Comment by gioo
3 years ago
Really a shame, especially for torrent users. The other good alternatives are double the monthly price at 10$/month in the case of IVPN (if you want port forwarding that is) and ProtonVPN. Unless you want to commit for a year or two and pay all in advance, which is meh but the discount may be worth it.
Why would this affect torrenting, isn't this only for explicitly added port forwards? Or am I missing something?
For torrenting at least one of the peers has to be accessible for outside world, either by having white IP, by using NAT with port forwarding, or by using IPv6-to-IPv4 shenanigans. If both peers are behind NAT, they cannot download data from each other.
If you're an active seeder, it makes sense to configure your machine so that it is accessible for all the peers, including ones behind NAT. If you're just a leecher though, it makes little difference.
It will affect leeching torrents that don't have a ton of seeders. No forwarding could render a torrent unusable that would otherwise download just fine if you had an open port.
1 reply →
This isn't completely correct. At least one peer in the entire swarm needs to be accessible. Holepunching (BEP 55) can assist in the rest (albeit it's not ideal).
is this an issue only for magnet/DHT transfers? or does it apply to torrents that have an associated tracker too? i would have expected in the latter case that two NAT’d clients could connect to the tracker, and then the tracker could help them hole-punch a direct peer-to-peer connection.
3 replies →
It wouldn't be very helpful in preventing abuse if you could still forward ports through UPnP.
Torrenting requires an open port accessible from peers for good speeds
Why not use a seedbox? Download torrent to the seedbox and then ftp home. This way you get the upload from a server which if you're on a private tracker (which you should be) you'll get good upload speeds, easy to hit the default seed requirements, and you'll get full download speed when you want to use it locally.
I recognize this is probably similar to asking about how to get into fight club, but any tips on how to find a private tracker? I assume it involves becoming part of a community, but I don’t even know where to start looking for the communities!
Been so long since I've even been in the community that I don't know any of the smaller forums but check out https://filesharingtalk.com/content/. Get known for being active and if there is still an IRC pop by there. The key once you're past the standard ones like TL, is to not be that hungry for invites, the less hungry you are the more places you get to. Maybe check out https://thepiratesociety.org/ which used to be a solid community 10 years ago but I dunno how it is nowadays.
Or you can just buy one. https://www.ebay.com/itm/143939358334 for example is $2 and is the private (semi public - all the benefits of private but easy to get). It's the one I use. Buying invites can lead to getting banned but if you're just chilling out on TL then you'll be fine.
A tip for private trackers. Only download new things and freeleech until you build up a buffer (You've uploaded more than you've downloaded)
7 replies →
This doesn't answer your question directly but it might help anyway. Usenet is an excellent (paid) alternative to climbing the private tracker ladder. All traffic is secure and effectively anonymous. Download is lightning fast. If you're on the right backbone there is an ocean of content. It's only missing very old, obscure stuff. It's MUCH easier than climbing that ladder and worrying about ratios.
1 reply →
The common advice is to start out on RED (Redacted) by doing the interview, and climbing the pyramid from there. Use official recruitement to join other trackers, and with some patience you'll eventually have everything you need.
24 replies →
Browse the /ptg/ (private tracker general) thread on 4chan's /g/ board
there are a few subreddits that people offer invites/ask for them
otherwise many have open signups randomly throughout the year
the better ones are harder and often expect proof of previous seeding, like i've been in IPT for years with 7TB/2TB ratio but still not managed to find an invite to some of the more renowned ones.
If you had a way to contact you on your profile, things might be arranged
8 replies →
Cost. If you've already got an old, cheap server lying around, then having an 8 TB box at home is very cheap. Say, $15 a month for Mullvad + power usage. Reputable seedboxes seem to be in the range of ~$60 a month for 8TB of storage. Obviously, if you want to scale beyond that, it's as simple as adding another 8 TB drive to your box at home, whereas a cloud seedbox would nearly double in price.
I don't really desire the added complexity of having my files somewhere else.
Seems same level of complexity to me as adding a VPN into the mix.
2 replies →
The level of complexity is running a rsync cron job every X minutes to check if you have new files to transfer back home.
It's not exactly rocket surgery.
5 replies →
dude, at least for tv/movies, just use ultra.cc (cheapest plan) and kodi can connect to it via https so no need for vpn and you don't even need to to download anything - super easy
you can even pay more if you really need plex
> Why not use a seedbox?
Mostly because I haven't been able to find a seedbox service I trust as much as mullvad. It's impossible to tell which ones will flip to copyright authorities as soon as a little bit of pressure is applied.
You don't even need to ftp it, you can run the client at home and it would connect to the seedbox through the swarm (or you can manually add a peer if needed)
This misses a major point of the seedbox: that you don't have to run torrent on your residential connection.
Tell me more please.
3 replies →
It would be better to look into a dedicated seedbox for torrents.
The companies offering those have experience dealing with copyright cartels.
Mullvad isn't stopping port forwarding because of copyright issues. It's because you can use their IPs to host highly illegal websites and they can't connect your account to the content and suspend it.
can you elaborate? how could someone outside Mullvad claim that Mullvad is passing illegal traffic, but Mullvad itself can’t figure out who in their network is passing that traffic?
1 reply →
I wouldn't even go all the way to a dedicated seedbox. I'm using a shared one, gets the job done and only costs $12 a month.
Still more expensive than the 5 euro/month I was spending for Mullvad
Pia has port forwarding and is half the price of mullvad
Many Mullvad customers migrated from there to Mullvad in the first place after Kape Tech bought them.
Kape Tech , at the time, had a less than stellar reputation. I haven't followed it much since that time.
Private Internet Access stopped releasing source code for recent versions of its clients.
Details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35642700
These days, free and open source software clients are table stakes for a VPN to be considered trustworthy. The fact that PIA silently stopped releasing source code after previously promising to do so is a major red flag.
You don't need to use their client. Just grab a config and use an OpenVPN or WireGuard client instead.
PIA official repo: https://github.com/pia-foss/manual-connections
https://helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com/guides/linux/linu...
I am pretty sure you can get a deal with NordVPN. Just search youtube for someone you follow Nordvpn and sponsor.
NordVPN doesn't offer port forwarding. https://support.nordvpn.com/FAQ/1047408432/Do-you-offer-port...
Can't have a place on the internet without some Nord shilling.
For torrenting, port forwarding is only marginally important - for torrents which have very few peers and you can connect to none of them.
It's also risky because mullvad certainly has records of forwarded ports and can out you if they receive a properly worded subpoena. There is also a chance those records would be present in their backups even after you deleted the forwarded ports.
I have a separate command for port forwarded torrent client and only use it when absolutely necessary, which is almost never.
If you’re concerned about records, port forwarding isn’t that relevant. Lookup nat binding records, which is how ISPs keep track of users behind nat.
How is that relevant here? mullvad has to keep track of who to forward the port to, any NAT ports are going to be ephemeral and conducted through an encrypted tunnel.
1 reply →