this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Both work quite differently. TOR routes you over several layers, obscures your IP and changes the IPs around occasionally so you can't be tracked.
With Bittorrent you want lasting connections to other peers to be able to receive and send all the data. This doesn't align with the ever changing IPs and stuff.
A VPN gives you one IP that you can have for hours.
A VPN supports UDP connections, TOR doesn't.
Connecting your Bittorrent client to the Socks-Proxy of a TOR client is a different setup than it just sending normal packets through a VPN tunnel.
TOR is slow (by design), a VPN is fast.
If your client or something leaks your IP it happens anyways, if you route it over one node or seven. All the extra energy is just wasted.
And bittorrent puts even more strain on the TOR network the way it works. Making it slower for anybody else. And (ab)using the resources volunteers provide. (And which are meant for better use-cases.)
Yes. That's how I see the problem.
I understand and agree.
In the context of this question, I don't really cares if the IP changes or if UDP supported or the network degraded. I'm asking a more fundamental one: when the data in the BT protocol contains sensitive information, then why VPN/I2P is acceptable but Tor (or other transport) are not? That sensitive info is still being transmitted. If that Tor blog is true, then no matter what we use, it is still bad for privacy.
Well, I don't know the exact reasons. I read somewhere that it's been a frequent issue. That has either to do with the way the torrent client is programmed and it doesn't pay attention to the specifics for that case. Or the users frequently get the config wrong.
For example: Since Tor doesn't support UDP, if your torrent client sends out a UDP packet, it goes over your normal internet connection, immediately revealing your real IP. Whereas if you used a VPN, the packed had been tunneled and that would disguise you.
Also the Socks-Proxy setup is more complicated. Seems to be the case there are just many more possibilities to get it wrong.
I don't know any reason why you couldn't theoretically get it watertight. But you have to pay close attention to do it right.
There could be specifics to torrent traffic that expose you in some way. I'm not sure, you'd need to ask a security expert about this. But a torrent download is another kind of data stream than the web-surfing Tor was made for. I know there was research done on Tor. I can only speculate.