Category: Online Services & Tools

What is public and private BitTorrent Tracker, and which one you should use?

When you want to share files with someone else, or a group of people, where do you go? Odds are, you’re surfing torrent search engines. But, did you know that torrent search engines don’t always allow you the greatest selection of files?

Some of them also host illegal content, and do nothing to sweep up the mess. You’re left to fend for yourself as a user – and that can get dangerous. Here’s where private trackers can help.

Why Use A Private Tracker

Companies, like Vuze or uTorrent+, restrict access to content, effectively putting up a “wall” between you and the files being shared. Some companies do this to effectively block or filter illegal content being shared on these networks. Others do it to protect the privacy of users. Sometimes, it’s a little bit of both. With a private tracker, you can also gain access to a larger variety of files, faster download speeds, higher-quality files, and strong communities that support you.

What Does “Private” Mean?

In this case, “private” doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means. Mostly, “private” means that it’s an exclusive community. There are a lot of benefits, but there are also a lot of rules you must pay attention to. There are also guidelines you must follow or you’ll be kicked out of the community.

A bittorrent tracker is a server that regulated the communication between those downloading and those uploading content. Private bittorrent trackers are selective about who gets to use the site and who doesn’t.

Contrast this to sites to popular torrent search sites, that allow users to use the sites unregulated. When you’re on such a search engine, it’s the wild west. Files are unregulated and it is up to the user to know what kind of files, which may include spyware and malware, they download onto their machine.

With private sites, there are rules regarding the ratio of uploads to downloads. You can’t just download torrents and then delete them. You need to spend some time seeding them too. Some sites will ban you if you have a low ratio, and others will just restrict what you can do on that site.

There are also rules that restrict invites. The users you bring into the community reflect on you. If they harm the community, it can also harm your stance in the community. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it limits growth of the community. On the other hand, the members that are there are tight-knit.

Finally, there are rules on uploading. If you upload files to the site, they need to be of a certain quality, format, or they must use specific organizational structure. Many torrent search engine sites carry a very disorganized system of files. Private sites, on the other hand, are all about quality and organization.

There may be other rules too, like no illegal content, though these vary from site to site.

The Benefits To You

There are a lot of rules to follow with nearly every private site, but, what do you get out of it? Plenty. There’s usually a fantastic selection of torrents, high-quality files, really fast downloads due to seeding policies and fast internet connections of users, and some increased privacy.

Should You Use A Private Tracker?

Whether you use a private tracker depends on a few things. First, don’t use one because you think it affords you more personal privacy. That might be true in some cases, but it’s only a coincidence. Users on private sites tend to be very serious. Finally, this is a great option if you just want to join a small community and build relationships with other users.

July 30, 2014
New search engine lists all illegal underground websites you can never reach out before!

Update: Grams search engine was shutdown on December 2017.

If you have been searching for the underground websites in the cyberworld which offers “All things illegal” then a new Google-like search engine “Grams” can end your quest. Hidden websites running under Onion Network, has been a new way to buy illegal stuff anonymously.

Underground websites offer illegal high-quality drugs or rifles, hacking tools, or any illegal services, until now you needed to type long, complex and specific Tor Browser URLs directly into the browser which is quite difficult to remember. Grams, can really save all the trouble and additionally allows you to find more sources matching your quest.

It is as simple as you might think – you can search for the keywords and the Google-like search engine will return the results matching your queries, listing all the sellers on Onion Network.

“I am working on the algorithm so it is a lot like google’s it will have a scoring system based how long the listing has been up, how many transactions, how many good reviews. That way you will see the best listing first,” Grams’ creator who calls himself Gramsadmin wrote on Reddit. He also added, “I am going to add a filter market this week so a user can search only the markets they have accounts for.“

April 27, 2014
Secure your online identity by changing ip address and geo-location – VPN4ALL
Every country has some sort of spying mechanism that monitors your activity online and stores the data that can be used against you. No matter how hard you try to keep something to yourself, you can’t hide it without any third-party services. This is where VPN (Virtual Private Network), Private DNS service and masked ip addresses comes handy.

See Also: [How To] access Netflix and other Geo-blocked channels from anywhere

Private DNS service is something new, which is not familiar to everyone, but other traditional methods are widely used to protect one’s privacy online. However, they still don’t ensure 100% security and privacy because these company’s has your original ip address log and access data, which can be accessed by the government in certain country under the law.

