5 Best VPNs for Torrents and P2P File Sharing

Torrents have become incredibly popular for sharing files online, and as networks continue to grow for P2P file sharing, increasingly more people are tuning in to this massive content sharing system. Of course, there are inherent security risks with any type of file sharing. This, coupled with the fact that the content of torrent files is usually something copyrighted, such as music or movies, is making users look deeper for ways to protect their privacy and stay anonymous.

Most people have at least basic anti-malware software installed on their devices, which is really helpful in screening files that may have viruses tucked away in them somewhere. However, this type of software really doesn’t do anything to secure your actual connection, it just secures your device.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and VPNs have answered the call. VPNs - Virtual Private Networks—offer users a secure and anonymous connection, along with global access to any content they want, regardless of their location. Not all VPNs are created equal though, and if you’re frequently downloading and sharing torrent files, you’re going to want a VPN that’s fast enough to get the job done.

Here are the top five VPNs for torrents and P2P file sharing, and how they compare in terms of price and connection quality.

#5. EarthVPN

Monthly Rate: $3.99

EarthVPN is a great, simple way to protect your privacy online. The connection is relatively fast - definitely fast enough for downloads - and the rates are some of the lowest you’ll find. Although the software is simple and the website doesn’t seem like much to look at, these guys offer loads of features and provide one of the better VPNs I’ve seen.

EarthVPN has the strongest 256-bit encryption available, so your connection is secure from snoops and hackers on public networks. You also get unlimited bandwidth, so there’s never any worry about hitting a monthly cap.The software is compatible with all major operating systems, and even allows three simultaneous connections, so you can use it on just about any device. The only real drawback? No live chat support.

#4. TunnelBear

Monthly Rate: $4.99
 

Okay, I am a huge fan of TunnelBear. The prices are low, the software is great, and let’s face it, the TunnelBear marketing gimmick is downright cute. These guys really know how to sell a product, and their product is awesome all the same.

TunnelBear’s encryption is tough stuff—256-bit and military grade, with settings in the software that you can use to optimize your connection for speed versus security. While TunnelBear is not compatible with Linux, it works on just about everything else—Windows, Mac, Android and iOS.What I love about TunnelBear is how easy it is to use. There is no manual connection configuration and no compressed files to mess with. It’s a simple download and install procedure. To top it all off, they even offer a free version to take for a spin before you sign up for a service plan.

#3. HideMyAss

Monthly Rate: $9.99

Where HideMyAss really shines is its server network. Often, the speed of your connection can really be impacted by the number of servers a VPN has. Too few and there’s not enough bandwidth to go around, not enough locations and you can have a hard time establishing a reliable connection. However, with servers in 190 countries, HideMyAss has one of the largest networks in the world.

With HideMyAss you get software that is compatible with just about every operating system but Linux. You can also use their software simultaneously on up to two devices.The customer support is really comprehensive too, with 24/7 help available on their live chat, phone and e-mail support lines. With unlimited bandwidth and a 30-day, money-back guarantee, there’s not much to lose by giving these guys a try.

#2. IPVanish

Monthly Rate: $10.00

IPVanish is another great VPN to try, with unlimited bandwidth and up to two simultaneous connections under one account. The one major drawback with these guys is that their software isn’t compatible with iOS, so mobile Apple users won’t have much use for it.

However, they do offer 24/7 customer support, with a live chat feature on their website you can use for immediate assistance and an e-mail ticket system for less pressing issues. Plus, they offer a 7-day refund policy for customers who do not find the service works well for them.

Like most other VPNs, IPVanish offers unlimited bandwidth and 256-bit encryption, plus a huge network of servers. Their network includes locations in 60 countries, so wherever you are, you should be able to connect with IPVanish.

#1. ExpressVPN

Monthly Rate: $12.95

ExpressVPN is definitely the best VPN I’ve ever seen. The software is incredibly simple and user-friendly, and the support staff is awesome when you need some assistance. They have the standard e-mail and live chat support, but what’s really incredible is that they usually get back to you within 20 minutes of sending them an e-mail—totally unheard of in this business.

The software works on all operating systems, including Linux, so you can use it seamlessly on all of your devices. It allows two simultaneous connections too—one on a mobile device and one on a home connection.

They offer a rock solid 30-day, money-back guarantee and will give you a refund—no questions asked—if you decide their service isn’t for you. If you do decide to keep it, you can even get a month of free service for you and a friend through their unique referral program.

Their connection is lightning fast, thanks to their massive server network, and with unlimited bandwidth, you’ll never have to worry about too many torrent downloads. Hands down, ExpressVPN is absolutely the best VPN for the job, and worth every penny.

