FreeBSD Bittorrent and Utorrent for High-Speed ​​Anonymous File Downloads

In today’s digital age, privacy and security are more important than ever. When we share and download files online, we expose ourselves to potential risks and threats. BitTorrent and Utorrent are popular peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols, offering an easy way to transfer large files quickly. However, using BitTorrent without proper configuration can significantly slow down download speeds.

This guide will explain another way to download torrent files through a FreeBSD server using Tor. With Tor, your downloads are guaranteed to be undetectable, as everything is done anonymously.

Before reading this article, we recommend reading the previous articles, “Setting Up Tor and Privoxy for Anonymous Internet Surfing” and “Installing and Configuring TOR on a FreeBSD Server” as each article is related to the other. In the previous article, we discussed how to install TOR and Privoxy on a FreeBSD Server computer.

Currently, my Windows client computer uses proxies from TOR and Privoxy. The results are quite impressive: no sites are blocked anymore, and my public IP address uses a random public IP from the TOR server. So when accessing the internet, I no longer use my Indihome public IP address.

After successfully installing TOR on a FreeBSD server and using it on a Windows client, I became even more challenged to try TOR to connect with torrent clients like BitTorrent, Utorrent, and others.

A. System Specifications

In this article, we’ll try configuring torrent clients (BitTorrent and Utorrent) to download torrent files through the TOR and Privoxy networks. I won’t be covering how to install TOR and Privoxy. We’ll assume our FreeBSD server computer has TOR and Privoxy installed, with the following specifications:

• OS: FreeBSD 13.2 Stable
• IP Server FreeBSD: 192.168.9.3
• IP/Port TOR: 192.168.9.3:9050
• IP/Port Privoxy: 192.168.9.3:8008

For the Privoxy configuration file in the /usr/local/etc/privoxy folder, we forward it to the TOR IP/Port.

root@router2:~ # ee /usr/local/etc/privoxy/config
listen-address  192.168.9.3:8008
forward-socks5   /   192.168.9.3:9050 .

In the image above, the planning architecture of how to download torrent files via Utorrent to Privoxy and TOR as the final backend.

B. BitTorrent and UTorrent Settings

In this tutorial, we’ll practice using BitTorrent and UTorrent as clients running on Windows. We’ll assume both applications are installed on your Windows computer.

Now, open the BitTorrent program installed on Windows. In the Options menu, click Preferences.

Now let’s test it by downloading a torrent file. If there isn’t one in torrent format, download it first. If there is, open it with BitTorrent and see the download speed.

Now we continue testing with the Utorrent program, the steps are almost the same as the Bittorrent program.

Torrenting is a very popular activity, albeit a risky one. Unprotected torrenting on P2P networks can lead to various problems. Your personal data or identity could be stolen.

Besides being free and offering high anonymity, TOR, combined with Privoxy, has proven to offer promising performance for downloading torrent files. Perhaps this tutorial will help you make the switch and try TOR as a backend for downloading torrent files.