this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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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.
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.
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.
Isn't that the whole point of a private tracker?
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.
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.
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.
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.