mazadin, 1 year ago

I’ll admit, this spooked me, but for different reasons than the OP and most comments.

I didn’t recognize any of the downloads, even though I have a publicly routable static IP and don’t use a VPN (I have a domain and self host so I know my IP hast changed in years).

I use exclusively private trackers, and nothing I’ve actually downloaded showed up, and the things that did were sporadic—one every couple days or so, first/last seen times identical, random torrents. I started asking myself if I had a rogue device in my network, so I checked logs and stats—nothing unusual (I think…I hope…hard to tell sometimes).

I looked more into how this site tracks peers, and it seems they have different levels of confidence. Their first API tier (peer API) is a “best guess” and this is based on listening to the DHT and PeX networks for their known torrents. I’m guessing their website uses this or a combination of this with their other APIs. I looked at my torrent config and saw I hadn’t disabled DHT/PeX and had a couple idle public torrents.

Not positive on this, but I think there can be false positives if your torrent box participates in DHT/PeX even if it doesn’t actually download said torrents. Can anyone confirm this?