have received 2 warning emails

[zardave]

*** Topic moved from BC general section ***

i have received 2 warning emails from aol about file sharing. my account is through verizon but it includes aol. dont really know why the warnings would come through aol but they did.

because this was not my primary email address i didnt notice the warnings till i had two of them. im using xp home,peer block,bitcomet 1.25, verizon dsl,westell 6100 router, dlink ethernet broadband router.

im wondering if there is anything i can do to better hide my ip address. would appreciate any suggestions or information on this issue.

thank you.

[greywizard]

The only good measures you can take to minimize the chances of getting on their black list would be:

• making sure you use updated lists for your PeerBlock app;
  
• staying away from "hot" new torrents which will keep you away from most of the "honey-pots" which MPAA and RIAA set up on the Internet;
  
• activating the encryption option in your client;
  

This by no means grants you anonymity, it just sets the chances of being targeted to a fair low level.

If you aim for complete anonymity, you should look towards a VPN service such as IPredator or HideMyTorrent. But you'll have to pay a monthly subscription fee for those.

[kluelos]

You may also want to change ISP's if you can.

It's good to remind your ISP which one of the parties is paying for the service, and which one is paying nothing while insisting that it threaten its customers.

[zardave]

ive changed my protocol encryption setting from "auto detect" to "always" if that helps.

would a proxy server setting help me, at this time i have no proxy. information on this ?

as far as "vpn", there seems to be a number of them for free (download.com, majorgeeks.com) but it seems theres a low limit for available use or bandwitdth, any experience with

these, there might be a good one, i dont think i want to get into a subscription. thank you for your response.

[greywizard]

Free VPN services may be appropriate for standard outgoing connections but BitTorrent proper functioning relies heavily on incoming connections for each peer (i.e. on the ability of others to reach you and initiate connections to you as well).

I really doubt that you will find such an offer on the free ones, therefore you'll have to run your client in no-listen mode and hence with seriously crippled speeds.

A proxy might be a solution if you find an anonymous one which doesn't keep logs. I've never used one for this (torrenting) so I can't tell you more.

[kluelos]

If there were a free VPN service, everybody would pile into it and quickly exhaust its bandwidth. (See "The Tragedy of the Commons".)

Then nobody would get enough to bother using it. (This has happened a couple of times that I know of.)

This is why the TOR project forbids using it for P2P.

[The UnUsual Suspect]

I'd consider getting rid of AOL, its not doing anything for you really, it isn't providing your internet, and you're not getting anything you can't get without it. Verizon is probably the best ISP, get their FiOS service if its available where you live. I don't think verizon would send a letter like this, but aol has a horrible history of treating paying customers very bad.

[zardave]

about 10 years ago aol was my provider,i was paying for dial up. then when dsl became available aol offered me a decent deal that switched my ip to verizon,

the deal was called "verizon dsl with aol". i dont know what the "aol" had to do with it because as soon as aol quit getting my money they deny any support services etc.

cant even get them on the phone because im not a paying member.

the same deal anyone could get just logging onto the aol site. anyhoo, i rarely use my aol screen names which is why i didnt notice i already had two warnings from verizon

via aol. had verizon mailed me directly to my primary verizon email i would have known about the warning after the first one (real time with bill maher)which is being tracked by hbo.

i called verizon but the person was difficult to understand, she seemed to be saying that aol handles their infringement notifications. doesnt really make sense to me.

the mail came from notification@copyright.verizon.net to my aol email address. i emailed verizon asking why they didnt notify me directly and asked to be resent any complaints

to my primary verizon email and they havent responded. i have to wonder how concerned they are if they sent warnings to secondary contact locations.

ive switched to my firewall companys servers,secure dns configuration which probably doesnt help this situation but thats where i am now.

[greywizard]

Setting the encryption option to "Force" will grant you only encrypted connections with any peer, therefore the BitTorrent traffic you generate won't be transparent to your ISP and this should be keeping you away from most of the nosy actions they may take to inspect your traffic. On the down side, not every peer supports encrypted connections so you may loose a share of the peers for each swarm.

However, if an ISP really wants to monitor what you're downloading you're not entirely safe. Your client needs to obtain first a peer list from a tracker, DHT or PEX in order to initiate any download and if the ISP really inspects your traffic seriously they can retrieve those lists as well as the info-hash and that may still constitute proof of participating in a torrent swarm.

I don't know if they involve this method as grounds for sending the letters you received but this method is being used by some ISP in order to throttle or hinder BitTorrent traffic for their clients.

In order to avoid that, you'd need to use secure connections with the tracker (HTTPS) but not many trackers support that AFAIK.

Anyway, I'm not sure that your ISP is the originator of these letters per se. Most of the anti-P2P agencies usually notify your ISP, whomever that may be, of your copyright infringement and many of the ISPs (depending on the country where you live) are more or less forced to come "knocking on your door" so to speak.

OTOH AOL is already sleeping in the same bed with a giant media company which has some movie studios in its pocket so they may have a direct interest here.

[kluelos]

Well, let's understand that nobody's really snooping on your traffic. They don't have to. All they have to do is join the swarm, then they get a list of peers' IP addresses just like your client gets. (Legally now, this puts them in a pretty ambiguous position, but they're not really doing legal, they're doing threat.)

This is, basically, an MPAA shill who does that. Then the MPAA sends a complaint to the owner of the address-block. (That's likely how AOL gets involved at all.) But you can see that no amount of encryption is really going to help. ISP's generally don't care about P2P, it uses bandwidth and they sell bandwidth. They do have to go through the motions if they get a complaint, or at least think they do. The question is, how serious the ISP is about it, and it sounds to me like the answer is, "not very". Much depends on what the letter actually said, but I suspect it's just a form letter.

IF the second letter is the same as the first one, and doesn't even mention the first one (this is your second warning, etc.), nothing indicating that this is a response from a person who actually cares about this, then they probably don't. I would still avoid the hot popular downloads though. Just as well, the quality of such torrents is usually dreadful.