My ISP sends me letters even if I am torrenting on VPN. Is there anyway to make my traffic not look like torrenting?

sum_yung_gai@lemm.ee to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 203 points –

Also asked them if torrenting legal stuff is allowed and they said no.

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There's an issue with your VPN.

What VPN service do you use?

It probably isn't which one that's the problem, it's more likely your setup.

If you can, try disabling IPv6 entirely, turn it off in your operating system and your router. I'd bet you're leaking past the VPN that way.

Wouldn't advise turning off ipv6. We are probably getting near the point where some public services will disable or offer v4 as only best effort, and when this happens, your connectivity will be broken for certain things if you disable v6. Heck, it's to the point now where all my home hosted services are v6 only.

The better solution is to just get a VPN that supports ipv6 like airvpn or mullvad. I think pia disables ipv6 while the tunnel is up, which is better than disabling ipv6 altogether.

To validate the tunnel is working properly you can use something like this.

https://ipleak.net/

There is also a Torrent Address detection section, that when you activate it, will provide a magnet link that will show your ip to ensure that it is tunneled properly.

Dude, it’ll be a longer time than this guy is going to be on his ISP before he’ll need to worry about ipv6.

OP - feel free to disable it, IMO.

Seriously; they've been talking about v6 for like 3 decades now. I'll believe it when I see it.

Many ISPs are no longer handing out even 1 public ipv4 address per account, and instead opting for CGnat which further breaks and stratifies the internet.

Tmobile for example is 464xlat which is even worse than cgnat since it requires tampering with dns responses.

Given the situation many ISP are in, most serious companies offering services on the internet have supported ipv6 for a long time now in order to offer the most competitive service possible. And with cloudflare now serving up a large amount of traffic, a lot of all traffic is v6.

Believe it or not, but IPv6 is here and gaining ground.

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Mullvad doesn't allow portforwarding anymore iirc

I actually had to disable ipv6 just because Halo Infinite wouldn't load the UI. A couple websites were unreachable with it on too. Seems like it will still be awhile.

WireGuard is increasingly popular as far as I can tell. And if I understand correctly, designed more for IPv6.

I just noticed I have ipv6 disabled in Mullvad. It has caused me no issues. Should I enable it?

If you want to, then sure. For torrenting, it's not necessary, but may be helpful. I do occasionally see ipv6 peers.

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If you are on VPN they cannot know shit. Only that you use a VPN... So either they are detecting the VPN and lying about what they know or you fucked up setting the VPN and the torrentina doesn't go through the VPN.

They’ll still see upload/download volumes, speeds and patterns. Just not destinations. That alone could indicate torrent.

That could indicate a lot of things. It would be very difficult to distinguish a torrent from something like cloud folder sync. And that would still be a statistical guess. No ISP is going to go after customers because their VPN traffic is potentially torrent traffic.

Besides, even if they could detect that torrenting is taking place, they will not know what data is being transferred from and to where. It's a meme, but torrents are actually sometimes used for non-copyright infringing data.

I was providing Linux distros and Machine Learning datasets some time ago, because official servers where slow. I'm the meme I guess

So you think OP is lying?

OP's ISP is lying or OP misconfigured his client.

My guess would be that there is a problem with his configuration, and he is leaking traffic that reveals he is using torrents.

Your comment assumes the ISP cares about false positives.

You are assuming the client needs to care about his ISPs claims unless they actually exist, and aren't false positives.

Check ipleak.net to see if there's identifiable info coming through. Use their torrent check as well.

You also need to force your torrent client to use the VPN network adaptor. You can do this in qBitorrent advanced settings

Where do I find this setting on Deluge?

Cheeky fuckers telling you no bittorrent at all is allowed. They're banning protocols now...

Because some idiot isps decided that torrenting is considered serving media/files to others and is thus running a server and thus require you to use Business plans that cost 5x as much.

If you're on qbit, did you bind your vpn to qbit?

Also your vpn might just be bad, what do you use?

Do you mind explaining or pointing to resource about binding to qbit? I use qbit and pia.

Start the VPN and connect to a location. Open qBittorrent. Go to Preferences, and then Advanced tab. Change Network interface to the VPN (usually its name, like "Mullvad"). Restart qBittorrent.

Basically when you bind it, if your vpn ever happens to turn off or leak etc its gonna stop the download/upload

Unless something has changed since I used it, you'll need to set PIA to wireguard only, and the adapter shows up as wg-pia. (or similar)

I did not but it was a system wide VPN.

You should always bind it directly in qb to prevent it from accidentally leaking

Start the VPN and connect to a location. Open qBittorrent. Go to Preferences, and then Advanced tab. Change Network interface to the VPN (usually its name, like "Mullvad"). Restart qBittorrent.

Basically when you bind it, if your vpn ever happens to turn off etc its gonna stop the download/upload

Dunno if anyone mentioned it, but if I had to guess, you have a DNS leak. Basically your DNS requests are going through your ISP instead of the VPN, resulting in them knowing where you're going online anyway. Be sure to check for those DNS leaks and setup a custom one if your VPN doesn't offer one. Don't forget, DNS traffic over port 53 is also unencrypted, so unless you force those through the VPN, they could still know where you're going.

I had a similar problem where my ipv4 traffic went through the VPN, but for ipv6 it was straight to clearnet

So you're effectively blocked from installing some Linux distros? What the fuck

What, they don’t allow torrenting legal stuff? So you can’t download Windows 11 as a torrent from Microsoft? Sounds like a sassy ISP.

Review your VPN config, it's leaking some traffic. Enable it system wide with a kill switch.

Last I tried was with mullvad and it had a system wide Killswitch.

