If you happen to use a bittorrent client such as utorrent, if you’re smart, you’re also using it with a VPN. Some ISPs will choke off traffic to peer-to-peer services and, of course, privacy when you are using a bittorrent client is always a good thing.
To get the best possible security, you want a dedicated VPN router. There are many different vendors for these devices and many of our preferred VPN providers offer support for them. They are not uncommon or particularly expensive hardware and, for people who really want to protect their privacy, they are absolutely the best solutions for using bittorrent.
For users who don’t have a dedicated VPN, the other option is to use a VPN service on their computer, generally with the client provided by the VPN company to connect. No matter how reliable a company is, it is inevitable that the VPN connection will drop from time to time. A VPN router will take care of this problem, but if you don’t have one, you need to make certain that your bittorrent software shuts down if the VPN connection happens to drop. There are ways you can do this.
You’re Still Going
Unless you have a VPN service that has a client that automatically kills your Internet connection when your VPN drops, your torrent program will still be going after your connection has been rendered unsecure. This means that, if your traffic is being watched, whoever is watching it can then see exactly what you are doing.
There are programs available that can automatically shut down a given program if the VPN service drops. These, however, are only available for Windows computers. If you happen to be using the utorrent program on a Macintosh computer, you are at risk.
Vuze, a different option for using bittorrent, offers a feature that allows you to force the program to route through VPN, which is a viable solution for people on Macintosh computers. For people on Windows computers, VPN Lifeguard and other options can shut down your torrent program should your VPN drop. Most of them will allow you to select multiple programs, so you could also close out your web browser and anything else you happen to be using over a network.
The router option is, by far, the most secure one. However, given that not all users are going to go ahead and switch over to a VPN router, using one of the programs that will kill your application or, at least, not using utorrent or other programs that don’t force a connection through a VPN with a Macintosh is advisable.
Useful Links:
• VPN Lifeguard — http://sourceforge.net/projects/vpnlifeguard/
• Vuse — http://www.vuze.com/
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