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Filed under: Web services, P2P, Beta

A trio of practical anonymous torrenting options have arrived

It was only a matter of time before the P2P community came up with some workable options for anonymizing our activities. Sure, Tor has been able to do it for quite some time, but torrenting is very taxing on the network and transfers can be painfully slow. Recently, however, three new services have appeared that could provide the privacy protection we've been waiting for.

iPredator VPN - We've known this one was coming for a while. The beta launch date got pushed back quite a bit, but that little courtroom skirmish may have slowed things down a little. In a blog post yesterday, the iPredator team announced that the first 3,000 beta invites have been sent out. If you're in the queue, don't start drooling just yet. There are 179,999 others names lined up.

Furk (pictured)
- Find a torrent, paste it into Furk, and you're provided a direct download link. Even with the free account, I still averaged about 275k/s, which isn't much slower than what I typically manage on a straight torrent download (thanks to my ISP). Download links are also passed to you with SSL encryption. Just don't use it to download stuff like what's in the capture - it's there for illustration purposes only, of course...

Paid accounts are just under 10 Euros a month or 24/three months.

BitBlinder
- Jay posted about this service the other day. The open source project aims to anonymize not only torrent downloads but also your web browsing. How does it work? Think of your Internet traffic as the fruit in a smoothie. Now take all your friends' fruit, chuck it all into a blender, and press 'liquify'. Pour it into a glass, and all you see is smoothie - you can't tell what's your fruit and what belongs to your friends.

As with iPredator you may be waiting a while to get your invite and download link.

Filed under: Internet, P2P

Pirates abandon ship as IPRED law kicks in

It's no secret that P2P traffic makes up a huge percentage of the total traffic on the Internet. Also no secret is that fact that some portion of that traffic is used for nefarious purposes like downloading movies that haven't been released or software that Microsoft doesn't want you to have yet.

Yesterday, the IPRED era was ushered in for Swedes, and an incredible 33% drop in Internet traffic followed. The vice-chair of Sweden's Pirate Party, Chrisitian Engstrom, said the decrease was a direct result of the new law.

Under IPRED's provisions, service providers can now be ordered by the court to turn over detailed information about traffic to a user's IP address. It remains to be seen whether or not the logs will be enough to be constitute sufficient proof for charges laid against file sharers.

It's an obvious scare tactic, but one that has proved effective for now. Even if only 1,000 of Sweden's 2 million-plus file sharers are prosecuted (as Engstrom proposes), that may not be a gamble the average downloader wants to take.

The P2P community has historically come up with ways around this kind of "annoyance." PirateBay's Ipredator service is coming, and may provide users with a simple and inexpensive way to avoid logging.

Do laws like IPRED keep you from downloading via P2P?

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Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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