Safety measures for newbies

[tanyaz]

Fairly new to bit torrents, but have read up a bit. Using utorrent so far has been pretty straightforward but I wonder about what I can do to better protect myself from malicious activity and spying eyes. Here's what I'm currently doing in Windows:

Set up utorrent with protocol encryption enabled

Running PeerGuardian

and in more general terms, have got a firewall, router and antivirus on at all times.

To source my torrents I'm predominately using meganova and on occasion piratebay.

If I'm going wrong somewhere please let me know and if you have any further suggestions on how to better protect myself I'd be really grateful for your input. Hopefully other will find this useful as well.

[DreadWingKnight]

Running PeerGuardian

http://neuron2neuron.blogspot.com/2006/05/blocklist-balderdash.html

The only way to not get caught doing illegal things is to not do illegal things.

[tanyaz]

absolutely sound advice and all I'm trying to do is make the process of using Bitorrent as safe as possible. I'm not talking about anything illegal, just want to better understand best practice.