qBittorrent official forums

Hi. I'm new here and I've been using qBittorrent for a while now instead of Utorrent (thanks to it's "crapwares" providing and other bugs).

Nce software, btw. But the real reason why I'm writing here now is because I've been caught by the copyright bullies downloading something from a torrent website. I'm aware that there are VPNs and proxies (or whatever) that exists to be (apparently) annonymus to all and protect our data from big brothers, but those "options" seems to be costly (well, for me it is since an internet access isn't cheap, thanks to the canadian monopoly on that media and no access to foreign competition whatsoever) and seems to be a hidden pretext/reason to spend money into something that should be provided freely to any users anyway, based on simple logic.

So, my question, as a total noob at this, is, is there any free alternatives or manipulations that can be implemented successfully without resorting to those "comvenient" paying services ?

Thanks to answer

Welcome to our forum.

Simple answer no. But you can try qBittorrent's anonymous mode or force encryption (settings -> bittorrent). Its still no guarrantee to be hidden though but you can give it a try.

Sidenote: Your speeds may be limited, less peers and so on cause you are not openly connectable.

Since v2.9.0, qBittorrent supports a feature called "Anonymous Mode".

When enabled, qBittorrent tries to hide its identity to a certain degree. The peer-ID will no longer include the client's fingerprint. The user-agent will be reset to an empty string. Trackers will only be used if they are using a proxy server. The listen sockets are closed, and incoming connections will only be accepted through a SOCKS5 or I2P proxy (if a peer proxy is set up and is run on the same machine as the tracker proxy). Since no incoming connections are accepted, NAT-PMP, UPnP, DHT and local peer discovery are all turned off when this setting is enabled.

If you're using I2P, it might make sense to enable anonymous mode as well.