Recent NSA leak by Edward snowden and other surveillance system in different countries states that everything is being monitored. So, taking the steps to mask your online activity is essential for those who wants to keep their activity on the Internet a “secret.”

See Also: BEWARE! Someone’s watching you, NSA agent leaks info on secret surveillance program PRISM in US!

The simplest and most famous method to do so, is to use a VPN service. It hides your activity and changes the Geo-location of the originating system – wonderful, isn’t it?… But, the thing is that, how to choose from literally thousands of them? To sort the things out we tested “VPN4ALL,” which has been there for last 3 years. I have been using it since last 24 hours, so that I can sort the good, best and worst of it. Lets find out what we got:

The Registration:

VPN4ALL is simple and robust service that provides traditional VPN mechanism to hide your online identity and keeps your “privacy” safe from the intruders. The first thing you would need is to get an account on their website. The registration process is simple and you won’t find any hassle while performing it. To make things clear, it is not a free service — you need to subscribe on the monthly, quarterly or yearly basis. (Register here).

Plans and Pricing:

The website offers 3 basic subscription options – “For Mobile & Tablet devices,” “For Regular browsing” and “For streaming & downloading.” Each of them has different usage and data allocation that is suitable for the specific user group.

If you want to secure your computer system, but don’t want to use it to stream contents or download files — you can simply opt for “VPN4ALL-50GB” plan. It allocates 50GB/month for windows and Mac. You’ll have to buy additional package “VPN4ALL-Mobile” if you want to use it on your mobile devices as well — We choose both for a year subscription (which helped us save $32).

When processed to the checkout, the VPN4ALL automatically offered us onetime “20% discount,” which minimized our overall cost to $80.80 (i.e. $6.74/month for 1 year) for both computer and mobile devices. The best thing is that, this discount is applicable for every new registration. To redeem the 20% discount you must follow this link – Register here.

I was pretty happy that I would have to spend less from my salary. Pretty cheap, isn’t it? If you’re smart enough, you can buy the same package again with a new account once your subscription expires. pss! don’t let the VPN4ALL website know that you got this idea from digitfreak!

After checking out with preferred payment option (there are various payment option that includes PayPal, credit/Debit card, and bitcoin), I received several emails from VPN4ALL that included account details, License key for windows software and mobile app key.

Downloads

I found account details in my email, which helped me log into client area. You’ll find details about your subscribed package and license key in your account. The email sent by them has full detailed information about the service and how to use it.

You can download the setup files and android application on their download page. I found it little difficult and annoying to download the setup file. There were two weird restriction — the download was not resumable and it had speed throttling issue. I never reached the maximum download speed that my ISP provides. Additionally, while downloading the file, it timed out once – forcing me to download the setup again from the beginning.

First, I thought it might be the issue with the ISP and Geo-location of the originating server from where I am downloading the files, but other digitfreak writers and staffs confirmed that they experienced the similar issue — not being able to get the good speed and download being timed out.

However, you can breath a sigh of relief because the windows setup is only ~48 MB.

Using the VPN

Setup:

The setup process is anything like installing other software — you just need to agree to the terms, click “next” several times and “Finish” at the end. There nothing you will have to take care of while installing the software. When installation completed, the setup offered us to choose from two configuration — “Basic” or “Andvanced”. I just choose basic one, and clicked on “Finish.”

Windows:

When you run VPN4ALL for the first time it will ask for the activation key. You bought the software, so they have already sent you the activation key. Just visit your account and copy paste your activation key to use the service.

Once activated you’ll find a really simple and effective layout that allows you to transform your internet connection into a secure network. You’ll find a drop down menu that has dozens of ip addresses to choose from — selecting one of them and clicking on “connect” button quickly connects the computer to the server for data encryption and tunneling. I was pretty impressed with the simplicity of it. It changes your “visible to the world” IP address and protects you against online snoopers and intruders. — All in one click!

VPN4ALL uses enhanced OpenVPN to ensure that (1) all your Internet traffic is encrypted with military-grade encryption as it’s transmitted over the Internet and that (2) your digital ID (IP address) remain invisible to the worldwide web at all times.

