Charter has decided to give its customers a speed boost. The new plans start at 3Mbps for $19.99 and go up to the Ultra plan of 100Mbps for $59.99 a month. But beware this is plans with a 12 month bundled contract, so if you just want the internet expect an increase in prices. It should also be noted that although the downloads are drastically increasing the uploads max out at 5Mbps for the Ultra plan.  The biggest concern that I see is that Charter does not mention if the bandwidth caps have been increased to match the new speeds or if they stayed the same.

Source | Engadget

You  may or may not know but in the past I was using SavvySeed as my Seedbox host. Well after having many unfortunate events with SavvySeed I was left on the hunt for a new host. After about a month I came across and finally tried out ByteSized and can say after the first month I am very satisfied with their service. Unlike many other Seedbox providers ByteSized offers some extra features such as VNC to log into your Seedbox and OpenVPN so you can really be discreet about your torrenting activities. I can say that I recommend them and if you are looking for a good Seedbox their prices are very competitive.

Some other cool features included that they don’t talk about is:

1. The ability to remotely restart your Seedbox through the online dashboard
2. Easily upgrade your seedbox
3. Great IRC community
4. Web Based VNC as well as Application Based.

A year ago I told everyone to use Proxy servers to avoid harassment from your ISP when downloading torrents, but now there are better alternatives. One alternative is to use a VPS host, known as a SeedBox, where you can download your torrents to at fast speeds. The key is they put the VPS servers in a country with no copyright laws making it NEARLY impossible for anyone to legally track the downloading to you. There are many benefits to make the switch to include;

1. Harder to track you because you don’t download any torrent traffic to your computer through the torrent network. Instead you download it through HTTPS or FTPS.
2. Faster speeds, most SeedBoxes limit around 10 or less users per server and each server has around a 100MB connection both up and down.
3. You are now able to share correctly. With this you can leave your uploading going and not fear a slow connection, eating up your bandwidth cap, or even getting caught redistributing the content.
4. Some Seedboxes offer additional services, like mine offers an HTTP proxy and was very friendly in getting me setup with some good private communities.

Seeboxes are not a alternative to proxies they are a better solution to avoiding the harassment, and doing anonymous torrenting. If you are interested go ahead and check out the provider I am using now (SavvySeedBox) they are wonderful. If you know of some other good providers please leave a comment.

With the popular torrent site ISOHunt redirecting its US users to a new “lite” version which basically renders it useless to US users due to the crackdown by MPAA, I have been on the search for a new service to use. Like many people have done in the past I’m sure we will all just find a new source or service to use instead of giving up and going fully legit.

If you ask me this is just power and money hungry “media whores” trying to get every penny from anyone and everyone. If you go to other countries like Iraq, you can purchase illegal copies of DVDs at 10 for $5 way before the movie even gets released to DVD much less theater. Makers of movies make enough money as it is off of box office profits and need to let us (We the people) be more free (In a free country).

FIRST ALTERNATIVE

So now the question is what are we going to use? I made a post earlier about how to proxy your torrents to better protect you from your ISP and help you search torrent sites that would regularly be blocked by your ISP. But unfortunately there is filters now being used by the popular torrent sites, filtering out torrents based on a word database called FileRights.  In the future they plan to use FileRights but have not yet. Below you will find a list of replacements I found so far. The list from top to bottom is my favorite to least favorite.

1. http://extratorrent.com/
2. http://torrentz.com/
3. http://thepiratebay.org/

SECOND ALTERNATIVE

Another alternative that you can still use until they and if they start using FileRights is to use a proxy server located in another country. I suggest you use a Canadian proxy as they are the closest to the United States. There are two ways to do this by altering your proxy settings in your browser or by going to an actual proxy site.

Proxy By Browser Settings List (Advanced)

Proxy By Site  List (No Setup)

Please let me know in a comment if there is anything better out there!

Check out my new article on, “Seedbox’s The Future Of Fast Anonymous Torrenting“.

Lately it seems Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been cutting down on people downloading content from BitTorrent sources. In the past it used to be a big deal with songs, now they have moved onto movies. A couple days ago I received a letter from our ISP explaining that one of the movies I downloaded was having its download activity being watched by the makers of the movie, and that I need to stop downloading copyrighted material, and delete any copyrighted material I have now. I talked around, and it seems that a lot of people have gotten more than one of these notices. So today I’m going to show you the steps I took to help avoid getting in trouble,  and help better protect your identity when downloading torrents.

Everything I’m going to talk to you about involves proxies. A proxy is just an alternative path to a source via a provider that keeps you anonymous. So for example instead of going up and telling someone “Hello my name is __ and I’m downloading your movies” , the proxy will do that for you and say “Hello my name is Proxy and I’m downloading your movies for someone who I can’t tell you their name”. Of course there is a lot of proxies out there, and with the right papers in some countries they can make that proxy reveal who the true downloader is (You), and that is why I use a proxy from Canada. Canada has some of the most strict privacy laws, helping this proxy keep its customers hidden.

How A Proxy Server Works

BTGuard (Torrent Downloading Proxy)

The proxy I’m using right now is called BTGuard. BTGuard is not a free service but there are no free torrent proxies I know of. It is also important to take note that going through a proxy your download speeds will drop, and if you use a free service to do this good luck downloading at all. With this any downloading I do is now going through a proxy, leaving my identity hidden.

Furk (Torrent Searching)

You should be doing pretty good keeping your identity hidden when it comes to downloading and uploading torrents but what about when we search for them? A lot of ISPs have been blocking torrent search sites and with a proxy you can get passed that. Although it is not required if your ISP is not blocking them, it is still a good idea to use it so your ISP does not know what you are searching for. My favorite service to use is Furk.net. It searches all my favorite torrent sites to include ISOHunt.com and ThePirateBay.

So now you are all proxyed up and ready to start downloading torrents again in complete privacy. Some sources also suggest turning off the seeding features in your torrent client but I DO NOT recommend this as it beats the whole purpose of torrents, and you are already hidden behind your proxy. Like I mentioned before, downloading will be a lot slower now, but just plan your downloads to start over night and/or turn the proxy off when downloading safe content (Just don’t forget to turn it back on).

Looking for a ISOHunt Alternative? Check out this article