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

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 7 points 2 months 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.