[Jack Rabbit]

One of the problems of a simple SSH tunnel is that the encryption overhead and the MTU of your network can cause excessive fragmentation. That can be compounded if you have some packet loss. Some programs behave really badly when this happens. This is one of the many little gotchas that can plague getting this to work well.

I had assumed you wanted a VPN for the more usual purpose of securing a road warrior connection back to your home or connecting between two houses. Having a VPN on its own is not really going to help much to avoid throttling of torrents. First, as the name suggests, a Virtual Private Network connects a number of hosts together securely. The problem is you will not be able to get the torrent seeds on your VPN.

Second, even if you did it might not help. You can encrypt torrent sessions and (I think) the BitTorrent standard uses OpenSSL for encryption so it is unbreakable. Many deep packet inspection tools can identify torrent streams based on the traffic pattern. More paranoid file transfer applications, like WASTE, allowed you to pad the data stream with random noise when you are not using it to obfuscate traffic patterns. The down side is that it dramatically increases traffic.

Tunneling software, proxy software, encryption software, and VPN software are all legal to poses and use. Of course, you have to use them right. It is legal to posses a crow bar but you can not use it to break in to someone's house. There are lots of "people" (read thieves) who host sites with lengthy lists of open proxies. They try to make the list look legitimate but they are not really open about what they are doing. The thieves just scan the Internet for open proxies and post the address when they find them. They do not actually ask the owners if it is ok to use them. The reasoning is that if it is publicly available it must be ok; you can make your own moral judgment on that. Use one of these proxies in the US and you are probably risking charges under the Communications Fraud and Abuse Act.

A guy I knew used a proxy to tunnel his torrents through a US server. He bought the service and paid for the bandwidth. It was pretty cheap; about $10/month IIRC. It worked well for a while but then something started going wrong with the connection. He never did figure what it was and it ended up being too much trouble to try and figure out.