You can use a VPN service and tunnel all your traffic through that.
You can use a seedbox, which is basically your torrent client running on a virtual machine or shared machine in a data centre. The P2P stuff doesn't come to or from your home IP. And it all happens at data centre speed.
If you use a private tracker, a seedbox is the way to go because you can leave it constantly seeding 24/7 at high speed so you build an amazing ratio.
You can pick up a seedbox with 700GB storage, 1Gb/s download, and 50Mb/s upload (both speed limited, but unlimited total) for less than a fancy coffee a week. Plex integration, OpenVPN connections included (so you can bypass any ISP-level filters), encrypted FTP etc.
There are other higher end packages with stupidly fast upload, but SB-50 is vastly faster than my linespeed anyway.
They do week trials for a couple of quid.
There's a slight learning curve, but as you're on HN, I doubt you'll struggle with the basics. And you will pick up the cool extras.
Do check out the VPN (iirc) tab, for creating OpenVPN accounts.
The only app thingy I used was Plex, and it worked flawlessly.
Ferral Hosting's seedbox hosting was fine, but it had a steeper learning curve and didn't give me anything compelling over SeedboxCo.
Then they look up the IPs, see that 123.456.78.90 was connected through a Comcast account. They send a big pile of requests to Comcast with all of the Comcast IPs and ask "hey, who had the IP 123.456.78.90 on January 14th, 2016 at 4:50pm?"
Not sure how often they actually bother suing actual users these days but either way, the ISP got the complaint and turns around and sends you a letter saying "hey, stop downloading tv shows and movies over torrents or we will have to cut off your service."
I'm sure the details of how this works change and are more complex but that's the essence. Even if you aren't sued, your ISP will cut you off if you keep torrenting stuff and generating complaints from rights holders.
Said isp has been "only show in town" for serious internet access for some time so thankfully that is starting to change so a move might be on the cards.
A rights-holder watches a torrent swarm for one of their copyrighted works and records the IP of people who are sharing it.
They then contact your ISP (just asking nicely) telling them what they saw. The ISP will usually send you a warning or two before cutting off your service.
Alternatively the rights holder can get a judge to issue a subpoena obligating the ISP to give up your name.
So, since no one is watching Ubuntu swarms and reporting the uploaders, that's not really a concern.
And the police doesn't make those request so lightly... they would need to know you actually uploaded and shared a tons of movies/copyrighted material linking to them on some public accessible site to even think about asking a judge permission to investigate further.
1. use a decent client (transmission. the windows version in confusing to find but works fine)
2. require encryption (default usually is prefer encryption)
3. don't be a retard and download cam from movies releasing today. it will suck and mpaa is probably the one seeing it.
4. if you limit to few torrents at a time and limit upload and download your isp will not bother sending your logs to the mafiaa
1. The client you use doesn't matter a bit.
2. Encrypting the traffic helps if an ISP is actively looking for torrenting, but they rarely do this. In fact, I suspect residential ISPs (Time Warner, Verizon, Comcast) absolutely never do this; university and corporate network administrators might. In part because it's very time and effort consuming for them, but mostly because lots of people torrent perfectly legal things. People get caught because the MPAA, and other organizations, contract firms to write scripts and bots to crawl sites and hunt for as many trackers as possible, then monitor trackers and record all peers observed if they find a file that matches content they own. Encryption won't do anything there. You can't encrypt your IP address from a peer, obviously.
3. When you do it makes little difference. Your odds of getting caught may be a little higher in the first few days, but many people still get caught several years later. The cost of keeping these scripts on these trackers is merely the cost of a little bandwidth and electricity for them. They have no reason not to sit on a tracker forever.
4. You have it completely backwards. It's the "mafiaa" who send the logs of what they found to your ISP. Then your ISP notifies you of the report they received. They don't require any info from the ISP (unless they decide to later file a lawsuit and want the subscriber's personal information). The burden of proof is on them to give what they have to your ISP.
I've dealt with many of these cases from the perspective of the ISP. None of these are secrets. Using a VPN to do something illegal is not remotely "tinfoil hat".
Just use a VPN or a tracker you're reasonably sure their bots can't find. That's it. It's easy. When you torrent, your goal is to hide from other peers of the torrent, not to hide from your ISP.
I also believe that in the US, it's technically illegal for ISPs to do this.
http://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-formally-rules-comcasts-throttl...
In a nutshell, you pay $30-40/year for a VPN account and when you feel like doing something you don't want easily tracked (like joining a torrent swarm) you enable the VPN and route all traffic through their servers.