[gioo]

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.

[anaganisk]

Why would this affect torrenting, isn't this only for explicitly added port forwards? Or am I missing something?

[reisse]

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.

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

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.

[toxik]

My experience resonates with this, if you have a torrent that isn't coming home, make sure you're actually reachable.

[anacrolix]

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).

[colinsane]

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.

[the8472]

Try to extrapolate. If nobody has an open port to which a connection can be established, how will the network work?

Trackers don't enable hole-punching, existing peer connections do[0]. And hole-punching is hardly a reliable measure to base your network on, if NAT or connection-tracking is implemented in an address-/port-dependent manner[1] then hole-punching becomes more complicated or fails, especially for TCP.

[0] http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0055.html [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4787.html#page-6

[reisse]

It does apply to all torrents. As far as I know, by default torrent trackers provide no facilities for hole punching.

However, if you have a tracker in a sense of "community of people dedicated to file sharing", there will be guides on how to do a proper setup even behind carrier-grade NAT. For example, one of the trackers I know suggested using Teredo (IPv6-to-IPv4) tunneling to do the hole punching.

[anacrolix]

Trackers aren't used for this, but a mutually accessible peer can be used for hole punching.

[armada651]

It wouldn't be very helpful in preventing abuse if you could still forward ports through UPnP.

[switch007]

Torrenting requires an open port accessible from peers for good speeds

[that_guy_iain]

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.

[nocoiner]

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!

[that_guy_iain]

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)

[e12e]

> Or you can just buy one.

There's currently a promotion running:

https://www.torrentleech.org/user/account/promoreg

[that_guy_iain]

Personally, I would suggest this. Use the seedbox for the first month downloading new freeleech torrents and build up a few TB buffer and use it worry free for years.

[gioo]

Buying an invite for TL is not a smart idea, they have regular open signups. You put all your accounts at risk for little gain.

[that_guy_iain]

This is why I gave the cavet that it's only worth doing if you're just going to use TL. If you're not into the whole tracker ladder thing then buying TL is kinda a safe bet, it's semi public. TL just care about money, I wouldn't be shocked to find out that TL has been sold a few times.

Previously, when I was really into torrenting I climbed the ladder really well, I was in the forum sections where staff would share the details of banned users. They mostly cared about cheaters, unless it was a small site trying to be exclusive. I knew people who would go to tracker staff and out people for trading and selling and nothing would happen.

But overall if you want to get into the torrent community buying and trading isn't worth it. But if you just want a single solid torrent site and are willing to pay TL is the one to do it with.

[katbyte]

whats is the best way to get access to the better sites? i've been on IPT for years with great ratio but no idea where to even begin to look for getting into top tier ones

[Gareth321]

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.

[wkat4242]

Stuff is also taken down within about a day. This is really the problem with usenet.

I actually find it much better for ancient stuff because my provider has 10 years retention and the DMCA takedowns only started a few years ago.

[gioo]

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.

[mindslight]

What really bugs me about these popular private trackers' interview processes is they too discriminate against VPNs. Like I know they think they have some private community of completely trustworthy angels, but I'm still not going to stick my non-anonymized neck out.

So then what, find public Wifi somewhere to do their "interview" from, that they'll pass for a non-shared IP address? And then hang around there all day until your turn for the interview comes up? That's the conclusion I came to last time I looked at Red's requirements years ago.

Also I just assume the interview processes have gotten much more competitive and inhuman due to the popularity, like everything these days. I got my Oink account by joining the IRC channel, and just asking nicely in a way that demonstrated a modicum of technical knowledge and reasonableness.

[gioo]

It's all by design, invite selling/trading is a big problem in the tracker world and tracker staff often force people to use their home IP to register for this reason. By having your home IP they can easily ban all your accounts if you are caught breaking some golden rule.

The interview process is not bad, it's just particularly slow in the case of RED. Especially frustating for europeans because most volunteers are in an american timezone and so interviews often happen in the middle of the night (in Europe). OPS has faster interviews but you want to join RED if you want to climb the tracker ladder, so passing through OPS basically just adds some delay.

Anyway, if you value your anonymity this much, maybe private trackers aren't for you.

[that_guy_iain]

> invite selling/trading is a big problem in the tracker world and tracker staff often force people to use their home IP to register for this reason.

It really isn't that much of a problem. Hell even ratio cheats aren't actually a problem. If you have a ratio based torrent site fundamentally someone has to have negative ratio for the site to function. Ratio cheats basically add download to others because they download. I'm of the opinion a lot of tracker staff are just nerds who power trip. And honestly, from my experience it's largely true. Simply, torrent sites have gotten away with power tripping and creating this image that people who buy and trade torrent accounts are a problem when you can literally talk you way up the chain within 6-12 months. It's really not that hard if someone wanted to infriate them, just say you're willing to code for them and boom you got yourself a staff position with access to the database and servers. Do that well, you'll get yourself a few more, you'll get friendly with staff at other trackers they'll invite you. Literally, it would be the easiest uncover role within the cyber world. And there probably aren't that many that are easier overall.

> Anyway, if you value your anonymity this much, maybe private trackers aren't for you.

This is sure a valid point. Your data 100% is not save with private trackers. Nothing is safe with then. They act all high and mighty but holy shit will they share you data like no ones business and publically out you, steal money from the "server fund" (personally I never had a problem with it but it was always drama ScT's exit was funny), etc.

