A Conflagration of Randomness

Ip Filtering with Utorrent

December 9th, 2007 Robert Kania 3 comments

I am not writing this post to encourage copyright infringement, you risk your own safety when you download illegal content, but I am writing this because there are legal things that can be downloaded through the Bitorrent method and if you are against the Patriot Act, or just like protecting your privacy then here is an overview of what I consider the best Bittorent Client out there.

Weighing in at a meager 263 KB is the mighty uTorrent, able to be customized to a great amount of personalization. It not only is lightweight but packs as much punch as its biggest rival Azureus. Utorrent allows you to sort torrents by % Completed, Date Completed, Seeder/Leecher ratio, and a whole variety of others. It includes a user friendly system that is not bloated with ads or unnecessary junk like Azureus and shows you a simple list of all your current torrents.

However to get the most out of uTorrent, you need to enable some hidden features of the software.

Utorrent Download: http://utorrent.com

IP Filtering

One of the best features to protect your privacy in uTorrent is to enable IP Filtering. It blocks out all the bad IP addresses that could compromise your privacy.

To enable this feature first open uTorrent and press CTRL + P to open the uTorrent Preferences and then go to the Advanced menu and find the setting labeled ipfilter.enable and make sure its value is set to “true”. If not double click on the value and it should change to true. A picture is below.

Once you have done that it is time to get the .dat file that includes the IP addresses. To do so go to http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TZ1D5ZI2 and download to a directory where you know where to find it. The old file I used to get was a tarball and needed Winrar to extract, however this version is a ZIP. Once you have the ZIP extract it to a place you know where it is. You should now have a file named ipfilter.dat . Now comes the final step. If you are running Windows XP (which is what I use so if you don’t you will have to check documentation, go to Start -> Run.. and type “C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR NAME\Application Data\uTorrent” replace “YOUR NAME” with your username on your computer which should be easily found at the very top of your Start Menu when you open it. Now copy the ipfilter.dat into this folder and restart uTorrent. When you look in your logger on uTorrent, you should be presented with “Loaded ipfilter.dat (# entries).” If not you did something wrong so repeat the process.

Other Preferences

If you wish extra protection go back to Preferences and set your settings to the following:

Bittorrent:

Queueing:

The rest of the settings are pretty much configurable based on your system and connection. Fiddle around with them to see what works best for you. Happy LEGAL Downloading!