip for all bittorrent clients?

Regards

[greywizard]

VPN networks are quite complex and in order to understand how they intimately work you need to have a firm grasp of networking basics.

However, in an overly simplified way, look at it like this:

Your computer connects to the Internet using a network interface card (NIC) (your LAN card, or wireless card or dial-up adapter or whatever) which makes the connection between your PC and the rest of the Internet. Your NIC is given by your ISP a public IP address which subsequently all the software applications on your system use in order to communicate with other hosts on the Internet (be they servers or peer hosts).

That's the IP address which is visible to all your BitTorrent peers while you're connected to them.

Now what VPN does is, basically, creating another virtual network "on top" of the existing network which takes its place and conceals the network layers "beneath", from the eyes of your software applications.

It also creates a virtual network adapter which will use a different public IP (the one that the Ipredator's server will provide in this case). Therefore all your applications will use this new IP for communicating with hosts on the Internet since they will see the virtual NIC as the new exit point of your PC towards the Internet (it will be only the VPN software which will still know your real IP assigned to you by your ISP).

All your connections will be transparently routed through the VPN servers (Ipredator's in this case) and all the other hosts to which you will connect on the Internet will see you with the IP address assigned by the VPN server.

Ipredator says that it will also encrypt your traffic so that it will be immune to packet inspection and therefore to traffic shaping.

Given the fact that they do not keep any logs of your activity on the server it is near to impossible to trace any of your activities on the net back to your real IP.

[kluelos]

The difficulty may be that you are thinking of bittorrent as a client-server technology like a standard http download where each downloader must go to the same particular server to obtain the file.

Rather, each peer gets a list of other peers who are interested in this particular torrent, from the tracker or via DHT or Peer EXchange. Then those peers connect directly to other peers on that list, and the peers exchange pieces of the torrent directly with each other. (The transfer of the data is from "peer to peer", which is what distinguishes this technology and why it's called what it is.)

Most of the pieces that you download come from other leechers, not from seeders. All leechers download AND upload at the same time, and that is both required and self-enforcing. A leecher is, in effect, a trade partner. Each trade is a mutual decision, and bittorrent's famous "greedy algorithm" leads it to seek out the best partner it can find. There's more to that, of course.

A peer could obtain the entire torrent without ever having contacted a seeder. Every piece, he got from somebody else who got it from somebody else who got it from the original seeder. And he could, theoretically, get no two pieces from the same source.

I made and seeded some torrents, put them up on Demonoid and seeded them up to where there were three or four other seeders. That took about three days. Then I just stopped. Those torrents are still going strong three years later but I haven't had anything more to do with them in all that time. They have a life of their own.

The peers find each other on the tracker or via DHT, but then it's all individual transactions between peers. This is much like the way a good joke spreads, and there's nothing to point back to whoever actually first thought of it.

When you're logged in to iPredator, your dealings with the outside world have an IP return address for iPredator, and it forwards that traffic to you. But iPredator makes no record of this, so as soon as the transaction is complete, there's no trace that it ever happened. Les flics can demand to know who was at the other end of IP such.and.such and iPredator can honestly answer, "I have no idea. There never was any record of that. If you'd asked me while the transaction was actually going on, maybe I could have helped you, but a microsecond later, I couldn't anymore.".

A server like download.com needs a fixed address so that it can be found. A bittorrent peer does not need a fixed address or even a DNS record. This is why you and all other peers can freely disconnect anytime, and reconnect whenver you like, using the tracker or DHT to re-find each other -- but because there are enough peers, all of the time, the system keeps working just fine.

You should note that this scheme will only work on a network like the Internet, where there are bajillions of people with diverse interests, connecting 24x7, all over the globe.

Bittorrent doesn't work at all on a private LAN with just a few people. It wasn't designed for that. We already had enough protocols for that kind of situation and didn't need another one.

[Veryverydangerous]

Greywizard,

Thanks a bunch! That's exactly what I was looking for and couldn't seem to find anywhere. An abstracted picture-view of the mechanic, in text. You might do well as a teacher, dude. I really appreciate it!

Kluelos,

You have provided me with some essential pointers as to where my knowledge failed. In particular that bit-torrents doesn't keep a DNS record. My skepticism towards proxies was rooted in the suspicion that bit-torrents does indeed transfer information collected by my client, about my identity. Thinking about it, it's a silly idea I suppose. Thank you for your answer, and for your time.

With Regards,

Veryverydangerous