Is typing a proxy IP and port enough to protect your IP on a BitTorrent client?

[brand]

I use uTorrent and want to protect myself from being tracked or identified when downloading. I googled something like "torrent proxy" and found a site with a list of proxy IPs along with their respective ports and proxy types. I found a SOCKS5 proxy and typed in the IP and port into my connection preferences. Is this enough to hide myself, or is there something else I have to do?

 

[JohnW]

The purpose of those proxies is to help circumvent firewalls especially since most home wifi access points act as NAT firewalls. The client is running on your machine and knows your IP address and will forward that on to other clients that will try to access your machine directly, failing that it will try to access the IP address which your machine appears to be coming from which is the NAT address of your access point. Using a proxy may obfuscate that access point IP address but not very likely as the people operating the SOCKS proxy will know what that is and also it's the responsibility of the proxy to forward all connections. Besides the whole purpose of a peer to peer file sharing is that you also act as a server of the file segments that you are downloading, it isn't very polite to the bittorrent community to obfuscate your IP address from the other bit torrent clients and you can be sure that the very client code you are running locally has taken measures against that. You can't have your cake and eat it too, if you participate in the peer to peer file share community prepare to have your access point inundated with connection attempts, just turn on logging and see how much you get. What really ticks me off is that after being disconnected for a long time, I might wind up being dynamically assigned an address once used by a bit torrent user resulting in degraded bandwidth and perhaps accusations of peer to peer activity from the ISP when in fact I haven't done any at all. This is why I will have nothing to do with ISP's that attempt to restrict peer to peer because they will likely impact the innocent more than the perpetrators and there is fundamentally wrong about attempting to limit how the bandwidth is used by the customer. Peer to peer is an interesting concept, too bad it's abused to just pirate music and movies. I don't like what the effects of the peer to peer abuse is having on me but I will defend their right to the technology. Of course, conscientious use isn't a problem, it's just the fact that it's being done by people who have no idea of the technology behind it and the so called white hats trying to control it are also completely inept at understanding the technology. For one thing,the peer to peer clients will pass control information regarding the entire catalog of what's available over the net constantly yet many a corporate firewall administrator will key on various keywords as if they've found someone indulging in say porn or some other prohibited activity when in fact the user may have only downloaded a needed driver or utility.

The only thing that really protects you from being tracked and identified is the fact that there are millions of people just like yourself out on the net and it's not worth anyone's trouble to snag you all.

 

[Loopie89]

You’re not protected.

If you were brought up for Piracy they would go to your ISP to track you. You can’t hide your IP address from the person that give it to you, can you? Your ISP sees EVERYTHING you do on the internet, everything you requests passes through their servers. But don’t worry to much, I mean after all out of the millions that use the internet what is specifically so important about you? People break copyright laws on a daily basis!