uTorrent with Steganos Anonym VPN ?

[urbncwby]

Anyone tried using uTorrent with Steganos Internet Anonym VPN ? It's basically an openVPN and has an adapter of its own. How do you go about setting the incoming and outgoing connections correctly with an openVPN ? After a little reading I set the net.bind_ip to my actual internet adapter's IP and net.outgoing_ip to the VPN adapter's IP. Is this how it's supposed to be ? If so why am I still getting the exclamation mark indicating that I can't receive incoming connections ? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Lord Alderaan]

I think you'd have to bind both.

By the looks of it Steganos will allow bittorrent the traffic and will make you pretty much anonymous but it won't protect you against legal action. It will stop the useless infringement notices which are pretty much worthless anyway but with a court order Steganos can be forced to give out you IP and thus your identity. And the RIAA/MPAA would need the same evidence to get that IP from Steganos as they would need to get your personal information from your ISP. So if your ISP would fall, Steganos will fall too. All in all it sounds to me as a waste of money because Steganos is expensive for bittorrent.

The 25GB a month traffic for a year for 99 Dollar would allow you to upload and download 24/7 at roughly 10kb/s which won't be enough for normal Bittorrent use. So you would have to go for the 400 dollar a year unlimited package. And even then as far as I can see there are no guarantees you can even reach your maximum or even decent bittorrent speeds through their VPN.

In the end you are paying a lot for no real protection at all...

[urbncwby]

Lord Alderaan: You might wanna read the following statement straight from Steganos:

https://www.steganos.com/en/support/faq/173

What informations will be recorded by Steganos?

Basically we log nothing what your are doing inside a VPN-Session on Internet. We are 'counting' your Traffic, take notice about the Date/Time of Login and Logout. This we are doing this to calculate your subscription only. The Steganos VPN-Servers currently are located in Germany.

Mind you, my original question had nothing to do with whether using Steganos VPN is a good idea or not. I already think it is so I'll keep using it. Everyone can make up their own opinion. I just asked how to use it with uTorrent. I already binded both as you suggested and as I explaine but it didn't help.

[Lord Alderaan]

I'm not completely sure about German law but I know Dutch (where I live and right next to Germany) and US law force ISPs and such to keep traceable record of their users so that in case of criminal behavior they can provide necessary information for prosecution. Otherwise such a service would quickly become a safe haven for snuff-movie and child-porn related criminal activity and even Steganos would not want that.

And even if they weren't forced to keep track of that kinda information they probably still would. Otherwise the law would go directly after them (especially in case of the child-pron and snuff-movie related criminal activity) and they have no evidence to prove it was someone else... Keeping track of Login's and Logouts might just be enough to provide information in case the police comes knocking. Besides, they used the word 'basically' which means the statement is a simple version of their real terms somewhere and the statement on its own is worth nothing. Check their terms thoroughly.

Their service is privacy from other people (and companies) on the internet, not protection from the authorities. Keep that in mind. The question is how German Law views piracy and how much criminal activity it takes before people will go through all the trouble. Which indeed is a LOT if an American company wants a German court to force a German company to give out your IP so that an American court can force an American ISP to give your personal information so the company can start to prosecute you. In that way it does provide a extra buffer. But it won't give you 100% protection. Presuming you live in the US. If you don't live in the US you have a LOT less to fear of said American companies in the first place.

I'm not telling you not to do it. I got the idea you might have a minor misconception about the amount of protection it offered and I'm just giving you my view on things based on information and rumors I have to help you make sure you feel comfortable with your decision. And even if you didn't have any misconception other people might read this discussion and I feel that without adding a bit of information they might form misconceptions. How does that sound as a proper excuse for writing these large blobs of almost bullshit

But you are right about the original question. I missed the connectible part. If you use a Steganos VPN connection you (almost surely) won't be connectible. In a way a VPN is similar to a LAN network. All the VPN users are connected to the internet through a router and incoming connections would have to be port mapped. Those routers are maintained by Steganos and it seems unlikely Steganos would offer you a port for incoming connections but you'd have to check with them. If they don't offer such a port you will not be connectible.

Btw if you don't bind both options to the Steganos IP you will either lose your anonymity or it won't work correctly. To explain: In any connection (both incoming and outgoing) the internet IP you use for that connection is visible to the other party. If you don't bind µtorrent to the VPN for every posible connection you make to anyone (peer/seed, tracker, DHT node) the other party might see your internet IP in some connections. I dunno the exact difference between the two bind options maybe someone else can elaborate that.

[µtorrent-Guest]

urbncwby: and just to give my 2 (euro) cents on top of it:

German authorities have already proven that they don't care about "anonymity".

They even hault in a great bunch of TOR servers that were located on german soil.

So they definetly will grap those few boxes that steganos uses for the VPN tunnels without hasitation if they think it is worth it.

IN case you really think using a german based VPN tunnel for doing stuff the german MAFIAA don't like, think again.

The DA office will probably plea for a higher sentence if you are even willing to pay on top of your normal ISP to do "Urheberrechtsverstöße". (Stichwort: FTP-Welt)

edit: and to answer your question how to get green with a vpn tunnel. as long as the steganos server is firewalled you can't get a green tick. It seems very unlikely that they use boxes that are totally open for what ever port you like to choose.