Cheating Rapidshare

If you have ever needed to download some very obscure stuff, you are probably familiar with sites such as rapidshare.de. These sites usually allow anyone to upload and instantly publish large files (50-100MB). Thus are perfect for sharing stuff such as video clips, picture archives, scanned books, all kinds of semi-legal game roms, abandonware and etc.

Rapidshare has a draconian download policy which (I guess) helps them to save bandwidth. They log your IP, and allow you to download only a single 20MB+ file, or several files that will add up to that much. That is, unless you buy their premium service.

I hardly ever use that site, so I refuse to pay their price. But sometimes I want to grab stuff that was uploaded there. If it is just one file everything is great. However, sometimes you need to grab a multi part rar archive. And that's where the fun starts. It will take you days to get the whole thing.

However, I noticed a little loophole. If you use Tor you can cheat rapidshare into letting you download more than one big file a day. Simply restart tor and privoxy after each downloaded file. Usually you will end up with a different IP every time, and thus rapidshare will let you through.

And on the upside, you are onion-routing your packets. So if you are downloading pr0n or something illegal it is exponentially harder to track you down!

Tags: rapidshare, cheating rapidshare, tor, downloading, sharing