Now Playing. "Port Forwarding (1990s version)" by T1na Badgraph1csghost
First, I should mention: I haven't torrented anything before. Like a lot of other people, I'm learning as I go, so keep that in mind. There are far more cogent tutorials from knowledgeable people that you can find by searching DDG, so if you're looking for a tutorial, this isn't the place.
Also, despite what the corporate feudal propaganda tells you, there is nothing inherently criminal about torrenting, or VPNs, or checking your IP address for leaks. I do not discuss how to break the law, nor shall I point out any explicit piracy sites. So, if you're worried that, by reading this entry, you're going to be added to some police list of potential lawbreakers—you're already on that list, but not for coming here.
Anyway, people often advocate for torrenting as a means of culture-jamming, but they talk like that XKCD comic about how biologists think non-biologists think. Outside a very exclusive core group of computer geeks, hardly anyone has even heard of torrenting, let alone understanding how it's done; and then they read posts on Tumblr telling them to go download a torrent client and use it without delay. Well, great—you mind explaining what you're talking about there, Boris?
Proceeding with the film references, torrenting is a stinky bog full of methane decomposition fires with only one way through it. You have to follow Gollum or you'll end up lighting a little candle of your own. It's not particularly complicated, but there are hardly any protections against user error during the setup process, and if you do one thing out of order or forget a step, your ISP is going to see what you're doing and block the torrent. That's the least they will do. All commercial ISPs in North America, Europe, and the British Isles consider torrenting equal to piracy. Regardless of what the files contained in the torrent actually are, it's easier for them to simply block all torrents, since a couple of huge multinational corporations complained about torrenting being the first line for media pirates. Torrenting a compendium of Victorian-era foraging guides from the Internet Archive will be treated the same as torrenting the complete series of The Mandalorian from eggsalad.website and will, at the absolute least, be blocked in transit. Depending on how many Disney or Amazon stockholders are on your ISP's board of directors, you may also have your service terminated, get slapped with a fine, or even get arrested and investigated for piracy.
There is nothing inherently criminal about torrenting, but to save itself money on personnel and attorneys, your ISP is absolutely not going to let you torrent. So where does that leave you? You've read the Wikipedia article about Torrent files
and you like the speed and relative anonymity of the format, but you don't know where to go from here. The answer is; you need a VPN. When it comes to VPN service, there's no such thing as "free". If a VPN host advertises its service as "free", that means they're stepping in to fill the void left by your ISP and are selling all of your browsing data to the analytics companies themselves.
You would be better off with a host that doesn't operate out of a Five Eyes country, so that strikes Mozilla VPN, Windscribe, and PIA off the list straightaway, as they're operated by North American companies. Really, it's hard to find a country in the world right now that isn't surveilled by one of the Five Eyes. Even though Sweden is technically included in a secondary branch of FVEY, called SSEUR, Mullvad AB has never had a major controversy in all the years it's been online. A police raid on their headquarters was attempted in late 2023, but officers left with nothing, because Mullvad had nothing to offer them. The reason for the raid was related to a co-ordinated blackmail attack in Germany that had used Mullvad servers, which was one of the reasons why they dropped support for port-forwarding (technical term, not really important here). However, since the company doesn't keep really any records of any kind, it's as private as you can get in the 21.2nd century, and it's fairly priced, at €5 per month.
Just like in maths, torrenters have an order of operations to remember:
• 1. Connect to the internet,
• 2. Connect to the VPN,
• 3. Launch Firefox,
• 4. Check for IP address leaks (covered in a bit here),
• 5. Launch torrent client.
...then, reverse the process when it's time to stop:
• 1. Close torrent client,
• 2. Close Firefox,
• 3. Disconnect from the internet.
Mullvad also has another ability that torrenters need, and that is to start with the operating system and block the computer's network traffic until it can connect to one of its servers. Once Firefox is running, the first thing to do is to make sure your IP address isn't leaking somehow. The most likely cause of a leaky IP with Firefox is "DNS over HTTPS" being turned on; it can be turned off from the Privacy & Security tab of the Settings menu. A leak means that the VPN isn't properly shielding your traffic from your ISP. Mullvad's own website has a connection test, or you can use a different site like ipleak.net; either way, make sure you can confirm that your connection is secured before launching your torrent client.
There are quite a few torrent clients, but most are data scrapers, cryptominers, or just straight-up malware. Pretty much the only one anyone should even consider using is qBittorrent. I said once that qBit wasn't compatible with Mullvad because they stopped supporting port-forwarding—apparently, while this will affect speed somewhat, it doesn't completely break compatibility, so Mullvad will still work with qBit; it'll just take a bit longer to assemble the file chunks, I guess.
If your only exposure to torrenting has been through piracy, than you will probably have heard of "leeching" and "seeding". A leecher is simply a peer that downloads torrents. A seeder is a peer whose torrent client is left open after a download is complete to be used as a source for the torrent. However, in piracy, "leecher" is defined a peer that downloads far more than it seeds. Pirate torrent sites tend to track a particular IP address's leech/seed ratio and block addresses that don't seed. The reason for this is that, pirate sites tend to have many torrents available—hundreds, possibly thousands. If a particular peer or network is taken offline; either for maintenance or some law enforcement reason; the torrent(s) that they seed will be inaccessible. Since pirate seeders tend to go offline fairly frequently and the site's offerings are so vast, these sites rely upon a larger network that cannot be completely disabled by police agencies. In order to be an effective seeder, a peer must be online at all times, which is often not feasible for the average user; either because the computer cannot be left on for extended periods, or acting as a server would be a security vulnerability. Non-pirate sites, such as FOSS developer project pages and the Internet Archive, do not expect leechers to also act as seeders. This is because all peers on the network are seeding the torrent and there are usually much fewer torrents offered. The only exception is the Internet Archive, which easily hosts hundreds of exabytes' worth of data; in this case, seed priority is given to those files that are accessed the most.
Again, this entry was not intended as a call to action, nor is its purpose to undermine any particular company. I intended it only as an extra layer of information, beyond some rando on Tumblr telling you that "you should be torrenting".
--16 April 2024--