Does Transmission release my IP?

[Clit]

When I'm downloading does Transmission tell the whole world who I am and give my IP information out?

Thanks!

[bollywood]

If it didnt, there is no way other peers would find you....

[texasranger]

Good question actually. Your IP is released, but I've heard that when people ask the trackers for IPs, the trackers return purposely bad IPs that aren't doing the file-sharing. In that way I heard that a printer got caught for downloading porn in this professor's lab, yes it's pretty ridiculous.

[Clit]

Thanks for the explanation. But then what is a seeder and a leech? As I understand if your downloading as a Leech then nothing is known.

If we add to the above conversation "Tor" how does this help????

Thanks guys!

[essiw]

A seeder is someone who is only uploading and a leecher is someone who is downloading, as simple as that

[jch]

does Transmission tell the whole world who I am and give my IP information out?

Yes.

If we add to the above conversation "Tor" how does this help????

Tor is designed to provide an anonymous transport layer. However, an anonymous transport doesn't help unless the application is designed so that it doesn't leak your identity; and current Transmission is not.

Be careful, by the way -- anyone claiming to provide anonymous BitTorrent are selling you snake oil.

--Juliusz

[roamy]

so the only question I have is "What can they steal if they have my ip address??

[jch]

so the only question I have is "What can they steal if they have my ip address??

Excellent point.

Given a torrent, it is trivially easy to obtain the list of IPs that participate in the swarm. It is probably not too difficult to correlate an IP address with an online identity (e.g. your username on this forum), and from there with a real-world identity (i.e. your name and address).

In other words -- anyone who cares enough (your boss, your employees, your wife, your children, your parents, your wife's lover, your mistresses husband, your local law enforcement agency) can find out who exactly is downloading or seeding a given torrent. There are similar privacy issues with other common networking technologies (the web, Skype, and even GSM telephony).

This is not to say that you should avoid BitTorrent, but that you should be aware at all times that you are not anonymous, and choose your online behaviour with that in mind.

So please seed, or we'll get you

--Juliusz