Enforce your privacy rights – MoBlock Evil Torrent IPs
// July 28th, 2008 // No Comments » // Personal
It seems that the UK government has finally woken up to the proliferation of Torrent and Peer2Peer traffic on the net and have decided to do what comes naturally to them – hunt down the evil perpetrators of this heinous crime and punish them … by sending then snotty letters.
I’m not going to bother wading into the P2P (as in Kazaa, Limewire, etc.) side of the argument as the majority of traffic on the Gnutella network is, almost certainly, illegal. However, BitTorrent is used for distribution of many valid and perfectly legal pieces of digital property and as such deserves special treatment.
There are a couple of ways in which ISPs and those working on behalf of the Copyright Owners can detect and therefore contact persons they believe to be using BitTorrent in an illegal fashion, and, in true computing style, there are a couple of ways that they can be defeated.
Traffic shaping (the technology employed by ISPs to throttle your BitTorrent bit rate) is quite tricky to dodge unless you’re using an encrypted client and only talking to encrypted peers. Most modern clients support encryption but, depending on the torrent, you could actually lose more than 50% of your peer options. On the plus side, you can also defeat traffic shaping by tunnelling or proxying your torrent traffic using something like Tor or even a simple SSH tunnel provided you can tunnel from end to end without hitting a throttling ISP.
The problem is not so much that ISPs can work out you’re torrenting as this can be obfusticated, but rather in the very nature of BitTorrent – i.e. the connection to 10s possible 100s of other users on the network who are unknown to you aside from sharing the same file you are currently downloading. A recent tactic by those who wish to prevent Torrents is to actually join the ranks of the anonymous IPs, but rather than just sharing files, they are logging IP addresses and compiling reports for ISPs and Law Enforcement.
Encryption won’t help you here (proxying and TOR will to some extent) but what if there were some way, some magic list of evil IPs that you could simply block connections to and from at the firewall (kernel) level of your server?
Enter MoBlock – a Linux application similar to PeerGuardian. Quite simply this app sits between your Torrent Client and your IPTables based firewall and populated block lists based on a constantly changing set of blacklists. If you’re using Ubuntu (and why wouldn’t you be?) then setup is a doddle and should ensure you aren’t giving yourself away to evil IP gatherers without all of the hassle of TOR and encryption.
Moblock supports white lists and LAN detection to ensure valid connections are not affected and, partnered with a client that encrypts traffic should keep you off the radar of those who wish to shut down torrenting for a good long while.