Even if you only do your file sharing at home, most countries have government surveillance programs for internet users, so your connection is anything but anonymous. With a VPN, you get an IP address and access to remote servers to make your connection totally untraceable back to you. ExpressVPN is, in my opinion, the best VPN to keep you protected.

If you’re on public networks frequently, this software is particularly indispensable. These networks are absolute hotbeds of criminal activity, and hackers specifically target them to infiltrate your connection and steal your information. With an encrypted tunnel for your web traffic, your information stays secure from your device to the server.There’s no need to get paranoid and modify your routine—share away, my friends. But messing with torrent files can be a bit like a virtual game of hot potato, so be smart. Protect your devices with anti-malware software, and always use a VPN to keep things private and anonymous.

Taking action when someone has copied your blog without permission

This article is about the steps you can take when someone has made an unauthorized copy of something that is published on your blog.

Finding out that your blog has been copied

Previously, I've described how copyright applies to blogs in very general terms, and the steps you can take to apply copyright protection to your blog.

Even if you follow these these steps, if you put material onto the internet it is quite likely that someone will copy it.

This maybe done out of naivety, or as a deliberate attempt to rip you off, or as part of an organised spam-blogging ("splogging") operation.

There are several way you might find out that someone has copied your work:

• You, or your friends, notice it
  Maybe you or one of you readers searched for a certain phrase and you found your content elsewhere.  Or maybe you found a link to an identical post on a help-forum or discussion board.  If you use a lot of in-post linking (ie you link to another article in your content), and notice you are getting a lot of visits from somewhere unusual, then you might visit that site and find your post copied word-for-word, including the unchanged links.

• Google's spam bots notice it:  
  If you get an email or a notice saying that your blog has been identified as potential spam, then one of the possibilities is that a real spammer has chosen your content.

If you found out that someone has copied you work because Google's spam-bots detected the problem, then you simply need to follow the instructions in the email that Google sent you, or consult the Blogger Help Forums.  In short, you will be advised about a four step process that you need to follow.   This is tedious, but the nice part is that Google is dealing with the copy-cat for you, and (if you're not a spammer) you'll get your blog back.

If you find out some other way, then you need to decide what do to about the problem (if indeed you believe is is a problem).   This is closely linked to what you want to achieve - this could be any of:

• Do nothing - if you don't mind being copied, and you're willing to risk being incorrectly identified as a spammer
• Getting the copied work taken down
• Leaving the copy in place, with your name or URL  added beside it
• Being paid compensation
• Receiving a public apology

and I'm sure there are other possible remedies, too.

Once you know what you want to achieve, you can plan what steps you need to take, based on the notes in the next section.

Reality check:  There is nothing wrong with being ambitious and wanting to receive $10M compensation.  But  unless you can afford really good lawyers, it might be a good idea to have a backup plan which involves a realistic goal too, eg having your name added to the copyright materials, or having them taken down.

Steps for resolving copyright problems

Start the easy way

Unless you're certain that the copying was deliberate and malicious, the first step is most cases is to send a nice email to the person who made the copy, telling them that it's yours and what you want done about it.  (You might need to just leave a comment on their blog, if no email address is provided.)

Report them to their internet service provider

The obvious first step if politeness doesn't work is to complain to their web-host:

• If they use Blogger (ie their URL is WHATEVER.blogspot.com, or they have a custom domain but the source-code on their site looks like Blogger code),
  then you should contact Google through this page:   http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html 
  Google have a very thorough process for dealing with claims of content stealing - and if the other site that you say has stolen your work is also published in Blogger, they can look at the dates in their database to see who actually published it first.
  Make sure that you read all the details of Blogger's policies before you submit a complaint:  they don't like malicious complaints, and you could be fined quite heavily if you claim that you own something which you don't really own.

• If the person who has copied your work isn't using Blogger, you may need to do some detective work with whois (use Google-search it to find a whois service for the domain you're looking for) to see   who the host is, and what process this host uses to resolve copy-right complaints. 
  This could be particularly difficult to do if they're not located in the same country that you are (so their laws will be different), or if they use a different language.

• If the person who has copied your work has put it into YouTube, you can use information and tools on  YouTube's opyright page.

Complain to other services

If the other party's web-service-provider can't or won't help, then you could try reporting them to other services that the use.

For instance many websites are also on Facebook:  if the contents includes your material, or links to a website that's distributing your copyright material, you may be able to use Facebook's intellectual property violation reporting process.  (I haven't tried it myself, but have been told that this can be particularly effective.)

