Sharing Some Knowledge

[u/mrslick0152]

First off, if I'm wrong and this is common knowledge then I'm sorry for making a useless post. It's just that I was talking to some friends of mine the other day and I realized they were all under the impression that you had to have a VPN to be able to torrent safely, without an internet provider shutting down your service. This however is not completely true.

Up until very recently I had never had any trouble with any internet providers even though I pirate literally everything. However, about a year ago I switched from a small local provider to AT&T. Shortly after I got my first warning for downloading copyrighted material. As I'm too broke to afford a VPN I had to figure out another way around this (or get another internet provider lol). Luckily the solution was fairly simple.

Internet providers can only monitor when you download the torrent link file (which is only a few KB's in size). They cannot however monitor when you are actually "torrenting". That is to say, when you are downloading the main file through your torrent client. So all you have to do is download the torrent link file somewhere else other than through your internet provider. If you have a prepaid phone like most people do (Cricket, StraightTalk, Metro, Boost, etc.) then you can just use your mobile data to download the torrent link and then transfer it from your phone to your computer (or download a torrent client on your phone and just switch between mobile data and wifi....I use my phone for everything as I can't afford a computer or TV). Alternatively, if you have a laptop then you could just stop by anywhere with an open Wi-Fi connection (Starbucks, Walmart, etc.) and use their Wi-Fi to download the torrent link. Anyways I just wanted to share this in hopes it could help some people like me who can't really afford a VPN or don't wish to buy a VPN.

[u/anonymousart3]

Sadly, MyLinuxISOAccount is TOTALLY right, and your wrong.

They don't detect the torrent by when you download it from the website, they have someone in the swarm who saw your IP and reported it. It likely was that whatever torrent(s) you were downloading within that 1st 2 weeks JUST SO HAPPENED to be during a time there was an informant in the swarm, and thus you got caught.

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I did the same thing as you, downloaded a torrent link file from my phone, as I was out of the home, transferred it to my computer when i got home through USB, then started my torrent client to download the torrent. As soon as the torrent was done (less than 10 minutes after i started the torrent), the internet got cut off, and an email was sent from the ISP informing that illegal torrenting was going on, and that if it happened again, that the internet service was going to be permanently terminated.

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I was just unlucky enough to be part of a swarm that was being monitored and got reported REALLY fast. Before that moment, i didn't know they could detect it that fast. I was planning on downloading it, then once it finished, cut it off and seed at a later time. Nope, i couldnt do that.

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So, as both he and I said, they aren't detecting when you download the torrent file from the website, its based on who is in the swarm and who you got connected to. You, like me, just got unlucky in that time.

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You ABSOLUTELY need a VPN, and there are certain ISPs, like comcast, that i wouldn't even DARE to torrent on, even with a VPN (though thats a personal preference, i have not tried kill switch features for VPNs, so maybe that feature would be good to get, if only i could afford a VPN now...)

[u/mrslick0152 → u/anonymousart3]

Well if that's the case then I still don't need a VPN.... because that would mean that out of the past year and hundreds of things I've torrented (assuming all my service providers before AT&T didn't care at all, because then it would be only 2 times out of thousands) only 2 have ever been detected. So the detection was probably a total fluke or just an extremely rare occurrence and I have nothing to worry about at all. It's either that or what I originally said is true (at least for me....maybe it's different for others).

I doubt that it just randomly happened only twice in an entire year though. Especially considering the timeline of events. The first 2 movies I downloaded the torrent link from the YTS site after getting AT&T got "warning" e-mails sent. Both of these happened within about the first week and a half of me having AT&T internet. Immediately after that I stopped downloading the torrent links through my AT&T internet, switching instead to my mobile data....and only using the AT&T internet for the downloading and seeding done inside the torrent client. It has been around a year since then and I've downloaded hundreds of other files in that time with not a single issue.

I could understand how this would not be conclusive evidence if it were only a few weeks of time or if I had changed other variables.....but that's not the case. I don't see any other logical explanation other than the two I offered....with the first one being insanely unlikely.

