So I’ve been grabbing a few shows I want to watch reruns of while playing Balatro that don’t have good blu ray releases. My piracy is fairly limited these days so I don’t bother with private trackers (do have a VPN though). In the past, I never really had an issue with grabbing a few one offs off the popular, maybe honeypot, sites like rarbg and 1337x.

But over the past month or so, I’ve noticed I have gotten a lot of shitty files. Skips here and there or garbled colors for a scene or two. At first I though it was just a bad file since re-downloading the torrent had the exact same problem.

But, on a whim, I did a recheck and had to download like 40% of a torrent. And then 20% the next time. Which made me assume my NAS was fucked or I was dealing with a lot of packet lsos (… I AM dealing with a lot of packet loss from my ISP). But when I redownloaded a “known bad” torrent I had the exact same corrupted file.

So am I just REALLY unlucky? Or is there an epidemic of shitty/malicious seeds on the public trackers these days?

  • SpikesOtherDog@ani.social
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    6 months ago

    Without context, I would suggest Transmission for troubleshooting. Qbittorrent is bloating and weird on Windows.

    The torrents should be hashed, but that wouldn’t stop someone from making a bad torrent or seeding one.

    If someone made a file intentionally collided it would probably cause issues. These aren’t collision issues, but bad chunks of data.

    https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/76043/torrent-bad-seed-attack-by-sony-how-does-it-work

    At a peek, it seems that this attack only causes delays in downloads. It’s more possible that there are commonly shared files with similar issues.

    • beaxingu@kbin.run
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      6 months ago

      Qbittorrent just gives you options you can choose if you use qt 5 or qt 6 and the version of libtorrent.