I've read a little bit about this in the last few hours and it seems opinion is divided. Some people swear blind that it is mad not to use block-lists. Some people swear blind that using them has no advantage at all - because your IP address is always visible to the swarm anyway.

I know there are some real experts on this forum so maybe one or two of them could answer this question.

Another question would be - is it possible to hide your actual IP address when doing bit-torrent?

It is not worth it, it will only slow down your system and cap your torrents speed. In the past I used to use them religiously to later realize the same I'm writing you here. So, If you take advices of long term torrent peers, avoid block-lists. Waste of time.

I was once a HEAVY block list user, to the paranoid side of things (adding them to my HOSTS file).  But then over time, I really thought about it, what am I blocking?  Do I trust that someone else entered 1,000's of ip's, verified which group went to which company or what country or whatever.  Companies have many shell companies, w/ their own ips not related to parent EvilCorp, so you must block those, EvilCorp may have offices overseas, different names, block, block, block, it in my mind becomes a never ending game of whack-a-mole.

I DO however, block an entire country (China), and that is through my own personal philosophical thoughts.

I concur that I believe over time, it just becomes a waste of time, because once you reach a certain threshold it comes too much for one person to handle and you have to delegate to others, and do you TRUST those?  Are they just compiling other lists, other ppls work, and not verifying themselves?  

If you BELIEVE they work and you FEEL safe/secure then go for it, use those blocklists, but in then end, my person thought, it's a personal choice.  Coke vs Pepsi, Ford vs Chevy, etc.  I know ppl that swear by them, live by them, never had a problem, but just b/c you never had issues doesn't necessarily mean it was b/c of the BlockLists.

Thanks.

How do you block an entire country in Tixati? Please clearly detail the steps necessary. Thank you.

It is described here: https://forum.tixati.com/support/1320/

I agree with both Guests. Block lists are useless in my opinion. No one can check if they are effective, they are good business for sure.

Block lists to avoid being monitored are pointless -- monitors grab your ip from trackers and DHT which cannot be blocked by a blocklist.

Block lists to avoid poisoners are only somewhat useful if up-to-date for the latest poisoner ip range/s.

A problem now is peers can use IPv6 as well as IPv4 at the same time...blocking their IPv4 addresses does little good if they have a large range of IPv6 addresses as well!
It's a good idea to only allow 1 connection per peer per torrent to avoid having them connected via both IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time.

Peers can go through proxies and VPNs as well, resulting in many common proxy and VPN services having their ip ranges added to the blocklists because supposedly a "hostile" was using them at one time.

Manually adding ips to a blocklist if you see peers that send you constant hashfails isn't a bad idea though, but it's a bit of work...only worthwhile on a huge torrent that you're having trouble downloading.

Erasing/emptying your blocklist every year or so might be good because ips change.

Block lists are worth using.

Yes, your IP is visible to the swarm, but that is not breaking the law.  You get in trouble when you get caught sharing the file, if you have a block list then you will never connect to a known outside IP address.

Do I trust they have all the IPs right? No.  But I do trust they have the big outside IP addresses on there.

I have only used custom block lists as security for a years now, and never got in trouble.

Block lists give a FALSE sense of security.

So you block all sony corporate domains. Get real. Do you not think sony might hire IP protection firms that can obtain and use IPs from anywhere in the world, or do so themselves? Do you think they will only use their in house domains/IPs?

If you can't wean yourself off of highly prized and protected IP media, and your in a very vulnerable state/nation with fascist regimes that protect such, then you need to go deeper into foiling monitoring and tracking.

Block lists alone is not the answer. And believing they protect is dangerous.

Hi BugMagnet,

Yes I think you're absolutely right and agree with your points. I am the person who asked for a Feature Request on Bad Peers.

What WILL be useful is a real-time automatic blocklist on Tixati which adds peers who send bad data ("Bad Peers") or those who attempt to ruin P2P.

I have literally spent days investigating bad peers. I get peers connecting to me all the time, for instance they never initiate transfer files.

Good peers can be identified in Tixati with this message "Both Peers Complete" - THESE could be added to a PLUS list in the tixati platform.

Bad Peers can be identified (in my opinion) by:

Happens continuously:

"Peer Reset Connection"
"Bad protocol id in handshake"

These dodgy peers ALWAYS use TCP when 98% of connections on the peer tab are UDP now - Probably a limitation on their rubbish monitoring software.

ALSO

Users who connect and disconnect but always have 0% File Allocation = These are DEFINITELY P2P monitoring boxes

Tixati needs to make logs of peers who have 0% and keep connecting to swarms for days. This isn't playing ball but monitoring swarms by spy boxes.


If you dump Tixati logs and trace all the IP's with a powershell script doing lookups I found all the NASTY peers were hosted on AMAZON AWS.

I therefore conclude there is a massive monitoring setup on AWS. I've traced around 100 AWS IP's today with a few hours of logs analysed.


I am being spied on by a Peer running on "Contabo" ISP (Germany) with Client ID=Azureus 2.0.6
This peer has been connecting to me for a long time and never has files. It is snooping.

We need to get tixati making a list of these people as they are only connecting to swarms grabbing the tracker+DHT IP list then disappearing. They don't have files.
So monitoring clients who don't have files should be easy to build up a list of snooping or at least "useless" peers.

Can we ask the developer to implement any of this stuff? Especially tracking IP's which have loads of torrents but never ever have any file %