5 ways to download torrents on a network that has blocked them
DISCLAIMER: in no way this guide supports or endorses piracy via any means, the steps given below are for people looking to gain access to legitimate, legal torrents.
Piracy is a terrible thing. Anything that robs the creators of original content their due remuneration should be fought against and torrents have unfortunately emerged as the number one enemy. While it’s true that torrents have become synonymous with piracy, there are still legitimate uses of the medium.
With the war on torrents still strong, chances are you can’t download any because they are most likely blocked on your internet connection. Here are five ways you can bypass that block.
Virtual Private Networks
A Virtual Private Network or VPN for short, cloaks a user’s identity and location online giving people access to services otherwise not available in the country like Hulu or Spotify. These work great for torrents too, transferring data through secure channels and bypassing the block put in place by your Internet Service Provider or ISP. There are a ton of VPN Tunnels for torrents and a simple Google search should pull up the most popular ones. Do a bit of research and go through reviews for the VPN services, your ideal bet is to pick one that charges a nominal fee.
DNS Servers
Most ISP’s apply blocks at a DNS level. Domain Name System or DNS is a unique server put in place by your ISP that converts website names into IP address numbers, in most cases the ISP’s set up DNS servers to block certain IP’s. The way around this is to use freely available public DNS servers. Some of the popular ones are Google DNS, Open DNS and Comodo DNS.
Proxies
Proxies play the part of middle-men in relation to Internet traffic, they take your service request and forward them through their channels to the site you want to visit. Proxies aren’t reliable though, since your IP will still be sent to the site you are trying to access plus most proxies are usually blocked by ISP’s.
Seedbox
Seedboxes are virtual servers for torrents. They let you download and upload data in the same way that a browser sends data to a computer, which means to block them would mean blocking all access to the web. Seedboxes are usually paid and a quick Google search will show you the most popular ones.
The magical Port 80
If all else fails, you can switch to Port 80 for all data transfer in your torrent download application. Port 80 is a common port used for all HTTP data transfer and chances of it being blocked are low. The caveat here is the network speeds for this port will be miserably slow, since all bandwidth will be shared among data that is fighting to be transferred.