Every time a user connects with VPN4ALL, 2096 bits of random numbers are converted into a unique pair of keys for each user and for each session — one private key and one public key. These two keys are mathematically related in a very useful way. Data encrypted with one key can only be decrypted with the other key in the pair, and vice versa. This means your data is safe and can only be encrypted at VPN server to return your request.

With secure Military-grade encryption, data tunneling, secure DNS, random IPs and masked Geo-location — you are ready to go. You can worry less about being exposed to most of the security flaws and organizations/hackers spying on your internet behavior.

Android:

Android Application is simple and effective, it is minimized to keep things simple and yet powerful. You can download the android application (.apk file) from downloads page mentioned above. Just install the application as you would do with other .apk files — i.e. run the setup and click on “install” on your android device.

Just like on windows, When you first run the application it will ask the account details of the user credentials to activate the application. Enter your registered email ID and license number provided by the VPN service and login. You’ll find a simple user interface that allows you to connect to the VPN without much hassle. If you are advanced user, there are some optional setting to play with — selection locations (globe icon) and settings (tweak icon).I left all the settings to default and simply slide the toggle button to activate the VPN on my android device. It quickly connected to the server and I could confirm in the notification area that I am connected to AES 128 bit secure connection that is now encrypting my data over my internet. At first, the surfing speed was real slow – so, I had to manually switch to the Geo-location that is nearest to my current location and I was good to go.

I visited several websites and services to make sure that VPN is actually working. To my surprise everything went so smooth that I didn’t felt any difference. In 5 minutes I was able to encrypt my internet connection on my mobile phone and successfully secured my privacy.

Benefits

So, you are ready with the robust and reliable VPN service and your internet is now secure, but do you really need this? What are the benefits you would achieve by opting for the private VPN service? Let us try to solve this riddle:
- VPN service is necessary if you don’t like the idea of government and other private organizations spying on your activity on the internet. If you want some privacy and data protection you can rely on reputed VPN service.
- VPN doesn’t only protect you against unwanted privacy violation, it also blocks eavesdropping and data spoofing.
- VPN sometimes gives better access to the content, which is faster and more efficient.
- It allows you to access websites and online services that is Geo-blocked or not available in your country. You can access the data more fluently and lifts restrictions.
- It bypasses all the ISP restriction that might be there in your country, which helps you access the internet without any restriction and hence reinstate freedom.
- VPN4ALL encrypts data with AES 256 RSA 2096-bit military level protection, which ensures protection of data from hackers and intruders.
- You can lift blockage (if any) at your school, offices or any public internet access hub.
- Whether downloading legally or illegally, you don’t want to find yourself on some company’s witch-hunt list just because you have a torrent app installed on your computer.
- VPN gives you a perfect opportunity to download through our secure VPN servers in complete privacy, security and anonymity. VPNALL servers are placed in p2p-friendly locations and are connected to high-speed channels (up to 10 Gbps) from the world’s largest data centers.
- You can hide your local ID and Geo-location.
- Securely use your credit card and/or PayPal account even on an unsecured Internet connection.
- You should definitely use VPN4ALL when you travel or on the go and connect to an unsecured / untrusted network.
- and more…
If any of the above bullets gets through your wall of requirements — You need a VPN service! and VPN4ALL provides just that.

Before using VPN:

After using the VPN service by VPN4ALL, I could access all the digital content online, like Netflix and Hulu:

Verdict

The Internet is a huge community which promotes freedom and human rights. Everyone should have the ability to choose between privacy and anonymity of internet activity — VPN4ALL is capable of doing just that.

The simple and robust service provided by them works well on windows and android atmosphere. Both platform has simple user interface and lets you switch between VPN and unprotected connection easily. There is some hiccups at downloading the setup file from their website and it takes some time to choose the right IP address that works best for you, but once you have tweaked the settings and selected the right Geo-location and ip address – you are good to go.

You can access restricted and geographically blocked internet services within minutes — protecting your online identity.

If you are looking for the anonymous and secure internet access, you should go for it.

Rating: 8/10
September 17, 2013
How we test security tools and malware blocking [A Brief overview]

In 21st century, everyone hires a digital knight that fights off or blocks – vulnerable attacks , thieves, spy or other harmful intruders trying to get into your castle (Pc, laptop or other digital device). Before assigning such protector to do the hard work to live your life without any worries, you need to test their ability. At DigitFreak we do the same, when we test the security tools for your PC or other portable devices.