Do you get specific letters about files you have downloaded, or generic letters about you using torrent?

If the first, something is wrong with your setup. Mullvad should be fine.

If the latter, it might be only your DNS setup is leaking and your isp sees the domains you are connecting to.

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-leaks/

I torrent on a seedbox and then download to my local machine with rsync. ISP shouldn't care about an ssh connection.

Do you use a seed box service or how does it work?

You basically have a remote server, usually a cloud or bare metal, where you do all your torrenting. It's fairly easy, as there are plenty of clients with web UI like Transmission that can be setup super easily via Docker. Make sure to protect it somehow though. Or use a torrent CLI tool and do everything via SSH.

Try Usenet instead. Or get a seedbox and let that do the torrenting for you. Either you have a DNS leak with your VPN, or they're just guessing your torrenting because of how much traffic you're using all the time. The DNS leak is more likely.

My gf got several letters and I started using a VPN. Easy peasy. No problems.

Now I've moved to seedboxes (seedhost.eu) and private trackers. First I buy an invite to a private tracker (if you spend like $20 you can get an invite to one of the less prestigious ones and like 500gb of quota). This is kind of a process since private trackers are 1000% against selling invites so it's kind of a "marketplace" forum type deal. Not a 1 min paypal transaction. Took me a couple days to get my first invite.

Then use that tracker on the seedbox which has a few tb disc. Then I sftp in (I have used the app Forklift for many years and highly recommend if you're on a Mac, it's amazing) and transfer down.

I get like 7 MB/s through VPN which is alright for me and even without a VPN, it's just random traffic coming from a server. You aren't torrenting from your machine so there's no issue.

To get quota on the trackers, you can either buy an invite that includes some quota or build it up yourself. The seedboxes I use have like 100 MB/s upload speed so you'd just download some super popular (freeleach if possible) torrents and then seed for a while. If your invite comes with some quota, likely you'll have more quota than you know what to do with. I bought an invite with a 100gb quota and now I have like 4tb of quota.

The downside is cost which might defeat the point of pricy for some. I pay like $6 a month for my instance. But if you're willing to pay for a more powerful instance you can run Plex directly and stream everything if you wanted. I download locally and put it on my local Plex server.

This sounds really promising! Is it unsafe to sftp download from the seedbox without VPN?

I use Syncthing with my Seedbox and use a VPN on my Debian VM running syncthing, then share the folder im syncing over smb on my local network. (I Use FeralHosting) This is just one of many ways to do it.

SFTP is fine but is like having a helmet on while racing but not using a seat belt.

Not really but I do notice that sometimes my ISP with throttle me and it stops when I use a VPN, so I just usually use a VPN (and never torrent local anymore, it's like waiting for a snail to deliver your amazon package).

private trackers are 1000% against selling invites

Unless it's one of the the trackers where the owners themselves are doing the selling via their seedbox sales

Users selling invites would undercut them.

Sure, there's a huge variety among private trackers. Googling "buy private tracker invite" shows 10s of different sellers. some tracker invites can be $150 because they're gigantic communities full of content and don't send out invites often. Some of them are cheap enough to throw in as freebies when you buy something else.

What's really nice about buying an invite is splurging the extra $10 and getting a built in 500-800GB of quota with it (really you're buying the account itself). Then you don't have to "work your way" up as long as you keep seeding whatever is popular.

It would be helpful if we knew what VPN provider you are using.

Please note: if your VPN provider costs you nothing; you are the product and you are absolutely using the wrong VPN! It is expected that you use a reputable, No Logs, Torrent-Friendly Paid VPN for best "torrenting-compatible" privacy results. These can run anywhere from $5 to $75 USD depending on what payment term and plan you run.

How about ProtonVPN? They are free-ish but only to a certain extent so you could also say they are a paid product as well. Are they decent for this task?

Edit: I was not specific enough but I do meant If you are a paid subscriber, is protonvpn okay for this task?

ProtonVPN explicitly denies Torrenting in their ToS when you are a FREE user. You must purchase their service before torrenting.

I use protonVPN exclusively for torrenting. I highly recommend it

your VPN provider, sucks, and is leaking, so they can see all your traffic, and sue you for it, after they cancel your service. get a better VPN provider like NordVPN, or another major, and STOP using whatever the hell VPN you're using now, it might already be too late

Damn, you must be living in a first world country. Anyway some VPNs have options to switch the protocol to a more undetectable one. Windscribe has a stealth mode where the traffic would look like normal https traffic over port 443. But looking at the way it is, your ISP might notice you have transferred x amount of data to a VPN server and still send those notices

Hahahaha.

Call them again and ask the same question. Record their answer. Then keep on torrenting legal stuff.

If they're dumb enough to come after you for something that is patently false, enjoy getting your retirement paid for by your ISP.

I don't think that's how it works; you don't just somehow get money because your ISP is being stupid. Maybe if, through years of expensive legal battles, you could demonstrate some damages and get a favorable ruling, but not because you have a recording of some incompetent customer service rep saying "don't torrent".

Also, be careful about taking advice about recording people from random people on the internet. A responsible person should tell you that different states have different laws around potentially requiring you to inform other parties that you're recording them. You'd feel pretty silly suing your ISP based on a recording that was actually illegally created.

To my understanding your isp is only passing on the dmca which means that the dmca is meaningless unless the rights holder acts on it. So take away from that what you will

I have a raspberry pi. Does anyone have a good guide on setting up a raspberry pi for secure torrenting from my home?

Depending on what you’re downloading (media - TV, movies, music) usenet could be the better approach.

If you are acquiring that type of content, look into the *arr services and setup guides.

where are you?

Not your address, because I'm totally not like the FBI or anything!