5 Tricks to Access BitTorrent in the Office
Getting your favored Creative Commons-licensed movies via BitTorrent is much more fun if you use your company’s T1 line instead of your slow-poke and soon possibly even metered home DSL account.
The only problem: That IT guy you hired to set up your office PCs apparently doesn’t like you to have fun at work. He made it impossible to install anything at all on that powerful, shiny new PC of yours that now just sits idle while you stare at your Excel spreadsheets. Maybe you should have been clearer about the fact that you are actually the boss of your little startup, funny haircut and all.
No worries, help is on the way. We over here at NewTeeVee know how much you can boost corporate productivity by watching quality entertainment during your lunch breaks, which is why we came up with a list of remedies to get your BitTorrent downloads working in an office environment.
Download torrents through your browser. Can’t install anything on your local machine? Then just go to Bitlet.org and use their nifty Java BitTorrent applet right in your browser. All you have to do is paste the URL of your torrent file in the web form, accept the certificate for the Bitlet applet, choose a download directory and you’re ready to go.
Start BitTorrent from a USB drive. The fact that you can’t install anything on your Windows PC doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t run any software, either. Just get the latest version of uTorrent, copy it onto your USB thumb drive or iPod and run it from there. It’s only about 200 kilobytes, so it will even fit on your old iPod Shuffle.
Encrypt your BitTorrent traffic. You got BitTorrent working on your system, but your connections seem to be dropping and your downloads just don’t finish? Chances are your company is using some sort of traffic-shaping to slow down or block P2P traffic. You can try to obfuscate your torrent downloads by enabling encryption. Torrentfreak has a great guide on how to do this with various torrent clients.
Remotely control your home PC. Just can’t get it working, no matter what you try? Don’t worry, you can still download torrents from work, just not through that super-fast T1 line. The solution: Install a BitTorrent client with a web-based remote control interface, also known as WebUI, on your home computer and access it through your office PC’s web browser. We recommend uTorrent for Windows PCs (WebUI download here, guide here), and Transmission (with the Clutch WebUI) or Azureus (WebUI plug-in) for Macs.
Outsource your torrents. This is how Wal-Mart would do it. Just let a remote server deal with your BitTorrent downloads and then get the media files as plain old HTTP downloads through that fast T1 of yours. A good solution to try this out is Furk.net. Got the hang of it and want more bandwidth? There are tons of companies that rent dedicated servers with a BitTorrent client pre-installed. Sure, this option is a little more pricey, but maybe you’ve got some folks in the office that want to chip in.
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If you can use Firefox at Work theres always the Foxtorrent extension
Matt Hendry on January 26th, 2008 at 6:53 am - Permalink
a T1 is slower that the vast majority of dsl lines
jimb on January 26th, 2008 at 7:54 am - Permalink
@jimb
Actually, a T1 is full duplex, most dsl connections are half-duplex. It may be 3Mb/s down, but that doesn’t mean it is 2x faster than the 1.44Mb/s down for the T1…
Jamie on January 26th, 2008 at 11:30 pm - Permalink
[...] 5 Tricks to Access BitTorrent in the Office (tags: bittorrent) [...]
(jeff)isageek.net / links for 2008-01-27 on January 27th, 2008 at 8:20 am - Permalink
[...] Written by Janko Roettgers Posted Saturday, January 26, 2008 at 12:00 AM PT [...]
Mind Matters » 5 Tricks to Access BitTorrent in the Office on January 28th, 2008 at 7:43 pm - Permalink
[...] isso, escrevo sobre o Furk.net, um endereço que conheci por meio de um post do blog NewTeeVee sobre técnicas para baixar arquivos torrent em redes bloqueadas para tráfego P2P. Com esse [...]
netmania » Blog Archive » Furk.net: conheça o melhor serviço de download de filmes, música e games da atualidade on January 30th, 2008 at 7:11 pm - Permalink
Dont forget that seedpeer.com has a verified torrents section, that usually helps
SeedPeer on February 5th, 2008 at 7:55 am - Permalink
Uhm, Seedpeer, how does that help with anything when it comes to companies blocking P2P?
Janko on February 6th, 2008 at 12:44 pm - Permalink
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5 Tricks to Access BitTorrent in the Office | Fresh Web 2.0 News on February 8th, 2008 at 7:57 pm - Permalink
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