Recommended blocklist - any others tips?

[jdaviescoates]

We subscribe to Netflix, Disney and Prime. But there were some films the kids wanted to watch that weren't freely available on any of those. No worries, I thought, I'll just go back to good old BitTorrent and download them. I did it on my server mostly just because it's faster than doing it at home, and beacuse I've got a nice set-up so that things downloaded there automagically appear in our instance of Jellyfin and we've got the Jellyfin app on our TV. All good.

But literally within an hour or so Hetzner (where I have my server) emailed me with an abuse claim related to these films. Oh, shit.

Anyways, I'll probably mostly just do less torrenting (it's not like I do a lot anyways), but I spotted Transmission has a blocklist feature and so did a search which in short led me to this list:

https://github.com/Naunter/BT_BlockLists/

It says it's no longer actively maintained, but it seems it's also semi-automatically updated/ maintained anyway. So I've added it.

By pasting this link https://github.com/Naunter/BT_BlockLists/raw/master/bt_blocklists.gz into Transmission preferences in the Peers tab here and hitting update:

Hopefully it'll reduce the likelihood of getting future abuse emails!

If anyone else has any relevant tips, share them here. My main other thought is that I should probably not be using the same server as I use for all my important stuff for doing this... I've never really looked into where best to host seedboxes, but if anyone else here has relevant knowledge to share I'm all ears - thanks!

[humptydumpty]

Why take the risk with your VPS? I know it's extra manual work to use a VPN and torrent client locally on your PC and move the data over to the media server, but you won't get any abuse emails. What am I missing?

[jdaviescoates]

@humptydumpty I don't think you're missing anything.

TBH I've never even bothered with using a VPN when torrenting at home and I've never had any issues.

It was just nice to be able to very quickly download files directly on the VPS into and saving the files into a Volume that the media server also has access too. Was just so quick and easy!

Presumably VPN providers also get abuse emails though when their IP addresses are implicated - I wonder how they handle it.

[humptydumpty]

@jdaviescoates said in Recommended blocklist - any others tips?:

TBH I've never even bothered with using a VPN when torrenting at home and I've never had any issues.

I'll get 10 different letters from my ISP if I attempt that here in the US

@jdaviescoates said in Recommended blocklist - any others tips?:

Presumably VPN providers also get abuse emails though when their IP addresses are implicated - I wonder how they handle it.

I use EU based VPN's like Proton and Mullvad and they claim "no logs" kept. I've never had any issues even when I was using a US based VPN (although lately, they did say we won't be able to use torrent with US servers; so I simply connected to EU servers).

Since no logs are kept, they have no way of telling which account is doing what. With that said, I did read a discussion on Reddit where Proton was able to identify and terminate an account that was running DDOS attacks. Even though they don't keep logs, they can trace abuse like DDOS to an account and terminate it in real time. I've never heard of anyone getting terminated or caught for torrenting though.

Mullvad has a new feature to mitigate against AI traffic monitoring by randomizing your packets. Proton has secure core, stealth mode, and a bunch of other fancy features to make sure you can't be traced back. In the end, you gotta trust someone and I sure don't trust my ISP

P.S. I use Proton now, but still have about 9 days left on my Mullvad subscription. I can share my account number with you if you'd like to try it.

[jdaviescoates]

@humptydumpty thanks, for now I'm just going to try using a cheap VPS from https://hostingby.design which I found via https://www.reddit.com/r/seedboxes/wiki/seedbox_vendors/#wiki_seedbox_vendor_list_.28alphabetical.29

I'll install a Cloudron on there, install Transmission, add the blocklist (in the setting.json via the File Manager so it persists), and create a Volume which saves to (again by adjusting the relevant values in settings.json) the same Storage Box that's connected to my media server and see what happens. I'll start by downloading the films that caused the issue previously again as I figure that should be a good test!

Update: for good measure I've also edited settings.json to Require Encryption too so (as I understand it) even if the blocklist fails it shouldn't be possible for people to snoop on exactly what files I'm downloading/ seeding.

Overall I feel this set-up with 1) seedbox friendly VPS host 2) blocklist 3) encryption is probably robust enough and I should be fine going forward.

And at least my primary dedicated server is no longer at risk! (was pretty silly of me to do it on there tbh! )

[necrevistonnezr]

Also, Hetzner is a German company, hence bound by very-strict anti piracy laws.

@humptydumpty was right - set it up securely at home (I‘d recommend qbittorrent and binding the network interface to the VPN; there’s no easy way to do this with Transmission; or use one of those dockers that include Torrent client and VPN so it doesn’t „leak“).
Even the new VPS probably has your (payment) data that it could release if so requested by a court.

[robi]

There is a difference between using public and private torrent trackers. Private ones are not visible as the public ones are.

Another option is to use Cove which can browse and play torrent media from your self-hosted server. Works in the LAMP app.