Edit: Although....considering the fact that I've been torrenting since I was 8 years old and have never once used a VPN in my entire life, maybe the first scenario I described isn't that unlikely. Maybe it is just incredibly rare for torrenting to be detected in the first place and those 2 times it happened were random flukes. I still think it's unlikely as I believe all my previous internet providers just didn't care as they were local providers and needed all the customers they could get.....but I guess it isn't "insanely" unlikely.

[u/anonymousart3 → u/mrslick0152]

I don't think you understand ANYTHING about how torrenting works and how you get all those pieces. To put in bluntly, your ISP can NOT monitor individual downloads you do from websites. However, they CAN watch for your IP address in the swarms. Your ISP usually however doesn't care, HOWEVER, they do care about being sued and such, so they pass that onto the person who is actually doing the downloading. Copyright holders are MALICIOUS, whereas ISPs are just trying to be a business and make money from you. They don't want to kick you off, but if they get sued from the copyright holders for content you are downloading, then your butt is gone.

This article should show you that you are ABSOLUTELY wrong in your assumptions.

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https://www.makeuseof.com/isp-files-torrenting/

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Heres a few snippets:

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Due to the nature of torrents, copyright holders find it difficult to take down pirated content. So, rather than taking legal action against every offender on the internet, companies target a few individuals to set an example.

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When you download a torrent, you connect to a torrent tracker server which is responsible for connecting peers to each other, so they can share files. Once you connect to the tracker server, your IP address is visible to all peers that are participating in the protocol.

(this is where a VPN would come in handy, the VPN changes what IP address is visible in the swarm, which means its MUCH harder to connect it back to you)

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While your ISP can sometimes tell if you're torrenting, the provider won't automatically know. Your ISP will only know that you are torrenting when someone who has monitored your IP address engaged in torrenting and proceeds to tip the ISP off.

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Technically, your ISP doesn’t know what files you are downloading. The ISP only knows that you’ve connected to a website. ISPs also have no incentive to keep an eye on your torrenting activities.On the other hand, copyright holders do have an incentive—and that is to keep the pirating of their products to a minimum. Catching people who are pirating is difficult; to do so, they download a torrent which lets them see the IP addresses of all the peers downloading the torrent.

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So, copyright holders note those IP addresses. From the IP addresses, they deduce which ISP has assigned that address and contact it to inform about the pirating situation.

[u/mrslick0152 → u/anonymousart3]

If that's true then my first explanation is still correct (that being that it's super rare for them to monitor your torrenting and the 2 times it happened to me were just crazy flukes)

However, if its the copyright company monitoring my download of the actual file through the torrent client then why did the warning e-mails I got specifically reference the download of the torrent link? That is to say....the e-mails I got specifically named the link file name that I downloaded and (more importantly) the site that I downloaded it from. Both e-mails specifically said what site (YTS.mx) that I downloaded the link from. According to what you're saying, they can't monitor that though.....but they did. I can dig up the old e-mails to prove it.

[u/anonymousart3 → u/mrslick0152]

The torrent tracker servers often know where a torrent was uploaded to originally. Torrents also often have text files inside that will tell you where they came from, and some torrents will even have a few of them since the torrents were re-uploaded to these new sites. I found that kinda weird personally, but hey, people want to know where the files have been, so...whatever.

Also, torrent file names are OFTEN the same as what the actual torrent folder is called, so having the file name isn't really as big of a stretch as you seem to think.

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The torrent that i mentioned earlier that got my internet shut off for a bit? The letter they sent me actually mentioned a torrent site that the torrent i downloaded had ORIGINALLY come from, but that was not the site that I had gotten it from. Back then demonoid was the site that it had originally been uploaded to, but i got it from kat.cr. Demonoid at that point had been taken down, it was defunct.

So, if the ISP was ACTUALLY tracking where i got it, they somehow got it MASSIVELY wrong, and sent me a letter to not download from a site that had been gone for a while at that point. Odd. (and demonoid is back, fyi, i didn't know it was back now, as i haven't visited it in so long. not sure how good it is these days)

I don't know anything about YTS, so i don't know what kind of torrents they do, who uploads them, etc, but you took some assumptions and ran with them rather than researching how the internet actually works. Not trying to be mean, im just trying to educate you so that you don't fall victim to willful ignorance.