An increase in bad seeds on Bit Torrent?
So I've been grabbing a few shows I want to watch reruns of while playing Balatro that don't have good blu ray releases. My piracy is fairly limited these days so I don't bother with private trackers (do have a VPN though). In the past, I never really had an issue with grabbing a few one offs off the popular, maybe honeypot, sites like rarbg and 1337x.
But over the past month or so, I've noticed I have gotten a lot of shitty files. Skips here and there or garbled colors for a scene or two. At first I though it was just a bad file since re-downloading the torrent had the exact same problem.
But, on a whim, I did a recheck and had to download like 40% of a torrent. And then 20% the next time. Which made me assume my NAS was fucked or I was dealing with a lot of packet lsos (... I AM dealing with a lot of packet loss from my ISP). But when I redownloaded a "known bad" torrent I had the exact same corrupted file.
So am I just REALLY unlucky? Or is there an epidemic of shitty/malicious seeds on the public trackers these days?
Without context, I would suggest Transmission for troubleshooting. Qbittorrent is bloating and weird on Windows.
The torrents should be hashed, but that wouldn't stop someone from making a bad torrent or seeding one.
If someone made a file intentionally collided it would probably cause issues. These aren't collision issues, but bad chunks of data.
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/76043/torrent-bad-seed-attack-by-sony-how-does-it-work
At a peek, it seems that this attack only causes delays in downloads. It's more possible that there are commonly shared files with similar issues.
Qbittorrent just gives you options you can choose if you use qt 5 or qt 6 and the version of libtorrent.
Is there any reason not to use the latest version of libtorrent?
i think some people had some problems with it. but don't know exactly what that was because i never had any problems.