If they show advertising on their site, then complaining to either the advertisers, or to the company that organises the advertising programme, may be effective.  AdSense is quite sensitive to not having it's ads shown along with copyright violations, and provides a policy violation reporting form that you can let them know about the problem.

Charge them

Some people have had success from sending the offender a bill for use of your work.  This takes a bit of thought:  if they pay the invoice, then legally you may have licensed them to use your work for far less than it is worth.   On the other hand, if the amount that you ask them for is ridiculously high, they will probably just laugh and ignore you.

Threaten legal action

This can be fun:  write a very formal-sounding letter demanding that they cease-and-desist from using your work (name it very specifically) by a certain date, and advising that failure to do so may incur penalties including but not limited to commencement of legal proceedings for in which you will be looking for legal expenses as well as damaged incurred.  

If you would actually be willing to sue the person (see the section below), then consult a lawyer, and get them to send the letter.   But if there's no chance that you actually will sue  (and most bloggers simply don't have the time, resources or levels of proof to do so), just make the letter sound good.   If necessary, get a friend who can write pompous-sounding letters to draft it for you.    Send it by regular mail - emails are too easily ignored - and make it look official.

Finding the address to send a letter to can be a challenge - one option is to scour your copy-cat's work, and see if you can find their company or personal details on LinkedIn (most are smart enough to hide themselves on Facebook).    And if you can, then complaining to their boss may be an option, too, depending on your niche and whether their action might be harming their company's reputation.

Legal action

If all else fails, another option is to sue the person or organisation that copied your work.  If you or the copy-cat are in the USA, then the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides an approach for this.   But if you and they are in different countries, then different laws and processes may apply.  But no matter where you are, two things are likely:

• You will need to hire a lawyer - so it may be expensive and take a lot of time, and

• You may need to prove that you really did create the work, and when it was made.   

The second point is where copyright registration services come in to play:  they provide evidence that you really had created the work as at a certain date.  Unfortunately this is one of the ironies of copyright:  listing your material with a copyright service does nothing to stop anyone using it.  But if you don't list it shortly after it's created, you probably won't have any evidence if you ever get to the point of wanting to sue (or even formally complain about) someone who has copied your work.

There are some other issues with copyright services too:

• It can be difficult to list a blog, which by its nature has different material being loaded very frequently.
• You won't necessarily know which services(s) to register with - because you don't know where someone who copies your work is located, so you won't know what services a court in your country will accept evidence from.

So, while I'm not advising you to avoid the registration services altogether, it's important carefully to choose when and how to use them.

Peer pressure / Name-and-shame

If the legal approach doesn't work, or would be too expensive, then another option is to use social pressure to convince your copy-cat that they need to stop copying your work etc.  This can take a range of formats - eg, if a local small business has copied your photograph and isn't willing to compensate you, you might get all your friends to contact the business and threaten not to buy there again.   Or you might start a Facebook campaign, or put a video on YouTube telling your side of a story.   Whatever you do, make sure you that you:

• Really know what you want to achieve:  fame, a pay-off to stop the campaign etc
• Consider the risks (ie what could go wrong) and whether they're worth it
• Don't break the law yourself (it's not worth it, especially if you're the small guy), and
• Think strategically about what you might do, and how this could affect the relationships in your area or niche:  some people are just too much trouble to have an enemies.

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DISCLAIMER

This article contains general advice about the copyright issues faced by people who use Blogger.   It cannot cover every possible case or specific legal systems. 

If you need legal advice about a particular situation, consult a lawyer, ideally one who is familiar with copyright law in your country.

I do not, under any circumstances, suggest using illegal approaches - threats of violence, sabotage, etc.

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Related Articles

Copyright, Blogs and Bloggers, an Introduction

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

Putting 3rd party HTML (eg a Creative Commons licence) into your Blog

Removing the Attribution Gadget from your Blog

Displaying a gadget only on the home page - or only on a specific page

This article is about how to set up a gadget / widget in Blogger so that it is only visible on the first place that a reader sees when they visit your blog (often called the "home page").  It is one of a series of articles about controlling what goes on the homepage of your blogspot blog.

Front Page Bob
By Paginator (Own work)
 [CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

There are a number of reasons why you might want to put a gadget only the screen that shows when a visitor first navigates to your blog's home page.

You may want to show a welcome message, or a topic-index page, or to give a view of your recent tweets or some other RSS feed.    

No matter what the reason, the process is very similar:

How to make a gadget only appear on the first page

Note:  in Blogger, the words "gadget", "widget", and even "page-element" all mean the same thing.  I generally use "gadget", because the Page Elements tab currently says "Add a Gadget".  But they're absolutely the same.