We deliberately test the software for extensive protection and prevention ability. Some of them delivers near perfect results, while other just give up. Testing a security tool isn’t easy — we have to deal with the fair amount of bottlenecks or our own limitation to clone the infections and vulnerability.

At DigitFreak we test every security tools manually with our own custom malware and virus scripts along with other virus samples collected for testing. We deliberately infect a protected system to find out if it is capable of fighting it off.

Testing with Virus samples and custom scripts:

The DigitFreak virus and script sample includes malware, scareware, adware, worms, rootkit and Trojans. We also use free online virus test scripts provided by eicar.com and DigitFreak’s custom virus script.

We used to test the security tools with the premium keylogger software, but most of the security tools are immune to it, thus we decided to shoot it when really necessary.

We do full manual update of the security tool we are reviewing – to make sure that it has the latest virus database to provide best results. We also make sure that the program itself has the latest build, version number and the original md5 checksum.

We bombard the security tool with the virus sample and rate it for the number of successful detection. If the tool detects 90% + virus sample, we rate it 9 or even 10 score for virus detection and best virus database and algorithm.

We also load various known malware-hosting urls to test whether the tool we are testing is capable of holding off the user from visting it and thus, preventing the overall damage and rate the software accordingly.

Live detection of viruses, vulnerability and security breach is also essential – we check if the tool automatically detects the virus from the virus sample folders or if we need to open each folder to let the tool detect the security risk for the computer.

There are various other factors that we need to test to score the test tool effectively, like – virus removal, detection, firewall, url blocking, restrictive control, virus database, prevention and custom controls.

Prevention is better than cure – so we basically concentrate on the detection ability of the security tool to make sure that it provides maximum security by testing it with our virus samples.

Naturally a product scores a full ten points for each threat it eliminates and detects on sight. If any of the virus sample is somehow managed to escape the security – we execute the program in the sandbox (sandboxie) to note how the product reacts.

At the end we include the results from the independent lab test and merge with our own results for optimal test results. DigitFreak expert reviewing team follows these guidelines to bring the best test results and scores.

July 30, 2013
Recent NSA scandal encourages anonymous search engine duckduckgo with a traffic boom!

Remember only few weeks back there was a whole fuss going on online about the NSA’s secret operation named PRISM that collects sensitive data from search engines and social networks like Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc. Well just a few weels after that a simple search engine named duckduckgo.com came under the spotlight.

The matter started when Guarding wrote about this seach engine owned by Gabriel Weinberg which vows that it does not collect any type of user data unlike Google and other search engines who constantly store everything related to a user through cookies and cache. Well it was just a start, and only few hours later he started noticing spikes in the number of visitors on his site. According to him the web traffic has increased by almost 50% of its normal status. And Guess what it looks like it ain’t gonna stop since more and more revelations about the NSA and PRISM are coming into the light.

According to weinberg “It happened with the release by the Guardian about Prism. We started seeing an increase right when the story broke, before we were covered in the press. From serving 1.7m searches a day at the start of June, it hit 3m within a fortnight. ” say he who is currently living in paoli, Philadelphia.

Before this incident almost nobody must have ever heard of this Search engine as it is not famous at all or comes under the alternative option in the browsers on desktop or mobiles. Different from the common day search engine, this one does not work on any cookie or cache so there is no personal data stored about any user and there is nothing there to give to the Goovernment.

Weinberg says that someday he got the idea that he could actually build up something that will be secure, anonymous and efficient unlike Google which is currently showing make trash links just because many webmasters have cracked the search engine’s algorithm. He hooked up with web services like wikipedia, Yelp etc to create something that was accurate and focused.

In the matter of public privacy in the case of search strings, he says: “I kind of backed into that.” It wasn’t a political decision, but a personal one. “It’s hard to define my politics. I take every issue seriously and come to my own conclusion. I don’t really feel like I belong to any political party in the US … I guess I’m more on the liberal side.”

For the company storing anyone’s data and search history is like hacking into other’s lives and thats bad. They reveal so much about anyone, that if one could know how much Google knows about a person then he might even change his total identity! Whatever be the future, we can now know for sure that there are some who are not selling our privacy just for some ads and revenues.

Digitfreak is with duckduckgo.com, where are you?

