- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
Dang. Genuinely good service ruined by the abuse of csam promulgating fuckheads who deserve to rot for their evil
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Oh is that why so many sites block me when I’m using Mullvad? Hopefully this does lead to it not being blacklisted anymore, I’m sick of having to turn it off to use the Regal app
Presumably that is the reason, yes. Mullvad's really good service makes it a target for those who wish to host and distribute csam. This causes their IPs to be blacklisted or hosting providers to drop them.
But now the many cool legitimate uses (like piracy, hosting servers without exposing your own IP, punching through NAT where you don't have control over the gateway, etc) are all ruined, too.
wait so i straight up cant use it for piracy anymore? i just paid for 6 months a week ago lmao
yes you can. if you never used port forwarding before (you'd know) nothing will change for you.
In minimally technical terms, it works as sort of a "reverse VPN", providing privacy if you want to accept connections rather than establish connections. You can see how this would be an issue when it comes to the distribution of csam
from what i'm reading you can still download but this makes it a lot harder to upload/seed. if you're on a private tracker or really want to pay it forward with a good sharing ratio then this is no bueno
Can't you use the torrent client to port forward? I am using QBittorrent and Mullvad and I still get some amount of upload though I can't remember if I port forwarded anything using Mullvad.
Apparently there are some settings in torrent clients to help juice your upload but that's only optimizing what your VPN already allows? I'm basing this all off a few threads in r/mullvadvpn so I'd go there if you want more concrete info
Port forwarding is a feature to establish a route from within one network to another network. Imagine Mullvad is acting as your router. You used to be able to go into Mullvad's website and get a forwarded port. This means you could set your torrent client's port to match what Mullvad gave you, making your torrent client directly reachable to anyone on the internet.
Without the port forwarding feature, you can only connect to other "reachable" torrent clients that are directly exposed to the internet.
If you have never set up this feature from Mullvad's site before, you will not experience a change in anything. But the benefit with a forwarded port is that you can communicate to more peers in a swarm, because you can connect to both reachable and non-reachable clients. Technically, it's the non-reachable ones who can reach you.
For well-seeded and alive torrents this doesn't matter to much. For creating new torrents and sharing them, or connecting to nearly dead torrents, this sucks.
Also, port forwarding isn't just about uploading. It's just about establishing connections.
You can request a refund according to the reddit thread on the matter. Just email them.
People on reddit are saying this is the end of mullvad, but I feel like that might just be the die hard torrenters talking. Question is how big a part of the user base they are.
It's a feature, you don't have to do it. It's useful for torrenting and other things. e.g. I port forward so that I can remotely access my plex server and torrent on the same machine.
If you are unsure of what you are doing or why, it can be a security risk to forward a port and expose some internal service unintentionally.
