Tribler - Is it any good? If not, is there anything as private as Tor for torrents? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by ScratchySoft@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I am not in a place where I can afford a VPN (do not start suggesting cheap VPNs to me istg), and in addition, you have to place a lot of trust in the VPN. Tribler seems promising, except... For the giant disclaimer that's been on the site for years. That worries me. I am quite worried about getting scary letters from my ISP or something when torrenting.

Do not put yourself in danger. Our anonymity is not yet mature.

Tribler does not protect you against spooks and government agencies. We are a torrent client and aim to protect you against lawyer-based attacks and censorship. With help from many volunteers we are continuously evolving and improving.

Edit: Seems like there are a lot of issues below the surface as well... https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/19118584/10120234

And Lokinet, I2P, and GNUnet have their own massive problems... https://comment.ctrl.blog/discussion/tribler-onion-routed-bittorrent

ngl, kinda depressing that it's like this...

Edit 2: I misread the article a bit, it's not quite as dire as I thought it was initially, but the warning and the fact that only the core file-transferring features are anonymized at all... Is a bit disconcerting.

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[-] Mohamed@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 months ago

It works very well for me. My evidence that it is private is that I download plenty (more than 1 TB per month) and I never get a copyright notice from my ISP. When I torrent non-privately I get plenty of copyright notices, sometimes several times for the same torrent.

It does have, however, some major performance issues. It can be very slow, and it can use up a lot of RAM and a lot of CPU. Its internal database, which saves state of downloads, frequently gets corrupted at which point it has to be re-generated, meaning the list of torrents (not the downloads) is lost. It can be quite a bit slower than other torrent downloaders, and sometimes torrents stall for a while as it waits to prepare the network, especially at start-up.

It's been getting a lot better though with every update, which is quite frequent.