14 DAY TRIAL // The Pirate Bay was shut down last week, after a Swedish police raid, and at this point, nobody knows for sure whether the website will ever come back or not.
But while some users and organizations are worrying that we’re rapidly moving to a censorship-based Internet, students and researchers at Delft University of Technology have come up with a solution that can actually boost privacy in an unprecedented way, while also making sure that the BitTorrent concept would never die.
Tribler is a BitTorrent client which uses a TOR-like anonymity system that protects users’ privacy and makes the whole protocol pretty much impossible to kill, no matter if servers, search engines, indexes, or trackers are shut down.
This client isn’t new and it was actually released in 2005, but given its state-of-the-art privacy system, it’s now making headlines, pretty much because of the closure of The Pirate Bay, which again raised some questions regarding our privacy online.
How it works
Tribler is first and foremost a BitTorrent client, so it can very well be used just like any other similar app out there that allows you to download files via this particular protocol.
But at the same time, it also includes its very own search features, so it doesn’t rely on a server to provide users with access to torrents.
Instead, users are directly served with torrent files from other PCs running the app, so as long as there are computers seeding specific files, it’s practically impossible to shut it down completely.
How it protects your privacy
In essence, Tribler hides all details of the seeder, so it doesn’t broadcast info such as IP addresses, which are most often used to determine the identity of the one who shares pirated content.
“We have implemented the main parts of the Tor wire protocol within Tribler. Instead of the TCP protocol that ‘the’ Tor network uses, we use UDP. The enables us to do NAT puncturing and traversal. We have created our own network using this Tor variant, our code is not compatible with normal Tor,” the official documentation of the app states.
There’s no doubt that the whole system also has its very own drawbacks, and the first that pops in one’s mind is lower download speed. Since computers are basically acting as proxies, it all depends on the Internet speed of other users as well, so you really need to be lucky to find only high-speed connections to be able to get the same download performance as with standard BitTorrent.
Tribler is also available on Android and more mobile versions could be released soon, and it’s pretty clear that the need for such an application is becoming critical for many users and organizations worldwide.
