If you ve been using BitTorrent to download any of the more popular files, such as the latest episode of some

major TV show, you may have found yourself receiving lots of Wasted data. This is data that has been discarded after being deemed corr upt or invalid by your BitTorrent client. Every so often, you will have received more wasted data than the size of the files you are downloading! This is happening because Anti-P2P organizations are actively polluting P2P netw orks with fake peers, which send out fake or corrupt data in order to waste band width and slow down file transfers. At its worst, when downloading major copyrig hted torrents, as much as a fourth of the peers you are connected to can be attr ibuted to various Anti-P2P agencies. There is also a much more serious side to t his. Once you ve established a connection to one of these fake peers , your IP has be en logged and will most likely be sent to the RIAA/MPAA! But there is a way to fight back! If you are using the latest employ a little known feature called IP filtering. The author ne out of his way to hide it, but it s there nonetheless. But te this filter, we need to retrieve a list of currently known ion IPs. uTorrent, you can of uTorrent has go before we can activa Anti-P2P organizat

This is most easily done by downloading the latest blacklist from Bluetack (the same people who wrote SafePeer for the Azureus BT client) at http://www.filestub e.com/5535d7c3eff7544a03ea/go.html (wait 45 seconds for the download to start) This list is updated daily, and contains all known Anti-P2P organizations, track ers and peers, aswell as all known Goverment/Military IP addresses as collected by the Bluetack team. Once downloaded, extract and rename the file to ipfilter.da t in preparation for the final step. To make the list available to uTorrent, you need to put it in %AppData%\uTorrent \. So type this into the Address Bar, or click Start -> Run and type it there. A fter placing the ipfilter.dat in this folder, start uTorrent and go into prefere nces (Ctrl+P), then click on Advanced . In the right hand pane, make sure that ipfil ter.enable is set to true, and then close the dialog. That s it for the configurati on. You can verify that the list has been loaded by looking under the Logging Torrent, where you should see the line Loaded ipfilter.dat (X entries) . tab of u

Congratulations! You are now protected against most of the garbage-distributing peers; and the likelyhood of the RIAA or MPAA knocking at your door has been sub stantially reduced! I d go as far as to say that you shouldn t be using uTorrent at all without this feature turned on! And even if the law enforcement side of it d oesn t bother you, you should still be interested in reducing the amount of garbag e data that gets sent your way, which in turn leads to quicker downloads, and is n t that something everybody should strive for? Note: It s advised that you update the list at least once a month, to keep you upd ated on the movement of the Anti-P2P organizations. One tool that will aid you g etting these updates is the Blocklist Manager from the same people who made the li st; go to http://www.bluetack.co.uk/ and download it. On a related note, this no te from the uTorrent FAQ should come in handy: To reload ipfilter.dat without res tarting uTorrent, simply open the preferences (ctrl+p), and press enter to close it again. Note: Keep the "uTorrent IP Filter Updater" on hand. You will need to use it eve ry time you need to update your uTorrent IP Filter. Make sure you close uTorrent and run this script, it will download the latest ipfilter.dat block list and pl ace it in the correct place. If you run the ipfilter update when uTorrent is sti ll running you will need to disable and re enable the filter in uTorrent for it

to make use of the new list.