Droolio

Get a VPN with port forwarding. Problem solved.

TERF island or the 4th Reich

I get wanting to boycott Israelis due to what their government is doing, but you do realise blocking (the good-ish) half of America is gonna seriously hamper your ability to complete torrents? And if you think the UK is full of TERFs, you probably need to verify your news sources and statistical acumen. You shouldn’t always tar with the same brush…

Aside from this, on a technical merit this is gonna have absolutely zero effect - because in a torrent, you’re part of a mesh - those bits will instantly funnel through peers one way or another, and you’ll never convince enough of the swarm to have an impact. Presumably, the ‘content’ you’re torrenting aligns with your personal ethics anyway, and you’re not spreading hate. So why bother?

Complete and utter waste of time.

They’ve been audited twice:

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/privacy-audit/

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/security-audit-2024/ (PDF)

https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging-claims-proven-true-again-in-court-180606/

Yes to crypto, via Bitpay.

Still using Private Internet Access (PIA).

Honestly, dunno why they’ve fallen out of fashion due to the FUD about being owned by an unsavoury parent company, but the most important matter to me is if they keep logs, which they don’t. One of the few VPN companies tested on this, in court, and in a recent audit. Plus still extremely cheap (if you go for 3yr+3mo).

Port forwarding works with with this docker NAS stack. Doesn’t use gluetun, but there’s a specialised docker-wireguard-pia container as part of the stack, with a script that handles port changes. Been flawless.

If you can’t find the original .torrent, one way to find it again is to use BiglyBT client’s Swarm Discoveries feature to search its DHT for the exact file size in bytes (of the main media file within). You may be able to find one or more torrents and simultaneous seed them with Swarm Merging too.

As well as the force recheck method others have mentioned, you can also tell BiglyBT to use existing files elsewhere when adding the torrent, which can copy the data onto there for you without risking overwriting the original files.

BiglyBT for manual dls on desktop, qBittorrent with the arrs

It’s good enough for recent releases (note you may have to open a port for passive XDCC) but because it’s not easy to automate, even public trackers + *arrs (w/ VPN) are just more convenient.

Occasionally you might find releases on IRC and not on public trackers, and visa versa, so it’s good to have a backup. I prefer scene releases so it’s easy to find specific stuff with the xdcc search sites (e.g. dot eu and sun), and maybe a 'lil help from srrdb to verify CRCs.

Suppose one way around it would be to rent a cheap VPS in the UK and piggy back off the connection?

Otherwise, there’s a s2 ‘NORDiC’ version going around which is actually in English audio - just with various scandiwegian soft subs, so it’s defo out there. DM me if you still struggle to find it.

More people should use BiglyBT and its Swarm Merging feature. You get the ability to seed or download chunks from peers across separate torrent files.

It’s a shame because if more people used it, the BiglyBT devs might add hash-based merging (with v2 torrents) instead of just size-based. Hybrid/v2 merging is still possible, but file size is less reliable and caters to files only larger than 50MB.

Some kinda auto v1/v2/hybrid private<->public torrent maker plugin for BiglyBT would be… bigly.