7mo ago

Forget about using IP-blockers to protect yourself during P2P activities, use them to block ads and malware

I was just looking around on different websites for what happened to programs like PeerBlock

Seems like they're not really too helpful to protect yourself against snitches. But they are helpful for blocking the IP-ranges of advertising companies...

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Or use a PiHole, which would work out better than peer block.
Shoutout the PiHole team!
- Or, if you’re disinclined to running a Pi-hole yourself, there are services like NextDNS.
  
  Seconded on NextDNS. It's like $20/year for the "pro" version (no monthly limits) and I honestly cannot recall the last time I saw an ad on any device I control. The sole exception is my Apple TV, where one of the apps I use has ads injected into the video, so, no way to block those.
  If advertisers truly cared about serving the customers they claim to care so much about, the ad networks would have better standards and more safeguards to prevent malware. I'd still block them, I just wouldn't feel the same level of pride in blocking them for both annoyance and safety factors.
- Things like PiHole, nextDNS and the desktop versions of adguard only block HTTP, FTP and POP and SMTP connections. It doesn't block connections to advertising companies through other protocols.
  
  Correct, but what other protocols are they using? When was the last time you had an ad served via FTP?
- I don't have the ability to run a PiHole of my own. But I have adguard installed on my PC with its DNS protection set to put my DNS requests through Next DNS and I have my DNS settings changed to put traffic through NextDNS on all of my shit
  
  Why can’t you run a PiHole of your own?
Yeah these have basically been ineffective for P2P such as torrenting for many years. The media companies can just outsource their Anti-Sharing campaigns to third parties and it is fairly trivial for them to do discovery from non-obvious or even residential IPs. They just have to open a given torrent long enough to see who is in swarm and start sending nastygrams to those ISPs.
The best way to protect yourself is seedbox/VPS in a jurisdiction with no filesharing enforcement, or at a minimum join a reputable private tracker, because then all participants are vetted and there will never be a snitch in swarm.
- Can swarms see your actual IP even behind a VPN?
  
  If you have your VPN client and torrent application set up correctly, your traffic would all be routed through the VPN and the network would see your VPN IP and not the actual IP of your machine. If you have a private tracker you can probably test this on their site as many will show you which IP they see as you seed.
  A few considerations with this- Some VPN services do not support or allow torrenting. Also some trackers have issues with you using multiple IPs etc. so your account could be flagged if you have used different VPN nodes over time.

16 comments