1   Add the gadget

Do this in the usual way.

2  Place the gadget

Drag-and-drop the gadget to the place where you want it.   It may be over or under your blog-posts gadget, or in a totally different place.

A popular place for a gadget that is going to look like a "home page" would be in the Body section, just above the Blog Posts gadget, where "Test Gadget" is in this example:

3   Find the Gadget-ID  in the usual way.


4  Find the code for your gadget:

Edit your template.

Click in the search box inside the template editor, and look for the widget name that you noted in step 3.   Once you've found it, notice what comes after it.   In this example, it's the line for Blog1:

          <b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Text1' locked='false' title='Test gadget' type='Text'/>
<b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'/>

Use the expansion triangle at the left side of the template editor to expand this section of the code.  After you do, it will look like:

 <b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Text1' locked='false' title='Test gadget' type='Text'>
<b:includable id='main'>
  <!-- only display title if it's non-empty -->
  <b:if cond='data:title != &quot;&quot;'>
    <h2 class='title'><data:title/></h2>
  </b:if>
  <div class='widget-content'>
    <data:content/>
  </div>
  <b:include name='quickedit'/>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>
<b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'>

5   Add conditional formatting

You need to put conditional formatting code around the code for the gadget - makings sure that it doesn't go around the code for anything else!  (which is why you noted what comes afterwards in step 4)

And to avoid leaving blank space where the gadget would have gone, you need to update a "hide" instruction to apply it to the gadget-id you noted in step 3.

The code to use is this - except put the gadget-id instead of the XXX.

<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl == data:blog.homepageUrl'>

THE red CODE FOR YOUR GADGET GOES IN HERE 

<b:else/>

<style type='text/css'>
#XXXX {display:none;}/*remove blank space that the gadget leaves*/
</style>
</b:if>

The example above looks like this, when the code has been added:

<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Text1' locked='false' title='Test gadget' type='Text'>
<b:includable id='main'>
  <b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl == data:blog.homepageUrl'>  <!-- only display title if it's non-empty -->
  <b:if cond='data:title != &quot;&quot;'>
    <h2 class='title'><data:title/></h2>
  </b:if>
  <div class='widget-content'>
    <data:content/>
  </div>

  <b:include name='quickedit'/>

<b:else/>

<style type='text/css'>
#Text1 {display:none;}/*remove blank space that the gadget leaves*/
</style>

</b:if>

</b:includable>
</b:widget>
<b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'>

6  Check that it's worked

Preview your blog before you save the changes:  check that the the widget is visible.

Save the template changes, and look at your blog.  Check that

• The widget is on the first page
• The widget is not seen when you look at an older page (eg one from your archive)
• The other elements of your blog (other widgets, blog post titles, dates and contents) are all as you expect them - on the first screen, and on other screens too.

If anything is wrong with how your blog is working, go back to the template editor (Layout > Edit HTML), and upload from the copy of your template that you made at the beginning of step 1.   This will let you blog work properly, while you figure out what went wrong.

How to display a gadget only on a specific post or page

Follow exactly the same approach as above.

But instead of  

<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl == data:blog.homepageUrl'>

Make the conditional statement based on something else.

This can be a different condition, or a specific page URL.    For example to display a gadget only on a specific page, use this code, and put the address of the page instead of POST-URL:

<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl == "POST-URL"'>>

Note:   for the address of the page, if your blog does not have a custom domain, then be careful to use the "blogspot.com" version of the address, not one with a country-level name  (eg the blogspot.in or blogspot.co.uk version)


To display a gadget on every page except a specifc one, replace the double equals signs (==) with the HTML code for not, which is an exclamation mark followed by an equal sign (!=).   For example:

<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl != data:blog.homepageUrl'>

Blogger have now provided an expanded list of conditional statements - you can find information about it:

• The support forum articles about tags https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/46995?hl=en
• and about expressions:   https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/6214580?hl=en
• Blogger Buzz about some more extensions:   http://buzz.blogger.com/2015/05/adding-new-expressions-to-blogger.html
• Another Blogger Buzz post - even more extensions:  http://buzz.blogger.com/2015/06/even-more-expansions-to-blogger.html

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Where to get more information

Controlling what goes on the homepage

Adding a gadget / widget / page-element to your blog

Editing your blogger template

Putting a slideshow from Picasa onto your blog

Getting the HTML code to put a picture into your blog

Making a gadget that looks like a posthttp://buzz.blogger.com/2015/06/even-more-expansions-to-blogger.html