Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Torrents and Seedboxes ...

Many people on line have tried downloading torrents, and then using a torrent engine like utorrent (read: microtorrent) to download a file (maybe the latest HOT movie?).  And inevitably you stumble upon a copyright holder who will file a C&D (cease and desist) against your ISP ... which get's you cut off (because your ISP tracks your IP address and times assigned).

Then, you think "I'll use a VPN and log in thru Hong Kong" so they can't track me ... and that is correct.  But the problem is that setting up a VPN and monitoring it 24/7 takes a lot of time and technical "know how" (at least in Windows it does).  When I tried a VPN, I found that often it would drop off, and my network connection would resume "in the clear" without notifying me ... very frustrating.

Finally, I found the best solution ... a seedbox.  If you don't know what that is, this article describes it better than I can.  But in brief, it is your 'friend' in some "non-tracking country", say The Netherlands, where privacy laws will keep you from ever being disclosed or discovered.  They download the file you want, and you FTP it from them, and since no one can track the contents of FTP activity, no one ever knows you downloaded a "copy-righted" file.

I used UltraSeedBox for over a year, and found that, while they had good pricing, over the last 6 months their Customer Support went to total crap ... so after they LOST my RSS feeds twice, I gave up on them and switched to EVO ... only $5/month, super support (at least at first), and you can even pay them with BitCoin if you REALLY REALLY REALLY want to stay anonymous (I don't, but you can).  But their stability went lacking after a year (they got a virus and wiped out all my RSS feeds and all the files I had stored there ... and offered no way to get them back ... even a "screen grab" to remind me of the files lost would have been nice ... but they just wiped my account and said "sucks to be you").  Also their web interface kept getting hosed up when I would load in a bunch of torrents ... so I  switched to SEEDBOX.IO. ... yes, it's $10/month for the basic package, but well worth it for the stability, speed, and super fast customer support.

Final note ...  if you don't use SEEDBOX.IO and decide to use something else, make sure you ask about PUBLIC versus PRIVATE trackers.  I tried one where only after signing up did I find that they would only work with PRIVATE trackers ... and you don't want that as the options available in the "private" torrents is pretty limited (IMHO).





Search This Blog

My Passions