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You are here: Home / Privacy / Torrent Ninja Guide – Stay Anonymous

2012/06/13 By Alex 29 Comments

Torrent Ninja Guide – Stay Anonymous

Tixati GuideWe’ve covered torrent privacy back in 2009, right before Windows 7 came out. At that time we helped you get peer guardian running on the release candidate and provided an alternative method by using utorrent’s ipfilter.dat.

We’re back with an updated and superior alternative for both utorrent, peer guardian, and peerblock. You might need to switch your torrent client as this guide revolves around Tixati.

Why Tixati? At a glance:

  • Automatically updating IP Filter
  • Manually choke/unchoke of peers
  • Ability to ban peers
  • Toggle DHT
  • Toggle Trackers
  • 32/64 Windows & Linux clients
  • It’s 100% free with no adware.

What’s this guide going to teach me?

By the end you should understand how to, or at least be able to perform a set of instructions to, prevent suspected unfriendly organizations and governments from connecting to your IP and to encrypt your outbound and inbound traffic. No, it isn’t perfect, but it should get you far enough away from the herd to maintain a relatively elevated level of privacy. You definitely don’t want your hobbies showing up on youhavedownloaded.com and this guide is here to stop that.

So what do I do?

  1. Download the latest release of Tixati and install it and launch it.
    Run the tests it asks you and determine your bandwith.
    Run through the steps below.

Encrypting your traffic:

  1. Go to Settings
  2. Network
  3. Connections
  4. set Outgoing & Incoming Peer Connection Encryption to Encrypted Only

Blocking Hostile Peers:

  1. In Tixati go to Settings>IP Filter. Activate the feature (set it to ON).
  2. Exit Tixati.
  3. Go to %appdata%/tixati (navigate to “RUN” and type that in)
  4. Download these ipfilters, open the archive with an archiver (7zip, bandizip, winrar), and extract ipfilters.dat to the folder you opened. (source of blocklists)
  5. Launch Tixati back up.
  6. You should have a bunch of automatically updating filters in your IP Filter section.

What do I do now?

You’re done with the guide, go forth and don’t forget to seed, support the software and game developers who create good games, and support the movies you like.

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Filed Under: Privacy, Security Tagged With: Torrent

Comments

  1. nimd4 says

    2012/12/23 at 12:28 PM

    Hi, your ipfilters.7z file is from 04/21/2012 and therefore pretty much obsolete.. Would’ve been nice if you’d listed some (more) permanent location to get nice .dat files for uTorrent (and others that can use DATs).

    Reply
    • Aleksandr Oreshkin says

      2012/12/23 at 3:31 PM

      One of the reasons I suggest Tixati over utorrent is because it automatically updates the ipfilters every 24 hours. That file is not obsolete, running it with tixati as the guide suggests will get you the latest block lists once it updates.

      If you use utorrent you will need to update these lists manually, whether by using blocklist manager or downloading them from BISS or Bluetack Security Forums. I’ve taken your advice and added resource links for people that want to obtain filters manually.

      Reply
      • swing says

        2013/02/05 at 6:34 AM

        I have an 404 error reloading 404 on the web exploit line is this a problem?

        Reply
        • Aleksandr Oreshkin says

          2013/02/06 at 1:52 PM

          It means you did not make a connection to the “web exploit line”, could be 100 reasons for this.

          Reply
          • chris says

            2013/02/06 at 5:29 PM

            It was an anti malware program running in the background. Thanks for your reply

            Reply
  2. Rachel McAdams says

    2013/10/27 at 1:56 AM

    What about linux you fucking cunt?

    Reply
    • Bay Area Tech Pros says

      2013/10/27 at 1:57 PM

      Download the Linux version of tixati and replace window specific steps with Linux alternatives.

      Reply
    • Tilax says

      2013/12/16 at 2:46 PM

      Wow that language. Just cp the files in the archive to ~/.tixati

      Example: 7z e ipfilters.7z -o”/home//.tixati”
      replace with your user’s name

      Reply
    • Trevor says

      2014/01/26 at 7:52 PM

      I feel like if you can’t translate windows steps to linux steps you have no business running linux in the first place.

