Can they track me if i download a torrent

The whole point of having an ISP is to use their services to provide you with a connection to the internet. That means that when you send or receive data — any data — it travels from your computer through your router and immediately encounters equipment owned and operated by your ISP.

Port 80 is web traffic, 25 is email, and so on. The justification is typically that file sharing protocols use up a great deal of the ISPs capacity, and thus have to be disallowed in order to provide adequate service to all of its customers. Of course your ISP also knows who you are. You pay them every month, they know where you live since they deliver the internet connection to your home. And they also know your IP address, since in order to connect to the internet at all they had to give the IP address to you.

Now all of a sudden your machine becomes implicated not in one copyright violation — your download — but as a source of dozens or hundreds of other copyright violations as you make that same movie available to others. Many file sharing protocols have begun to do exactly that: encrypt. The port number that defines what it is you are sending is not encrypted. It may change 25 is email, is typically encrypted email , but it still defines what it is you are sending.

Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week. They adamantly reject Peer to Peer downloading. Maybe the big guys can swallow the extra overhead. If you were sophisticated enough with respect to intellectual property law, you would understand that.

There are legal ways to download many of those movies which usually consist of paying for the rights, such as via Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and many others. But unless the owners of the copyrights give you permission, it is illegal in most countries. But It can be enforced as a civil matter; it is a tort. I agree,I do see the need for torrents,and these sort of programs, but they do have legitimate uses , not just piracy.

I myself have had the infringement email two times in just over two years. What you do is learn about the TOR network. Then you trip, and fall into the TOR, subsequently hitting your head, and your fingers hit download on one of the movies you missed due to your illness. The TOR does something to mask your identity online. Have you checked where all these people are living? Have you checked their offshore accounts to dodge taxes their implemented for the rest of us but are unwilling to pay themselves?

Some ISPs have traffic shaping which will actually slow down uTorrent. Theres encryption for getting past that, however its not good for anonymous the only thing it does is prevent passive listening, IIRC. In the same train of thought— if I am using a program such as PeerGuardian, how am I protected exactly? What information is hidden from 3rd parties, and how much if any is hidden from my ISP? Kind of like banning cars because some people drive when they are drunk….

Regarding email encyprtion you should clarify that port is typically TLS encryption which is just the credentials of the message — not the message itself. The one thing that has always puzzled me about this subject is this: With all the information the IP address of where content is being sent from, your IP address, etc.

From what I understand, the police need a court order or something to get information from ISPs. But Im not sure how hard those are to get. And a lot of them I imagine are outside of jurisdiction. Not since the Patriot Act. All ISPs are required to keep record of Internet traffic for years and let the government take a peek when it needs something.

Optic degrades 6 times faster than co-axial which means you have to strip it out and replace it every years otherwise it becomes useless. Cost for connection of fiber escalate out of sight compared to coaxial cable.

Coaxial is far easier to repair, resists damage where optic will crack, split, fracture, break and is a pain in the proverbial to join — joins further degrade efficiency. Not being too knowledgeable about bandwidths etc, I thought that all the massive movie streaming, tv catchups etc that were being urged to watch and my wife does due to the hours she works would use more bandwidth than just downloading file-sharing material or am I wrong?

I have music playing on the internet all day, am I being greedy? Getting back to the original question, I think I read somewhere that they can only track what we upload and not download, or am I wrong. How and what are the protections of this vs. And you wont know until the next bank statement.

P2P, in fact, is ludicrously amateurish, and you will discover that once you learn to use Google. Especially true if there was some sort of registration page agree to TOS, enter code on receipt, etc.

Your MAC address is unique to your computer aside from any hackery , and may have been tied to your purchase of said machine, or to your warranty, etc. So, tinfoil hat wise, sure it's easy to track an IP back to a person. And you can probably be sure that your generic commodity hardware had it's serial number somehow tied to your purchase and that serial number is tied to the MAC address of that machine.

And MAC addresses are assigned to vendors, so for instance it's easy to say you were using an Apple machine and know that they should contact Apple to find which machine has that MAC. In general, "law enforcement" does not get involved with tracking down individual downloaders of old music, movies, and TV shows. If for some reason the FBI is following you specifically around and snooping on your public wifi traffic, they could see stuff like torrent traffic.

And similarly if the FBI is sitting at your coffee shop monitoring wifi traffic to find people torrenting for some reason you could get caught that way.

Otherwise as other people have said, the best an outside observer who didn't know where you were could get is the IP address and the time, and could only match that up to you if the place you were connecting at saved records linking you to having connected with that IP address at that time. The more realistic way these sorts of things usually go is that the copyright holder or their representative monitors a public torrent tracker to collect IP addresses, and then sends nastygrams to the ISPs of each of the IP addresses, which the ISP usually forwards to the customer associated with that IP address.

In most cases, the ISPs have some sort of official or unofficial policy that if you get enough of those nastygrams they drop you as a customer. That would generally apply to your coffee shop or your neighbor, so either of them could lose their Internet access if you get caught downloading stuff from their connection. Everyone involved knows that it's inefficient to go after each infringer in court individually, so cases of individuals getting sued by copyright holders are relatively rare. No need to worry.

I download anywhere from 50 to have gigs a month in torrents and upload about to to I've been doing this for years, and haven't had a problem. Take Screenshot by Tapping Back of iPhone. Should You Upgrade to Windows 11? Windows Default Browser Workaround. Browse All Windows Articles. Windows 10 Annual Updates. OneDrive Windows 7 and 8. Copy and Paste Between Android and Windows. Protect Windows 10 From Internet Explorer.

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How-To Geek is where you turn when you want experts to explain technology. Visitors to the site could then type in their own IP addresses -- or any IP addresses -- and see a list of files they have downloaded via torrent. However, the operators of YouHaveDownloaded.

Downloading copyrighted media is illegal and companies have filed thousands of lawsuits against users. Even without engaging in illegal activity, Internet users have an interest in maintaining their privacy. Downloading anonymously through an application such as BTGuard is the only reliable way to throw the watchers off your trail, though BTGuard charges a monthly fee for keeping your IP address hidden from snooping computers.

When surfing the Web, blocking cookies and immediately deleting any that are automatically downloaded helps shield your activities from trackers.