I searched for ages for a replacement of something like torrentz, and the rarbg drop made me start the search again. I ended up trying the included search in qbittorrent, and I’m very happy with the results, it scans many public trackers, and I have always found what I wanted.
To be clear, qbittorrent is a desktop app for linux/windows/mac, that has a panel where you can search for torrents:
A bit off topic, but are there any good blocklists for qbittorrent?
The Blocklist I use for Transmission doesn’t work for qbittorrent or I would have switched already.
I’ve found that the block lists on the net tend to contain extremely outdated information and blocks a lot of legitimate activity, while ultimately being ineffective at actually blocking copyright trolls sufficiently. Best to have a vpn to prevent that. Since I have a vpn, I don’t care who downloads from me so long as they aren’t abusing my resources. So I manually create a blocklist for IP blocks I’ve observed malicious activity from. The blocklist file syntax is a note and an IP or IP range (not cidr notation) on each line, separated by a colon. for example, to block 195.154.0.0/16:
Poneytelecom:195.154.0.0-195.154.255.255(That’s an IP range I actually block, belonging to poneytelecom, a very low reputation hosting provider I was getting some weird denial of service looking activity, like 40+ simultaneous connections who wouldn’t actually download anything)
Also, if you download torrents popular in China you may come across the Xunlei client, which always reports its progress as 0% and never seeds. Banning these would be impractical game of whack a mole. So instead, simply enable super seeding mode on those torrents. Gone instantly. Might be slower at seeding, but at least now you can seed to legitimate users.
what sort of malicious activity are you seeing? Are these downloaders doing something fucky? or is it just other IP’s attacking you?
The poneytelecom IPs would just constantly remain connected to me without actually downloading or uploading anything, which is quite unusual because torrent clients normally are supposed to disconnect from peers that they have no use for. And there would be like 15-30 IPs doing the same thing on the same few torrents. They were using Deluge, a legitimate client, which is quite weird, so maybe their shit was just misconfigured accidentally somehow. I looked up one of them on iknowwhatyoudownload.com and it was active on thosands of random torrents (including lots of CP apparently). I also recall in the past another IP from that range repeatedly downloading the same 80 GiB torrent which I am the only seed on, wasting my bandwidth for no apparent reason. So I just banned the entire IP range since clearly it’s not doing anything legitimate to me and is just acting strangely in all sorts of ways. It’s sort of a mini DDoS attack (intentionally or not) since I have my qBittorrent configured with a max number of connections.
The Xunlei IPs aren’t really attackers per se, but the client doesn’t follow the BitTorrent protocol standard and seeding to them is useless since they are incapable of seeding to other people. Some people just ban China entirely but I can’t do that because there are lots of legitimate Chinese users on the torrents I have and I don’t want to cut them off over something other people do
I too have a lot of there chinese torrents with 0% progress. They all use the same client (probably spoofed). Qbit sadly doesn’t have a filter by client, so I’ll try the superseeding mode on those.
I have never used a blocklist, is it supposed to filter out virus and stuff like that? Or does it filter out porn/nsfw?
No it’s a IP Blocklist, it doesn’t filter out content but tries to blocks peers like law firms and studios who try to take you to court for legal action.
It can’t replace a vpn but it’s no effort at all to use it (in Transmission) so why not
Interesting, I have not used anything like this, but according to this post there’s this setting:
And you can use the ip list that is inside the repo you linked.
Yeah but qbittorrent uses a different format than transmission, the Blocklist from the repo doesn’t work, tried it already.
There’s a file in the repo which is just a list of ips, each in a new line. Is it the same content? Maybe that works?
Checked out the repo and the code to generate the list. “combined_2.txt” is the raw list before it gets gzipped and can be used in qbittorrent (once you change the extension).
So thanks for pointing that out :)
If anyone’s wondering, the correct extension should be
p2p.No problem! Glad you could make it work :)
Ideally it’s supposed to filter possible sources of malware and some people believe it makes them less likely to be caught torrenting
Yeah the effectiveness is questionable, but I don’t see any downside other than maybe losing a peer or two
But good article!