      Reply
  3. G. says

    2013/12/30 at 6:53 PM

    Hi guys! Thanks for the article.

    I have a problem with the “ipfilters.dat” file using Tixati v1.96 (Windows 7 x64).

    Tixati gives the following error (in “status”, ip filter tab):
    “Error reloading: string overflow”

    Can I solve this?

    Thank you!

    Reply
    • Alex says

      2014/01/01 at 11:40 AM

      That one is for the Tixati help forum. I can only suggest you reinstall and delete the tixati folder from appdata and try again.

      Reply
  4. TixatiUser says

    2014/01/22 at 9:38 PM

    Thanks Alex. Is there any further ways that are free to anonymize torrent traffic that you would suggest? I did what you suggested already, but I’m looking to further anonymize traffic.

    Reply
    • Alex says

      2014/01/23 at 3:53 PM

      Look into getting a seedbox, these lists are only partially effective. Moving downloading from torrents to filehosting sites (uploaded, rapidgator, etc) will significantly reduce how public your downloading is.

      Reply
  5. James Van Rude says

    2014/02/26 at 2:40 PM

    should put all details in linux format to start and let windows users fend for themselves

    Reply
  6. Malk says

    2014/04/24 at 9:18 PM

    If you still look at this post, I would appreciate if you could suggest where to get a new ipfilter.dat file that’s more up to date. Used both ipfilter.dat and ipfilter2.dat, and I get “Error reloading: Bad response: 410 Gone” for all but the EDU line in my filters list.

    Reply
    • Alex says

      2014/04/25 at 11:57 PM

      Hey Malk,

      I’ve updated the filters. The previous provider, bluetack, has put their ipfilters behind a paywall. However, with a bit of research I found that iblocklist.com offers the same filters for free. The link has been updated in the article.

      Reply
  7. Simplemind says

    2014/07/22 at 4:36 PM

    As someone who has been in the Apple realm, and very used to Transmission, I downloaded and installed Tixati on my Windows box. I updated the ipfilters right away via the link in the article.

    would like to thank you for taking the time to put this together.

    Reply
  8. Annon says

    2014/08/31 at 5:47 PM

    Thank you for posting these lists up!!!!

    Reply
  9. erion_Z says

    2015/10/06 at 12:10 PM

    Thanks for the guide.

    Reply
  10. DreamBliss says

    2015/11/03 at 2:54 PM

    Rachel, you speak to your mother with that mouth? Because if you do, I feel sorry for your mother…

    Thank you for this guide.

    Reply
  11. Alpha 61 says

    2017/04/23 at 1:31 PM

    Thanks for the guide. I had been using Tixati for a while now with just the default settings. Today, I added the steps in this guide–went without a hitch. ipfilters updated automatically perfectly.

    Reply
  12. Kate says

    2017/06/11 at 12:08 PM

    Thanks so much! This went smoothly, and I now feel much safer while slurping. The language of some people….. so sad. Thanks again for your tip. Kudos to you! 🙂

    Reply
  13. Sander says

    2018/10/21 at 4:53 AM

    Hi, when I click the link MEGA says that the file is no longer available. Could you please update the link?

    Reply
    • Alex says

      2018/10/23 at 2:48 PM

      Try again, it is working now.

      Reply
      • Sander says

        2018/10/23 at 4:06 PM

        Thanks, it worked.

        Reply
  14. Sander says

    2018/10/23 at 4:19 PM

    Now I’m stuck with the part you described as launch Tixati back up. I already put the filters in the folder you described and I looked in the settings from Tixati and can’t find launch back up. I’m using Tixati v2.58 on a Windows 10 machine, 64-Bit. What to do next?

    Reply
    • Alex says

      2018/10/25 at 1:05 AM

      launch tixati back up = launch tixati again.

      Reply
  15. Newtorrent says

    2018/11/22 at 12:21 AM

    Hi, I was wondering how safe ip filter is with every auto 24 hr update. And if it’s not safe, why is that? How does the program know which IP is suspicious or not?

    Reply
    • Alex says

      2018/11/22 at 11:41 AM

      Not safe at all.

      Because these are crowd sourced lists and they will always miss hostile IPs.

      Crowd sourcing of lists.

      Reply

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