A dumb question about torrenting and open ports (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Mimia@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I've been using mobile internet for last few years and whenever i would try to seed it'd be like 0.2 kb/s at best. I know that it's due to my dynamic IP (or whatever it's called) and i have closed ports.

Then i saw some people say that opening your ports makes your connection better/faster because you're able to connect not only to people with open ports, but closed ones aswell. Does it make sense download-speed-wise? Because how could i take traffic from someone who's unable to seed due to closed ports?

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[-] Morgikan@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I remember when Mullvad offered port forwards, it assigned you both a port and a key. My guess is that they simply authenticated the key to determine if the port should be routed to whatever tunnel established the connection. So, they would have to map that a dynamically generated key was assoicated to the port (and probably other bits of non-PII like datacenter/region), but nothing beyond that point outside memory. Even account IDs they generated were dynamic. In theory if you were able to guess the ID, you could use the account.

[-] DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah good point. Even when they offered port forwards, they would only do it with the once off payment accounts. If you set up a payment method against your account ID to be used each month then you couldn't do port forward because the port number shown on the tracker could be linked to your card which could be linked to you.