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Torrenting is a highly controversial subject. Moreover, it has been like that not just for the past few years but ever since the ability to use the torrent network came around. It is sometimes hard to believe that torrenting has been around for the better part of two decades. So, the knowledge about torrenting is critical not only for the fact that hundreds of millions of internet users access these portals every day for both legal and illegal purposes but because torrenting has become a culture in itself. Frankly, the majority of this is illegal, but that is not ours to say. What we’ve come here to do is to professionally and most importantly securely guide you through the process of torrenting in 2022. Again, the emphasis here is not to encourage people to download pirated material but to guide the enormous amount of users already using torrent apps and torrent portals to a better, safer way to do just that.
What is Torrenting?
Torrenting, as many of you may already know, is a very well-known but scandalous way to download files. Many a government has tried to shut it down, several torrenters have been incriminated, but alas the legend lives on to this day. For those of you that have not heard of torrents, the first thing that comes to mind is torrential rainfall or a torrent of water. In actuality, this is very close to the truth of the matter. Let us explain.
The name BitTorrent is derived from two things. The first word, ‘bit’ comes from a unit of storage or data. The second word, ‘torrent’ is a comparison to torrential movement. So, this alludes to the torrential movement of data across a network which is exactly what torrenting is all about. The technology itself was created by programmer Bram Cohen in 2001 when the internet was still quite slow and undeveloped. In 2017, 16 years later, BitTorrent, Inc. released the BitTorrent v2 protocol that we use today.
BitTorrent is a communication technology for file sharing between multiple computers on a large international network, called P2P for short. This technology enables the distribution (upload and download) of files (particularly large files of multiple gigabytes) in a decentralized manner over the internet. Torrent portals come in all shapes and sizes, both legal and illegal. Perhaps you’ve heard of some infamous portals like The Pirate Bay, which has stood the test of time even though some of its staff are in jail. On the other hand, there are portals where you can find documents and other completely legal research information which can be handy for journalists, academics, and the rest. However, as we said earlier, pirated (copyrighted) material is most often associated with ‘torrenting’ because simply put, that is what the majority of torrent portals host online. This can be anything from video games to TV series that are offered for free by uploaders registered on these torrent portals.
Today, there are multiple BitTorrent ‘clients’ (apps) to choose from and even more portals to download material from. There are even open-source clients available, so torrenting is still very, very popular and accessible. Some of you may have heard of BitTorrent (sometimes referred to as QT) clients such as uTorrent and Transmission which are used to download torrent links from portals such as The Pirate Bay, 1337x, Kickass, and several others.
How to Torrent Safely and Efficiently
Whether you’ve decided to torrent the legal way or the illegal way, that is ultimately up to you. What we can do for you is to guide you in the correct direction to utilize BitTorrent technology and its many variations and platforms to the safest and most efficient level. Unfortunately, the downloading of pirated material has incurred billions of dollars in losses to the industry. Likewise, it is not a sustainable practice to rid the world of pirates. More than that, it is impossible. For every pirate caught, there are thousands more in the shadows. For every torrent portal brought down, dozens of anonymous backups will be online within the hour. Let’s forget about pirates for a minute and think about you. You want to download one of the latest AAA games from The Pirate Bay, for instance. This game is at least 60 gigabytes in size. That’s all fine and dandy, however, depending on where you are in the world, you might get penalized for doing such a thing. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Net Act, DMCA fines, CFAA fines, and several more protection systems might track you down to your device’s unique public IP address and come knocking on your door.
Now, what is there to be done about this? Well, there are a couple of things you can do to reduce the possibility of the above happening to almost zero. First of all, you need a Virtual Private Network or VPN, and secondly, you need a web browser where you can adjust your internet visibility. In most cases, connecting to something like a ‘Double VPN’ (multi-hop) VPN server via a premium VPN provider like NordVPN will more than suffice. On top of that, you must ensure that your browser blocks fingerprinting and third-party cookies. Finally, your browser has to be able to allow you to disable both the WebRTC and WebGL elements so that you cannot be identified. So far, only a few browsers have been able to do this. For instance, Mozilla Firefox Nightly gives you this option on Android. Unfortunately, on iOS, you need to download a separate extension known as uBlock Origin to mimic this process. For smartphones, it is a bit difficult, but browsers are much more customizable on laptops anyway.
So, there you have it. If your wish is to download pirated material online, you certainly have the option to do so. Before you do that though, make sure you follow the steps above so as to minimize your online presence and anonymize your public IP address!