[fruitreunion1]

The interviews are not too difficult if you know your digital audio well and can memorize/look up a few facts. The hard part is waiting in the queue...

I'm not sure if they will allow public wifi either if it doesn't look like a residential IP. It's unfortunate... I too wish many trackers didn't do this. Totally worth it for me though. I'll just hope future me doesn't have to suffer the consequences :)

They can probably build quite a specific profile based on my searches and snatchlists, lol. There's no privacy in private trackers for the user.

[Roark66]

Can I ask, what do people download via those private trackers? I never had problems finding anything I wanted using public tpb proxies etc.

[that_guy_iain]

For me, it's generally the same as private trackers but a few differences. Very little - almost zero chance of viruses in the apps. The speeds are way faster, this is very noticable on older stuff. There is no bait and switch.

For niche stuff you can even find the super hard to find. Want to find the tv version of episode 12 of season 3 of Flashpoint, there is a site where that is possible.

Some have communities which are super useful if you're into those. But if you just want to download and get good speeds, a general tracker like TorrentLeech is pretty much all you need.

[theshrike79]

Reliable source for movies and TV-Shows - even rare ones.

And zero chance of being picked up by copyright watchdogs who download the whole swarm's IP addresses and send legal notices to each one fishing for ISPs that will give their user's data without a warrant.

[symlinkk]

“Zero chance” is bullshit, they could easily join a private tracker and look for IPs, they just don’t currently because private trackers are not widely known.

[fruitreunion1]

Well, depending on your tastes some stuff can be hard to find especially if you want lossless copies. Other nice features are the user collages, comments, and great organisation which are pros over something similar like Soulseek.

[serf]

in the case of What.CD there was a community of music makers that released exclusively or very close to the tracker community.

One of the great losses from the shutdown of that site was the destruction of that creative community.

[npteljes]

Private trackers moderate torrents, and peers can use this to their benefit. Formats and naming are more standardized, software has less chance of malware.

[xnyanta]

Browse the /ptg/ (private tracker general) thread on 4chan's /g/ board

[katbyte]

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.

[dtx1]

If you had a way to contact you on your profile, things might be arranged

[6ak74rfy]

I am highly interested in getting started in this - please reach out!

[defamed]

Sorry to bother you so late but I am interested as well!

[przems]

I am extremely interested too, could you help me out?

[ewenjo]

Interested if still available :)

[cbsks]

I am also interested…

[that_guy_iain]

Check your inbox.

[defamed]

I am curious as well. Apologies for the lateness.

[cute_boi]

i am also interested :)

[bscphil]

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.

[Hamuko]

I don't really desire the added complexity of having my files somewhere else.

[that_guy_iain]

Seems same level of complexity to me as adding a VPN into the mix.

[Hamuko]

Not really. With a VPN, the only change is that the networking between A and B now go through a tunnel with no changes to A or B. But if you get a seedbox, A is completely removed from the picture and you just have a connection between B and C.

[theshrike79]

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.

[Hamuko]

So it's more complex and slower.

[theshrike79]

I can wait for the extra 60 seconds it takes for my cronjob to check new files :D

[katbyte]

it can take a long time to sync files home if they are large enough/your connection is slow

[emeril]

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

[thaumaturgy]

> 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.

[justsomehnguy]

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)

[npteljes]

This misses a major point of the seedbox: that you don't have to run torrent on your residential connection.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Tell me more please.

[justsomehnguy]

?

You add the torrent to the seedbox torrent client and your (eg) home torrent client.

They are both become part of the swarm for that torrent, through the tracker or DHT, so eventually they would know about each other.

If your seedbox dowload the chunk then you home client can connect to the seedbox client and download that chunk, just as a regular participant of the swarm, no need to do anything.

Because the seedbox has a direct connectivity then if there is a seed without a direct connectivity - it can connect to your seedbox (again, discovered through DHT or tracker) and give out all the needed chunks.

A bit slower than having a direct connectivity at you home, but most of the time it doesn't matter.

[Hamuko]

I'm having a hard time understanding the point of this setup.

[justsomehnguy]

Seedbox has a real IP (or port forward, though that doesn't matter here) so seed and peers behind the NAT can coonect to it and transfer torrent data. Your home torrent client therefore can connect to it and receive the torrent data even if it can't connect to the seed directly.

[WeylandYutani]

It would be better to look into a dedicated seedbox for torrents.

The companies offering those have experience dealing with copyright cartels.

[byyll]

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.

[colinsane]

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?

[djbusby]

Mullvad has known exit IP addresses. Mullvad doesn't have shit for logging so they cannot link clients to traffic.

[that_guy_iain]

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.

[sph]

Still more expensive than the 5 euro/month I was spending for Mullvad

[MikusR]

Pia has port forwarding and is half the price of mullvad

[serf]

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.

[commoner]

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.

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

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...

[tomjen3]

I am pretty sure you can get a deal with NordVPN. Just search youtube for someone you follow Nordvpn and sponsor.

[stefandesu]

NordVPN doesn't offer port forwarding. https://support.nordvpn.com/FAQ/1047408432/Do-you-offer-port...

[byyll]

Can't have a place on the internet without some Nord shilling.

[rogers18445]

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.

[kortilla]

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.

[rogers18445]

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.

[kortilla]

Whether a port is forwarded or allocated on demand for a connection is irrelevant when you have a nat binding record keeping infrastructure.