Torrent Downloads

[jdale]

My friend was telling me about Ubuntu and he said that your ISP can't track what you're downloading because it reads in a different format that other OS's or something. I'm obviously kind of skeptical but I was wondering if anyone could tell me weather it's less of a risk or more private to download torrents on Ubuntu.

Thanks

[rampageoberon]

Short answer:
There's no difference what Operating system you use - the traffic will appear to be the same to the ISP.

[pricetech]

Makes no difference that I am aware of.

What are you trying to avoid / circumvent ??

[jdale]

getting caught

[Paqman]

getting caught

Simple solution: don't do anything bad.

Having said that, your ISP is highly unlikely to be doing packet sniffing to try and determine if the content you're torrenting is kosher. What they will do is throttle torrent traffic to stop it from eating all their bandwidth. There's not a lot you can do about that except find a better ISP.

People trying to catch you sharing copyright material will do so by joining the swarm and logging your IP. So just don't join swarms sharing dodgy stuff and you won't get caught.

[spillin_dylan]

I doubt this holds true for all ISP's, but I think mine doesn't look at what you're downloading as much as what you are uploading. I think that's more of a function of the laws of Canada, where it isn't necessarily illegal to download any content, as much as it is illegal to SHARE the (presumably copyrighted) content.

All the same, though, if you don't do anything suspicious or malicious, you should be safe.....