Looking to revive this thread after almost a year... I decided to go with TorGuard with SOCKS5 to proxy my torrent usage and testing with netstat show that ALL connections go through the SOCKS5 proxy. Putting aside the debate as to whether or not this idea is dumb, the empirical evidence shows that it works well. I'm consistently able to get download rates of 8Mbps or more for medium to large swarm torrents.jch wrote:Correct. (You can get SOCKS conections to trackers, of course, but not to peers.)olk wrote:I still do not get it. You can get Socks support with Vuze, but not with Transmission?
It's a stupid thing to do, so nobody who actually understands what they're doing is going to implement it.So it is doable, but nobody can develop it?
--jch
Now, granted having all of your traffic run through a proxy may seem "dumb", and not within the spirit of the BitTorrent protocol, it seems to me that privacy trumps architectural purity, and moreover given a proxy with 1) enough nodes, and 2) enough bandwidth, it shouldn't affect the swarm all that much. Perhaps it'll create a bottleneck at the pairing point my proxy provider's backbone connection, but hopefully if they are smart they are working those issues out and will stay ahead of the bandwidth curve.
Anyway, Transmission has always been my favorite bt client to use, but now that I got my first letter from my ISP for downloading, I have to use a privacy service--and since Transmission doesn't support proxies I have to say goodbye. It pains me, please bring back SOCKS5 support for both trackers, and add support for peers like uTorrent. Anybody else using VPNs for privacy is essentially doing the same thing to the swarm: all traffic is routing through a fixed set of nodes--but I contend that a VPN is inferior because ALL your connections go through your one VPN gateway. This is opposed to a SOCKS5 proxy where some if not all P2P connections went through a different node. (At the time of writing, proxy.torguard.tg has 64 IP addresses in its pool.)
What say you JCH, have you come around on your thinking of removing proxy support?