Is Torrent-live's dynamic blocklist worth the €30 it costs?
Blocking dangerous, privacy-invasive or unwanted IP addresses is not an entirely new concept.
Programs like PeerBlock or PeerGuardian (which PeerBlock is based on), are standalone applications that block certain IP addresses from connecting to your computer to increase your privacy when your devices are connected to peer to peer networks.
The main idea behind these applications is to block IP addresses and ranges that can be associated with certain organizations, trackers or malware so that they cannot do harm or monitor activity.
Torrent-live's dynamic blocklist is the result of the "Monitoring and blocking the bittorrent monitoring spies" study which focused on tracking and blocking monitoring stations using BitTorrent's peer and DHT system only.
The main issue with BitTorrent from a privacy perspective is that anybody can monitor peers in the network.
The researchers have created a tool to detect, follow and block spies, and one of the results of the operation is the dynamic blocklist that is updated by the project every 15 milliseconds.
The study discovered two types of spies with only one of them being dangerous from a privacy perspective.
The blocklist is being sold on the Peersm website for €30 which gives you one year of access to it. It is provided as a p2p file which you can either integrate directly in BitTorrent clients supporting the format or in programs like PeerBlock which run on a system-wide level.
In qBitTorrent for instance, you'd click on Tools > Options > Connection, enable IP filtering and select the p2p blocklist file on your system to integrate it in the client.
The dynamic blocklist lists more than 17800 IP addresses currently that spy on users.
The revenue is used for maintaining the service and for Torrent-live, an open source Torrent client utilizing the findings in the study.
Is it worth it?
The main question is whether integrating the blocklist is worth the money it costs. The answer depends on several factors including your current setup, your activity and whether you trust the findings of the study.
For instance, if you are using a VPN service you may not require the blocklist on top of that if the service keeps no logs of your activity.
Access to the full study is not provided on the project website which makes it impossible to find out whether the methodology used is as effective as claimed by the project.
The best course of action right now seems to be to use it as a complementing strategy instead of relying on it solely to keep you safe online.
Now You: How do you protect your privacy while online/using P2P?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.