July 11, 2013
How cloudflare helped Spamhaus to mitigate 300Gbps DDoS attack and saved Internet

Spamhaus has been a quite a buzz recently on the internet – and it should be. It faced a biggest DDoS attack reported so far on the internet and successfully mitigated it. The whole process to keep the site alive, couldn’t be possible without CloudFlare (the cloud computing service, which powers our website too).

At the very beginning of the attack, it noted as an average DDoS attack, ranging from 80-90 Gbps of traffic – which could be easily pulled down. But, as time went by it got worse. Cloudflare took command when Spamhaus knocked on their doors and everything was managed in a proper way with vital resources available.

Cloudflare wrote on their blog:

The attackers were quiet for a day. Then, on March 22 at 18:00 UTC, the attack resumed, peaking at 120Gbps of traffic hitting our network. As we discussed in the previous blog post, CloudFlare uses Anycast technology which spreads the load of a distributed attack across all our data centers. This allowed us to mitigate the attack without it affecting Spamhaus or any of our other customers. The attackers ceased their attack against the Spamhaus website four hours after it started.

When the attackers couldn’t take down Spamhaus (thanks! to anycast technology used by CloudFlare), they changed their tactics. First the CloudFlare’s bandwidth providers were attacked and then it took the bigger frame – Tier 2 providers.

The “inter” in Internet refers to the fact that it is a collection of independent networks connected together. CloudFlare runs a network, Google runs a network, and bandwidth providers like Level3, AT&T, and Cogent run networks. These networks then interconnect through what are known as peering relationships.

When you surf the web, your browser sends and receives packets of information. These packets are sent from one network to another. You can see this by running a traceroute. Here’s DigitFreak’s individual traceroute :

Once the attackers realized that they cannot take CloudFlare with 100 Gbps+ DDos Attack, they immediately started attacking Tier2 bandwidth providers – which started congesting Tier 1 bandwidth provider (Tier 2 bandwidth providers buy bandwidth from Tier1, who are actually responsible for generating the internet bandwidth. So basically Tier1 providers are the one who makes sure that internet is never knocked down by engaging bandwidth).

One of the Tier 1 provider reported Cloudflare that they are receiving 300Gbps+ of traffic related to Spamhaus attack – which makes it largest reported DDoS attack in the history.

The number of open DNS resolvers is dropping—CloudFlare reported that it was down by about 30 percent in February—but they’re still abundant, and as the current attacks on SpamHaus make clear, still enough to be tremendously problematic.

The attacked also attacked Internet Exchanges (IXs), which helps CloudFlare connect with other networks. These IXs are responsible for connecting the multiple networks as basic level switches and can pass bandwidth over the network. It is very critical infrastructure in Europe which connects largest networks including CloudFlare, Google, Facebook and just about every other major internet company.

If you are our regular follower – you must have read the blog post, where we told you about the DDoS attack we faced earlier. CloudFlare helped us mitigate the attack quickly then.

Cloudflare’s AnyCast technology distributed the traffic to their mirror cloud servers and the load was balanced evenly to the network – making the attack less vulnerable.

Cloudflare Further writes on their blog:

At the bottom of this attack we once again find the problem of open DNS recursors. The attackers were able to generate more than 300Gbps of traffic likely with a network of their own that only had access 1/100th of that amount of traffic themselves. We’ve written about how these mis-configured DNS recursors as a bomb waiting to go off that literally threatens the stability of the Internet itself. We’ve now seen an attack that begins to illustrate the full extent of the problem.

Unlike tradition DDoS attack simulation which is carried on connection of home PCs or modest Internet connection, these attacks were being carried on big servers with fat pipes. They can be literally called bazookas which could have damaged the entire Internet.

According to ArsTechnicia, CyberBunker is the originating server of the attack:

It now seems that the attack is being orchestrated by a Dutch hosting company called CyberBunker. CyberBunker specializes in “anything goes” hosting, using servers in a former nuclear bunker (hence the name). As long as it’s not “child porn and anything related to terrorism,” CyberBunker will host it. This includes sending spam.

The attackers never succeed to bring down Spamhaus, CloudFlare or Internet as a whole. Everything settled peacefully without having much damage. This couldn’t be possible without CloudFlare being involved in the attack.

CloudFlare proved that they are something which could be trusted on and can be reliable when it comes to the network attacks. They understand it best.

What do you think? Let us Know.

April 1, 2013