rufus

Hey, that's unfair. Here in Germany we don't get 5% discount with IKEA family. Just discount on a few select (changing) products and free coffee.

It's probably more they either optimize for speed or for privacy. You sometimes can't do both. Including IPs is usually done to find the best and direct connection between peers. It's not shady per se. But it'll harm you if it's the default.

The relays don't have access to the content, it's encrypted. But the exit-nodes can see what you're transmitting. They just don't know who you are because they got your data forwarded by the relays.

Well, I don't know the exact reasons. I read somewhere that it's been a frequent issue. That has either to do with the way the torrent client is programmed and it doesn't pay attention to the specifics for that case. Or the users frequently get the config wrong.

For example: Since Tor doesn't support UDP, if your torrent client sends out a UDP packet, it goes over your normal internet connection, immediately revealing your real IP. Whereas if you used a VPN, the packed had been tunneled and that would disguise you.

Also the Socks-Proxy setup is more complicated. Seems to be the case there are just many more possibilities to get it wrong.

I don't know any reason why you couldn't theoretically get it watertight. But you have to pay close attention to do it right.

There could be specifics to torrent traffic that expose you in some way. I'm not sure, you'd need to ask a security expert about this. But a torrent download is another kind of data stream than the web-surfing Tor was made for. I know there was research done on Tor. I can only speculate.

I answered there. Not sure why you open a completely new post for that follow-up question?! You could have asked just here.

Both work quite differently. TOR routes you over several layers, obscures your IP and changes the IPs around occasionally so you can't be tracked.

With Bittorrent you want lasting connections to other peers to be able to receive and send all the data. This doesn't align with the ever changing IPs and stuff.

A VPN gives you one IP that you can have for hours.

A VPN supports UDP connections, TOR doesn't.

Connecting your Bittorrent client to the Socks-Proxy of a TOR client is a different setup than it just sending normal packets through a VPN tunnel.

TOR is slow (by design), a VPN is fast.

If your client or something leaks your IP it happens anyways, if you route it over one node or seven. All the extra energy is just wasted.

And bittorrent puts even more strain on the TOR network the way it works. Making it slower for anybody else. And (ab)using the resources volunteers provide. (And which are meant for better use-cases.)

It will never get recommended. It's bad for the network and bad for your privacy.

I'm glad they're taking AI seriously. I feel the world of commercial services and free software have been diverging for some time. With the former being extended with lots of recommendation algorithms, AI features, smart assistants and machine learning shenanigans. And free software not so much.

While I like my free software without recommendation algorithms that cater for advertisers and confine me in a filter bubble, I like the ML and AI stuff to be available in free software as well. Like a voice assistant, AI that helps with organizing stuff, querying documents, transcribing voice messages... This is all very useful.

I'd like some of the machine learning stuff to be adopted in other free software projects as well. For example GIMP adopting the current AI helpers. And tight integration of text to speech and speech to text into the desktop environments and available in the package manager of my desktop linux install.

Hehe, but the old myth that graphics cards degrade if you use them is a myth. I think Linus Tech Tips did a video on this and an older one. Sad that your GPU is flickering now, but probably unrelated and had happened either way at some point.

Yeah. Hetzner is the hosting company. They are the owner of the IP range and thus get the letters. They forward it to their customers, in this case OP. And the letter seems to be from one of those shady companies that scan the torrent swarms for Intellectual Property of their customers and then write letters to the abuse contacts of the IP addresses of the offenders. I don't know where OP lives, but Hetzner is big in Germany, so it's probably german law we're talking about. And we're not very liberal with copyright infringement, should that escalate to that point.

Why? Make me learn something.