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What if... BitTorrent clients partially ignored the private bit of a torrent? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

20 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Private torrent trackers have all the reasons to remain private, and I don't blame them for that and I am glad private trackers exists. But the torrent files themselves have a setting that says "this torrent is private", which makes the BitTorrent client to not distribute them via DHT, which makes magnetic links not work with them, so they are restricted to people who can obtain the torrent file from the private tracker.

What if clients had an option (on by default) to distribute the torrent via DHT and perform PEX, while still taking care to: a) not place the private tracker in the magnetic link the user might generate, and b) separate the upload/download statistics for the peers returned by the private tracker, so the ratio statistics in the private tracker are not skewed?

This way, private torrents could "escape" into the wild, still maintaining the privacy and social/closed community effects of the private tracker. Someone could download something for a friend or for a random person who asks for some content in a forum, send them the magnetic link, and don't have the private tracker activities or anonymity affected in any way.

What do you think of this idea? How do you think it would be received by private trackers and BitTorrent client developers? What are the drawbacks you can think of?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you also end up exposing the IP of every peer on that torrent to anyone who joins the swarm, even if you masked the tracker and stats or whatever?

Like, IIRC that's kind a requirement for how torrents work in general, and so this idea would be making all activity on private trackers public, and I'd have to say that seems like a really, really stupid thing to want to do given the current situation where corpos are going after infringers again.

[+] [email protected] -8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Yes, it would. But do people rely on the privacy of the tracker to hide their IPs? I mean, even private trackers are somewhat big, and is not hard to have copyright lawyers infiltrated in them.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Well, given how torrents work, yes, because you have to.

When you're downloading, you know the IP of everyone you're downloading from, and they know yours because that's how the internet works.

If an anti-piracy corpo hops on the swarm, they'll be able to see the IPs from all the peers as well.

So, TLDR: yeah, public anything is stupid when simply knowing the swarm exists and being able to connect to it is sufficient to provide enough documentation for everyone involved to get screwed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Isn't that the whole point of a private tracker?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I thought that it was so it could maintain a lower profile, thus attract less unwanted attention, and maintain the health of the torrents with the minimum ratio rules.

But I am not dismissing this issue, I think it is important.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What does "maintain a lower profile" mean specifically? I think the point of a private tracker is that you don't need to enable DHT, which effectively broadcasts to the internet that your IP address is trying to download content identified by a specific hash.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

For the tracker itself, because it is much easier for the police to go after trackers that server thousands of pirates than to go after the individual pirates.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

But if this is a concern, the swarm itself could be split into internal/external, and no PEX would be allowed to happen for peers that are received exclusively from the tracker. This way, peers who have the setting enable would act as bridge between the two swarms, and only their IP would be visible.