Torrenting over a VPN vs Tor. What’s the difference?
Don’t fucking torrent over Tor.
Tor is an important resource that many people depend on in order to have free access to the Internet. This resource is limited. When you selfishly torrent the latest episode of the Big Bang Theory over Tor, you take away valuable bandwidth that other people actually need.
Further, there are just under 1000 Tor exits operated by an even smaller number of volunteers all over the world. When you torrent over Tor in order to avoid legal trouble, you put that legal trouble on those exit operators (like me) instead. That makes you an asshole.
When you use a VPN, you pay a company. You pay to have a piece of their paid for bandwidth capacity to do whatever you want with. Some VPN providers are sizeable businesses and have decided they are well equipped to deal with legal issues from their customers’ traffic.
Don’t fucking torrent over Tor.
Please don’t torrent on Tor. It is very poor netiquette and takes bandwidth away from journalists trying to publicize the oppression of various peoples.
On Tor:
- Bittorent reveals your real IP which defeats the purpose of Tor
- Insanely slow
Torrenting over VPN you trust the VPN so your packets only get washed once.
Torrenting over Tor you don’t trust anyone so your packets get slowly bounced around the entire world a dozen times.
Do not torrent over tor. It does not make you anonymous while using Bittorrent. If you would like to stay somewhat anonymous make use of tribler or use a vpn.
To some it up.
It doesn’t make you anonymous
It slows everything down on tor
It makes you a dumbass
It makes you an asshole
You can use online torrenting sites.
I’m kind of curious, is it really that unsafe to torrent? And another question for those who knows about this kind of stuff, would it be safe to torrent using utorrent without vpn?
How do drug dealers run a website on tor? do they need a vpn, or just use tor?
so, in the end they will find you? 1000 exits with people watching on tor
or abusiness with bandwith…
everyone is so clueless yet so defensive about this.
Thanks for letting me know before I did anything! Dont fucking torrent over Tor guys
Why so hostile about this, though? It doesn’t make them an “asshole” if they don’t know how it affects you. You can say this in a way that doesn’t make you seem like a jerk.
dude retune your post all it does is make people turn off to it and it will drive more torrent traffic to tor just to spite you.
tell you what, just for that, I’m gonna torrent over tor now
Do not put yourself in danger. Our anonymity is not yet mature.
Tribler does not protect you against spooks and government agencies. We are a torrent client and aim to protect you against lawyer-based attacks and censorship. With help from many volunteers we are continuously evolving and improving.
Tor doesn’t support UDP traffic but Torrent requires UDP to talk to the torrent tracker so if you set your torrent client to use Tor as a proxy, UDP packets will not go through Tor but will instead go directly to the internet and reveal your true IP address to the torrent tracker but connections to the peers will go through Tor.
In other words you will not be anonymous and you will unnecessarily waste Tor network’s limited bandwidth.
BitTorrent is just a protocol. It’s like asking if using HTTP is safe.
Edit: since I got downvoted I’ll explain. Here’s the wiki for BitTorrent, which starts off:
BitTorrent (abbreviated to BT) is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing…
Asking if BitTorrent is safe to use without specifying what you’re trying to do is a stupid question.
It’s the same as asking if HTTP is safe without specifying if you’re trying to buy illegal drugs, check your e-mail, or visit an innocuous page where you don’t have to log in or provide any credentials.
Assuming the entire protocol is used for illegal downloading is stupid, as well. It’s like when people try to say Tor or Bitcoin only exist for people to buy drugs.
It’s not necessarily unsafe. If you know what you’re doing then you should be fine. It’s kind of like being the grandma who doesn’t know how to use a computer. Falling for obviously fake downloads, Scammy websites, and viruses. Unless you learn what to avoid through just experience
What do you mean by “safe”? This hugely depends on the countries laws, more importantly the enforcement of the law and copyright trolls.
me too
that guy probably owns a VPN company