This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
Speaking of which, I gave up on torrents a couple of years ago and switched to direct downloads. Not only is it much faster due to not having to rely on seeds, turns out that ISPs don't actually care if you download pirated content. Distributing it is where they get you.
This is going to depend on the country that you're in. Germany for example is pretty notorious for also going after the small fries.
Isn't it harder to find direct downloads? Or am I just stuck in the past on the bay?
Why would anyone, anywhere block torrenting? There is nothing illegal about it.
Legal game updates as torrents? Is that a thing?
Even Windows Update has a peer-to-peer option.
Policing this crap isn't trivial and not worth the effort.
We just gave up and block 100% of all P2P traffic on both our university wireless and student wired networks.
In our corporate network, we just detect for common BT applications on the endpoint and alert on that instead.
What do you mean by blocking "100% of all P2P traffic"?
100% of all P2P protocols, literally are blocked by our University F5 BigIP by rule.
All of them (including certain Lemmy features).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_P2P_protocols
When your IT has a small budget, you do what you need to do in order to mitigate the actions of the few.
My university just blacklisted the questionable trackers' DNS, not the actual data traffic
So basically I would tether to my cell phone, wait for it to fetch a list of peers from the tracker, and then switch back to the uni wifi to complete the download
Why would you care? Is it a legal issue of some sort?
Likely is. When a dorm resident does the torrenting, the university would be receiving those naughty letters.
debrid services for the win! just let someone else torrent it for you, and download it from them.
AllDebrid costs €3 a month and saves you any legal headaches.
At least it's allowed, when I was in college they didn't allow any torrent traffic at all. They had also banned pings specifically, and threatened to shut off my internet if I didn't stop trying to send pings, which apparently my torrent client was doing automatically.
At least it’s allowed
That was my point. It being allowed rather than "we received 2 not nice letters, say goodbye to that entire protocol" as usual.
If you get the torrent from a site using HTTPS and get the data only from encrypted peers is it even possible to tell what people are downloading?
Not from monitoring on the network
But if one of those peers is a snitch then you have a potential issue
If it was me, I'd snoop the DNS requests and/or SNI headers. Flag on torrent index sites and trackers known to be used for pirate stuff. They don't need to know exactly which paw patrol movie you're downloading, just that you are getting something from thepiratebay.
For anything public, it's anything varying from trivial to hard/annoying depending on your client settings, but never quite impossible. Even in the best-case scenario where you have DHT turned off and all the trackers in the torrent are using HTTPS, man-in-the-middle attacks are fairly doable for anything popular.
This can be easily bypassed by joining the seeding/downloading of popular torrents which gives access to peers' IPs.
me with my vpn
Interesting, but torrents have legal uses so it shouldn't be too surprising. I've had data sets provided by torrent due to size, although it's not that common.
Do keep in mind, is a school Internet if it's on the dorm so this is probably more a warning than anything. It's not that different than trying to do illegal stuff on a library computer (or even legal stuff like porn. Don't do that on a school or work computer, lol).
I did find it interesting that my own school Internet in student apartments didn't have this problem, though. Iirc, that was because it was individually done via spectrum, not a campus intranet. My personalized orientation, the grad student showing me around even had pirating suggestions, lol.
Where does one even find legal torrents?
Archive.org for example. Plenty of legal torrents on public trackers like tpb too.