The problem: My download is fine but seeding is very slow and intermittent even for popular torrents. I think this could be improved using IPv6 via 6to4. 6in4 or 6rd, all of which are supported by my router, to discover more peers.
My ISP allowed me to forward the port so I am discoverable via IPv4, but doesn’t support IPv6 and I understand the aforementioned technologies as a way to connect to a tunnel broker, which would forward my packets to the IPv6 internet.
However, they are another entity that can monitor my internet activity. Are there any, preferrably free, 6in4/6to4/6rd tunnel providers that are known to be torrent-friendly? Are there any firewall rules I should set up for my security, like only allowing IPv6 traffic to the qBittorrent port? My ISP doesn’t care about torrenting so I haven’t been using any kind of VPN. Should I?
Oddly enough, I have no problems seeding on a specifically Central European torrent tracker, which usually maxes out my measly 2 Mb/s DSL upload, but the dozens of peers at international trackers, some of which must be in Europe, barely leech data from me. Am I presumed to be slow because of a slow ping from the presumably American server, or is my disqualification from IPv6 so impactful? I find it strange as I can download from 20+ peers simultaneously and top out my 20 Mb/s plan.
I tried a public tunnel broker and it immediately makes everything super slow. All the connections that grabbed the IPv6 connectivity went from my theoretical 300MBit/s to like 10-20 MBit/s.
Please don’t say “MBit”, it makes my eyes hurt.
My internet plan tops out at 2 Mb/s upload so that wouldn’t nearly fill such a public tunnel broker’s bandwidth, and I would be glad for even half that, but right now I seed 500 GB of reasonably popular movie packs and the long-term average upload is a few kilobits per second, not worth spinning up the 10W HDD motor for. Yes, I expect some overhead with tunneling but not three orders of magnitude, and I need at least 100 kb/s to get a good ratio on those movie packs.
Correct terminology makes your eyes hurt?
It’s supposed to say “Mbit” or “Mb”. Capital B infers bytes. Incorrect capitalization is one of the most common mistakes when using the metric system. It may be popular but it becomes a problem when 1 B = 8 b, or when 1 MJ = 10⁹ mJ. By the way, common ad-hoc abbreviations like “kbps” as opposed to “kb/s” or “PSI” instead of “lbf/in²” also grind my gears, luckily most such mistakes only occur in imperial units.
Agree, if you do it, there is no harm in doing it right. However, I grew up with the metric system and I’ve never seen capitalization of the prefixes being a mistake that happens in the real world. I.e. your ADC can measure up to 500 mV and you instead ‘accidentally’ put 500 Megavolts through it. That is somewhat unlikely to happen. But then mistakes like that do happen. People wanting to order 500 rolls of toilet paper and getting 500 shipping crates of it. Things like that definitely happen. Especially in combination with computers that just do whatever you typed in. I’d just not call it ‘common’.
When inconsequential, capitalization gets messed up all the time, and the mistakes are overlooked: everyone understands that a weight labeled “10 KG” has a mass of 10 kg, but it’s better to get used to good practice for when it does matter. Thankfully, the “M/m” mistake of 9 orders of magnitude is usually caught by humans before it gets out of hand: you wouldn’t order 1 mm³ of wood instead of 1 m³. Very few quantities span 9+ orders of magnitude, for instance 10mΩ and 10MΩ resistors exist quite commonly, and you can imagine one being mistaken for the other with people copying each other’s handwritten component list. However, I’d bet that the bit/byte dichotomy confuses hundreds of people every day so we better make that clear by not breaking rules.
BTW, the word is “megavolts”, not “MegaVolts” or any other capitalization, similarly “byte” is correct unless at the start of a sentence, with title case, or in German, and perhaps in words like “MByte”, which I discourage in favor of the full form or complete abbreviation.
I’ll just weasel my way out of the capitalization mistakes by saying I’m German… Or by saying I type too much English on the internet…
In this case I did it to stress it and make a point.
I can see the resistors being somewhat a more likely scenario. But it’s also a big difference. A mΩ is somewhere in the order of magnitude of what your copper traces have between two (close) components. And such resistors would for example be used as a shunt to measure current. They’re made to withstand quite some current and below 10mΩ I don’t think there is even a color code available. Footprint might be different, too.
I know, I’m an electrical hobbyist. Most 10mΩ resistors (no space because it’s an adjective) are SMD because leads would introduce significant resistance that changes when bending. Unless the wire is the shunt, of course. They have large pads and are thick to accommodate the current and power dissipation because their main use is measuring current in the order of A.
Meanwhile, 10MΩ ones are usually THT and normal size, the occasional ones rated for multiple kilovolts or spikes of even higher voltage are longer to prevent arcing.
Fair enough. I need someone to provide me with a way on how to remember which one was capitalized and which one small.
Byte is the 8x bigger one – longer word – capital B (but the word, unless shortened, is “byte”, not “Byte”),
bit is the 8x smaller one – shorter word – lowercase b.
There is a roughly 0.8% difference per order of magnitude between 1024-based binary prefixes (ki=kibi,Mi=mebi,Gi=gibi, often incorrectly written ask,M,G) and 1000-based metric prefixes (k=kilo,M=mega,G=giga) but these ballpark numbers are not affected.Anyway, do you think it’s worth trying in terms of security against threats and law enforcement, or should I use a VPN on top?
Thank you very much, I’ll try to re-wire my synapses.
Concerning the privacy aspect: I’m really no expert on that. I believe a VPN either provides you with IPv6 and is the solution to both of your problems, or you’re circumventing it and making it less secure by introducing a side-channel. I wouldn’t do both.
If you want to protect from law-enforcement you have to read the exact terms of your VPN or tunnel broker. There are companies who keep logs and some who don’t, some cooperate with lawful interception of your country. I don’t know which one to choose. I suppose it’s the same with tunnel brokers. And for security: I don’t think a VPN or IPv6 tunnel does much for that.
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Makes sense. I don’t think latency is a great issue when transferring large files, I would be more concerned about packet drop. (Unless latency is part of the reason the tracker thinks I’m too slow to bother requesting data from, which would explain why American-based trackers barely let me seed but local ones work great.) The overhead of TCP torrenting is about 3-4 % for me, and even if an IPv6 tunnel increases that to say 25 %, I will be able to use 80 % of my upload bandwidth for seeding, assuming IPv6 allows me to reach enough peers to request 1.6 Mb/s from me, which would be much higher than the current <1 %. My logic was that I could reach people that don’t have a publically reachable IPv4 port but an IPv6 one (because of IPv4 exhaustion of course), but now I understand that this is way less of an impact than I thought.
