Well, After hundreds of GB of torrents downloaded, I slipped up. I’ve been changing around linux distros recently and i believe i configured my VPN wrong or forgot to turn it back on after doing something. Well, I finally got hit with a copyright warning. Just your typical “we had to send this” type of warning but none-the-less, I slipped up.

Sharing this because the day before it happened, I read a post about not only having your killswitch on but also binding your client to you vpn interface for situations like this. Needless to say I didn’t take that precaution. For those who are on linux, I found a great post about how to set this up on reddit and wanted to remind people to “double wrap” because why not be safe lol.

The steps were more or less as follows (for QBitTorrent at least):

  1. Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced Settings

  2. Under “Network Interface”, select your vpn interface. To test, check what shows with your vpn on, and then turn it off and re-navigate to this part to see what dissapeared. Thats likely your vpn interface if the name wasn’t clear. (Do not be seeding/downloading torrents while doing this in case).

  3. To test, download a non-copyright torrent like the Ubuntu ISO torrent. In the middle of download, disconnect or close your vpn connection. This should stop the download.

Not sure if reddit links are cool here but here is the guide source if anyones interested. Binding VPN to Torrent Client

Stay hidden!

    • black0ut@pawb.socialEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Yeah it sounds so bizarre to me… What do you mean your ISP is constantly snooping all your encrypted traffic or trying to de-anonimize you by making undercover peers? That doesn’t sound very net neutral…

  • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
    0·
    2 months ago

    ive not had any leaking since i setup my torrenting container(deluge is my fav) to use the openvpn container(gluetun) for its internet. theres zero chance it can leak, nothing to ‘forget to turn on’… kinda idiotproof, which i needed

    gluetun is your friend

    • Joe@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Be careful of dualstack and IPv4-only VPNs. The client can discover and advertise the real IPv6 address, even if adequately firewalled. I’m not sure if gluetun addresses this risk.

      edit: this should be considered a risk even if you don’t have IPv6 support today, as this could be enabled by your ISP in the future, then automatically enabled on your network by your router.

    • JackAttack@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Public I assume, I’m pretty new to torrenting and haven’t really dove into private trackers yet. Any resources your recommend on reading up on that?

      • ShepherdPie@midwest.socialEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        /r/opentrackers /r/opensignups to find openings and read the rules of wherever you’re joining. Typically, they just want you to seed for X amount of time within Y days. I’ve also been temporarily banned once for not having any activity several days after joining on one of the more popular sites.

          • Chozo@fedia.io
            1·
            2 months ago

            Mainly just that you need to maintain a fairly high seed ratio to keep access. A lot of trackers will limit how many concurrent torrents you can have, based on your seed ratio. And depending on the tracker and the media that you want to download, you sometimes run into situations where just nobody else wants what you’re seeding, or where the torrent has so many seeds that you barely get to contribute.

            Last time I was on a private tracker, I was one of only like 3 other users who were downloading episodes of Doctor Who. I could seed those for months, and never go above 1.0 because there just wasn’t interest in that.

            I’m not sure if this is considered a good practice or not, but what I ended up doing was occasionally torrenting something that was really popular, even if I had no interest in it, just so that I could seed something. It definitely helped to keep my ratio up, and as far as I can tell it’s overall a net benefit to the network as a whole, so I don’t think tracker admins would have issue with it. But it just felt weird, to me.

            • ShepherdPie@midwest.socialEnglish
              1·
              2 months ago

              I’m not sure if this is considered a good practice or not, but what I ended up doing was occasionally torrenting something that was really popular, even if I had no interest in it, just so that I could seed something.

              This is absolutely recommended in order to build ratio. Find and download brand new torrents to get the best chance at upload credit, especially if they’re freeleech files that don’t count toward your download ratio.

              Also every tracker I’ve ever joined has some sort of bonus point system that allows you to buy upload credit and improve your ratio with points earned from seeding, uploading, leaving forum comments, etc.

              I’ve been able to build super high ratios even with garbage upload speeds just by seeding things for a long time to the point that I don’t have to worry about it even with automated downloading via sonarr/radarr.

  • Spectrism@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Same thing also happened to me at the end of last year. I usually only use torrents on my PC, but that day I decided to also use them on my laptop and of course I forgot to change the network interface to that of my VPN in qBittorrent because I’m an idiot. After around 2 weeks, I got a cease and desist letter ordering me to pay ~1000 € and sign their cease and desist declaration. Was able to negotiate down to 600 € and only sent back a modified declaration, still pretty expensive for such a silly little mistake. I’d say you can consider yourself lucky to just receive a warning :)

    Unfortunately for me, German law makes torrents a very lucrative business model for some law firms who do nothing but send cease and desist letters, thousands each year.

    I only got caught for a few seconds according to their letter, but that was enough to get me into trouble. Not sure what the reason was, perhaps I started the VPN too late or maybe systemd was stopping the VPN service before qBt got closed when I was shutting the laptop down. Either way, this probably wouldn’t have happened if I had set the correct network interface in qBt and I’ve learnt to always do that first whenever I install a torrent client. I can only advise everyone to also check the publicly visible torrent IP with tools like this, just to be sure.

    Smooth sailin’ me hearties! 🏴‍☠️

    • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      02·
      2 months ago

      The IP checker you linked likes to flag false positives. I just checked it on my phone and it claimed that my IP address was being leaked, despute me using a VPN and the IP they listed being my VPN’s server