Six Ways to Bypass Torrent Connection Blocking and Throttling

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With the massive increase in popularity of torrents many ISP’s have started throttling torrent downloads (i.e. limiting download/upload speeds) and many colleges and universities are blocking torrents outright. Bypassing these techniques can be laughably easy or maddeningly confusing depending upon the technique employed for limiting or blocking torrent downloads. Here are some possible solutions:

1. Https Proxy: This is will work only if you are lucky and your system administrator is really dumb. Sometimes all that the system admin does is block all .torrent files. Getting around this is ridiculously simply. Just use some https proxy website ( like https://proxy.org/ https://proximize.me/ or https://launchwebs.org/ ). Otherwise simple go ahead and paste the torrent URL in TXTor, it will change the file extension to .txt so that it will be loaded normally in your browser. Once the file is completely loaded simply save it as a .torrent file and add it to your torrent downloader. However this would only work for public torrent files.

2. Encrypt Torrent Traffic: Smarter ISPs analyze the traffic to detect torrent downloads. One way to get around this is to encrypt the data. Most popular torrent clients support data encryption. You can set your encryption level in uTorrent from Preferences->Bittorrent. Vuze users can do the same through Tools -> Options -> Connection -> Transport Encryption. A detailed guide to encrypting torrent traffic is available here.

3. Torrent Relay: While encrypting traffic will probably get you around ISP throttling (e.g. Comcast torrent throttling) it won’t help you if your administrator is blocking ports used by torrent clients. This is where Torrent Relay comes in. It is a browser based torrent downloader that acts as an intermediate between you and the torrent tracker. You provide Torrent Relay with the torrent file; it will download the file to its own server and serve you the http links to the file (now residing in its server). However, this service is not free and costs minimum of $ 9.95/month.

4. Furk.net: This is service is quite similar to Torrent Relay. Once again the torrent is downloaded and stored on Furk’s server and you are provided the http download link. This service isn’t free either. It costs €10/month.

5. Imageshack Torrent Downloader: Imageshack – the popular image host, also provides an identical service. It provides 5.0 GB disk space and 10 GB bandwidth every month for free. Additional disk space and bandwidth can be purchased. But be cautious if you use torrents to download copyrighted material, as it is prohibited by their terms of service.

6. Xunlei/Thunder: Xunlei or Thunder is a little known Chinese download manager (though its insanely popular in China). If you can’t afford to pay then this option is worth trying. Besides being the fastest http download manager I have come across Xunlei also handles torrent download. It fakes the torrent headers and disguises torrent downloads as http downloads. It downloads using standard http ports so Xunlei should work even if your administrator has implemented port blocking. You can download Xunlei from here and the English translation is available here. Extract the “en_us” folder to “ThunderLanguages” and select Languages->English(US) from ??(V) (3rd menu option). Not only that, Xunlei is faster than most other popular torrent clients like uTorrent or Bitcomet. This is the option I would recommend, however be aware that Xunlei is known as a leeching client and is frowned at by many.

Did these techniques work? Do let us know.

Tags: Software