3d ago

What are these torrent connections?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/39867783

When seeding a file. Let's say a movie, and all I see are a lot of connections where others try to download that movie. However, they remain at 0% and never download anything.
Almost feels like its something watching, logging connections to everyone connected to that torrent. Just a theory.. No idea. (Privacy conscious)
Maybe someone can shed some light?

11 comments

something watching, logging connections to everyone connected to that torrent
Might be, FWIW there are quite a few ways to torrent in a rather private way, namely require encrypted connection, have a blocklist, require to be behind a VPN, etc ... but in the end you still share data with strangers, that's the core premise. The whole point is to facilitate the sharing of data reliably but then who joins the pool is outside of the protocol itself.
It can be numerous things, like misconfigured port forwarding on your router and/or torrent client on your side or on there side. This doesn't mean that it blocks all handshake but it does limit how well your/there client will exchange data. Other possibility is that Client is set to a limit of a active connection (total or by torrent). It can keep some connection so that it will switch to another one when it will be done with other connections (because tracker is sending list of peers according to some timer, it doesn't ask for new peers every time it has finished with one, probably to not overload tracker server with repeated queries). Those are the first reasons that come to my mind but probably are others possibilities.
Edit: I don't personally think these are people/agencies logging data, agencies that try to enforce infringment will download data from you so they have proof that you are sharing.
- Fyi, it's "their client" not "there client".
  "Their" means an individual or group of individuals owns something.
  "There" is referring to a place.
  I'm not trying to be pedantic with this comment, based on your server I'm assuming English is a second language and wanted to help
  
  Thanks 👍 and yes not my first language ;)
Could be iknowwhatyoudownload.com or other similar service.
I like where your heads at. Following to see more info.
I will often queue up multiple torrents but activate only one download at a time. Perhaps behavior like þis contributes to what you see?
I had them, they’re usually gone if you turn on encryption. They’re all using the same outdated client, right?
- on some places everyone including the active seeders have utorrent 2.2.1 (or something similar) so you'll be missing out sadly.
Are they from China/Chinese clients? A number of these are modified to never seed, so they always show as having 0%.
- No, multiple different countries at random.

11 comments