How to block torrent sites?

Question

Recently we've received at least four letters from our ISP that we are violating their terms and service by the downloading or the distribution of illegal software through bittorrent protocol. My son has apparently been using the site to download software and movies for free. Before we're revoked from our internet is there a simple way to prevent or block torrent websites?

Answer 1

The best solution for this problem is education!

This is due to the fact that there are other ways to download software and movies which are harder to block than torrents. On the other hand these mostly one click hoster based file sharing solutions are much harder to detect by the ISP and arent likely to bring you in that much legal trouble. The problem with torrents is that you are downloading and providing illegal copys at the same time. The offering part is the one that may cost you a lot.

Anyway there are various technical solutions. Some home router are able to block torrents. This ability relies heavyly on the product you are using. You can also buy an additional firewall that is able to filter torrents but that is of cause a costly solution for a private usecase.

Answer 2

BitTorrent is very difficult to block/firewall, since it can work on any port the BitTorrent client has been configured to. Your best solution is to either stop torrent downloads from your PC or hide their existence from your ISP.

Stop torrent: remove any torrent clients from your PC and then ban your son from it or convince him to no longer do this. You may also install content control software on your PC, but you are then counting on your son's inability to work around that.

Hide torrent from ISP: Set up an encrypted VPN to a VPN service provider (past/outside your ISP) and run all your internet traffic through that VPN. You must confirm that your ISP has not established a local security certificate on your PC to prevent them from "inspecting" your encrypted traffic.

Answer 3

There are many ways you can restrict torrent, including:

• Destination filtering: try to restrict access to all torrent websites, but you'd have to maintain a large blacklist.
• Control the applications installed on the computers on your network. Don't allow installing P2P applications
• Use some third-parties applications, like pfSense which is an open source firewall helps to block torrent traffic.

Finally, I think it's an education issue. Try to convince your users not to use torrent, and keep away from P2P connections.

Answer 4

I think if you took your hosts file to block the top 10 torrent sites (or the sites based on internet history), it would be way more difficult to find the content he's looking for. Altough this is definately not the answer, I think it would help.

Answer 5

There is a rather 'easy' way to partially block BitTorrent. it is by using NAT.

BitTorrent works with peer-to-peer protocol and requires an open port on the internet / wan side to respond to peer requests. using NAT results in all connecting peers being rejected and hence degrading the connection fanout. However, the BitTorrent client would normally attempt to connect the peers rather than only waiting for the other peers to connect. But if many of the peers are simply behind NATed firewalls (a lot of routers) and they do not forward the internet-facing ports to the BitTorrent hosts, the peer to peer sharing networks may be severely degraded or simply fail altogether.

To allow/enable proper functioning bit-torrent use, you'd basically need to forward the BitTorrent ports to the hosts running it, another note is that BitTorrent use shouldn't be deemed illegal as long as legitimate legal files are shared. In fact, BitTorrent is used to distribute many Linux distributions and other open-sourced software across the internet.

My guess is some internet service providers intentionally attempt to ban BitTorrent due to the perceived high bandwidth usage. an active BitTorrent session can fanout to a large number of peers and the parallel distributed traffic can run in the 10s to 100s of megs per second and consume significant bandwidth.

The trackers host the peer registers for the session and if you know which tracker is being used, you could block access to that particular tracker site. many torrents I'd guess used a bunch of trackers to prevent this type of censorship.

It is somewhat questionable about 'illegal software' as that implies the isp watches your traffic and figures out what is being downloaded. the same 'illegal' software downloaded say from a vendor's website selling it as a download may not receive the same complaints as it is likely done over HTTPS (encrypted) and there is a likelihood bandwidth consumption is lower.

For generic BitTorrent, it is probably easy to detect its protocol being used. but banning BitTorrent probably steps beyond what is legitimate BitTorrent use.

To be sure educated to use BitTorrent for legal materials, if the isp persist to dispute legal BitTorrent use, it may be necessary to find an alternative.