The bottom frame of the main window contains the reverse DNS of everyone seeding the torrent being downloaded.Ī quick right-click resolves those DNS entries and exposes the IP address. The above screenshot of the BitTorrent client for MacOS shows how readily available the IP addresses of other participants in a swarm are. They can then participate in the same torrent swarms that you are participating in and will be able to see your IP address. That means they won’t be blocked by PeerBlock, and thus, the owners of those IPs will be able to connect to your computer. Now that we’ve determined that there are IPs in blacklists that should not be there, it’s not too big a leap to assume the opposite is also true: there are IPs that should be in these block lists that are not. It’s not easy to say which location is correct for any of those IPs, but the inconsistency highlights how little faith should be attributed to an IP address accurately representing any meaningful information about the machine on the other end. This is a fairly typical example of how transient IP addresses can be. I found five IPs in the Nigeria file that were identified as belonging to other countries by the GeoLite database from MaxMind, and over 100 in the Russian file that were reported as belonging to other countries. There are a number of IP lists broken down into categories like agencies and countries.Īs a quick test to the integrity of some of the lists, I audited the Russia and Nigeria IP lists. The specific implementation of PeerBlock’s blacklist is the use of lists from. Therefore, the notion that a single IP identifies a company that you want to block doesn’t really follow.įurther, in the case of torrent monitoring, the companies involved in this have a vested interest in avoiding your blacklist, so they employ a wide range of tools to avoid detection. Every device on the internet has an IP address, but it can’t reliably identify a single person or computer because IP addresses are constantly reassigned by their owners. The reason the concept of IP blacklists is flawed is because of the dynamic nature of IP addresses. Both concepts have their place, but blacklisting is much less reliable. Blacklisting allows every IP address except the ones you have explicitly listed to connect. Whitelisting allows only the IP addresses you have explicitly listed to connect to your computer. While the concepts of blacklisting and whitelisting, as they pertain to computer security, may seem similar, they are very different. What’s the difference between a blacklist and a whitelist? As long as you choose a no-logs service, that’s where the trail will run cold since there’ll be no record of which users were connected at a specific time or what they did while connected. In other words, anyone who tries to trace you via your IP address will eventually find out that it belongs to a VPN provider. This not only prevents your activities from being monitored by your service provider, it also gives you an IP address from whichever country your chosen server is in. VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, send your internet traffic through an encrypted server somewhere else in the world. Specifically, the idea that dedicated torrent monitoring companies are unable to easily subvert something as fragile as an IP blacklist seems like wishful thinking. Generally, the idea of IP blacklists is flawed.
This is done by denying access to your computer from agency IP addresses, thus preventing them from knowing you are part of a torrent swarm. One of the potential uses of PeerBlock is by torrenters to avoid detection from torrent monitoring agencies. PeerBlock is a firewall application that uses blacklists (essentially a list of banned IP addresses) to prevent certain IP addresses from connecting to your computer. Below, we’ll explain what these two technologies are, and the differences between them, and let you know which is better for torrenting: PeerBlock or VPN. After all, there’s a huge amount of conflicting information out there, with some people recommending firewall apps like PeerBlock and others claiming a VPN is vital for anonymous torrenting. Staying safe while torrenting can seem like a daunting prospect.
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