I heard that in some countries you can get fined for using torrents or seeding beyond a certain limit (Das Deutschlandlied intensifies). How to seed so that no idiot government would get hands on the fact that you are downloading torrents? I am pretty sure I can do this using Tails OS but what else? Is there a safe way to SEED TILL YOU BLEED?
It would have been nice if we (someone but not me) could have created a website where we could read a particular country’s law and how to torrent safely from there.
Seeding is safe when you aren’t using P2P discovery functions. If it is a private tracker, and everything is encrypted, you’ll never have any issues. Stay away from public torrents that aren’t explicitly controlled by a tracker unless it’s freely available data (like a Linux distro).
Tell that to my university. Got a nasty email because I… downloaded Fedora Silverblue 38 😭
Well, yeah. Private network sysadmins tend to act like a big hammer. Torrents can be terrible on a network, particularly Linux distro torrents, especially if the hardware itself was put together on a shoestring budget. That said, a lot of universities are mirrors and there isn’t really a need to go outside the university network to obtain that stuff. Not all the time, though.
edit: didn’t downvote you. btw, is it true that you can see who downvoted you on lemmy? I don’t want to but yeah idk seems somewhat interesting.
I am sorry, you would have to explain this to me :(
Also, what do you mean by private tracker, I create a torrent which has encrypted files and then I share that torrent & encryption keys with my friend. That kinda torrent?
Out of the box no, but if you host a Lemmy server you can check in the SQL database who downvoted what, both locally and all posts that were synced using ActivityPub.
Apparently all that data is included in the ActivityPub protocol. On Kbin, every post has an Activity button that shows every user (even those on other instances) that upvoted/downvoted/saved that post. So if a Lemmy post happens to federate to Kbin, all that info can be seen publicly by anyone.
I wish that was not the case but fine ig!
Also, government reach is infinite. If you’re using them Internet, the government has your traffic. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a real thing. Go look up Room 641a.
Most people understand the word “private tracker” as a website like piratebay which you can only enter if someone else invites you. It often involves a requirement to seed some amount back into the network.
There are some names of known private trackers out there, there are ways to get an invite, sometimes it even involves something as simple as a donation (that’s how I got in, currently sitting on the leaderboard for amount of data seeded). Once you’ve entered one private tracker, there’s also easy ways to enter others, since you show credibility and commitment.
I think that sums it up nicely.
Generally there is a centralized “tracker” that creates a torrent on the fly specifically for your user. I’ve you load the torrent and connect to the tracker via sometime like transmission or rtorrent or deluge, the tracker provides you with a list of peers (as far as I understand it). There’s usually some settings you need to change on your torrent tool, like disarming different, DHT, etc - the sure usually has instructions for beginners. The communication between you and your peers is encrypted, so deep packet inspection at the ISP level is not possible. It also significantly reduces, but not eliminates, the risk a particular torrent is a honeypot.
I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve never received a notice about torrenting from my ISPs. However, people I know that got stuff from open places like Pirate Bay and the like did get notices. The difference being I always used private trackers.
Not at all required. The client sees a private torrent and does all that automatically.
Must be a legacy thing. All the tracker guides instructed users to turn all that off.