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Tribler - Anonymous Bittorrent

A recent post from TorrentFreak has alerted me to a bittorrent program called Tribler that aims to annonymize users when sharing traffic.

...the most recent version of Tribler that was released today also offers anonymity to its users through a custom-built in Tor network. This allows users to share and publish files without broadcasting their IP-addresses to the rest of the world.

Install

Ubuntu users should know that Tribler can be easily installed with the following commands thanks to the webupd8 team.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:webupd8team/tribler -y
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tribler -y

My Experience With Tribler

One of the features that Tribler has, is the ability to search for torrents from within the program rather than having to use the web. This feauture also exists in Qbittorrent which is what I currently use for downloading my Linux distros. When using Tribler, the search turned up no results for me, and when I manually added a torrent file, it told me that it was not annonymous. This may be because during startup, it spent ages "creating connections" that seemed to never go away. Perhaps one needs to leave Tribler open for long period of time before it can be useful, after setting up the annoymous connection network.

In the meantime, I'll continue to use qbittorrent which allows me to separate my torrent files from my torrents that are in progress, and those that have completed. I don't believe Tribler allows you to do this yet. I could only set one location for storing everything.

Please let me know what you think in the comments below.

Last updated: 16th August 2018
First published: 16th August 2018