I am so very tired of my Vuze not connecting/seeding/NAT firewalls and such, that I am about to give up and go back to uTorrent that I used when I was on a PC (on a Mac now). That said, when I used uTorrent, I got caught and so want to avoid all those nasty, scary letters in the mail threatening to sue me for ruining whole studios with my singular download.

So, yes, I know that I apparently need to get a VPN, and I've read up on some of my options. My question(s) are a bit more basic than that, namely:

1. Will all my interest traffic automatically go through the VPN (like my visits to MSNBC), or can it be designed for just certain features. I know the VPN results in some loss of speed, so if I can avoid running most of my internet traffic through it, all the better.

2. Once established, I assume that it would work on any internet system I can connect to, like Starbucks, or a hotel, etc. and not need re-configuring for every different wireless connection. Are my assumptions correct?

I hope to do this soon before I once again destroy my ratio here (I've lost almost an entire 1 point on my ratio b/c of this problem). So any guidance is great and well-appreciated.

Just got notification from my cable provider that I had been caught downloading a file. It was not from here (from Kickass Torrents) and was just a regular movie. I have Vuze and have been using that for years to avoid this very problem.

So while I'm decently computer savvy, I wonder how this happened. I thought Vuze was designed to block my IP address from view and make it generally untraceable. I've also noticed that my seeding is now terrible when I am not at home. I've lost 0.3 from my ratio because I download, but nothing gets returned back. I've run my NAT test at my current location and it can't connect, although when I'm home, the NAT test runs fine. I have my ports forwarded as I have been advised in the past.

These two things may be connected as they have started to happen within the past week or so. I haven't made any changes to my Vuze set-ups, so I'm curious as to what's going on.

Any suggestions or help? Or more information?

So I've been downloading torrents for what feels like forever, but recently had some problems. Now I have two separate and I believe unrelated questions.

Because I was having some issues with Vuze (I'm a paying user for that), I re-set the settings to the "factory default." I've since re-set everything like I had it, but now, when Vuze pulls in the torrent file from my default folder (I have it set up to import and start automatically), it doesn't start. I've clicked or unclicked everything that says "start torrent immediately" or "pause" or whatever is appropriate, but for now, the only way I can get a torrent to begin downloading is to manually go in and force start. Any suggestions?

Second, unrelated question. I was killing my ratio here and wasn't sure why. Come to find out, I needed to forward my ports, which I have done. Happy that it works – when I'm at home where I set the port forward to work! But, I also travel with my laptop to work, to Starbucks, to friends, etc. where it appears that port forwarding wouldn't work (because of the assigned IP address, I'm assuming). Is there a way to make this work -- or am I stuck seeding just when I am at home?

I'm a decent tech guy (I know how to turn on my computer!), so I'm likely able to try any suggestions anyone has. Thanks in advance!