Well, After hundreds of GB of torrents downloaded, I slipped up. I've been changing around linux distros recently and i believe i configured my VPN wrong or forgot to turn it back on after doing something. Well, I finally got hit with a copyright warning. Just your typical "we had to send this" type of warning but none-the-less, I slipped up.

Sharing this because the day before it happened, I read a post about not only having your killswitch on but also binding your client to you vpn interface for situations like this. Needless to say I didn't take that precaution. For those who are on linux, I found a great post about how to set this up on reddit and wanted to remind people to "double wrap" because why not be safe lol.

The steps were more or less as follows (for QBitTorrent at least):

Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced Settings
Under "Network Interface", select your vpn interface. To test, check what shows with your vpn on, and then turn it off and re-navigate to this part to see what dissapeared. Thats likely your vpn interface if the name wasn't clear. (Do not be seeding/downloading torrents while doing this in case).
To test, download a non-copyright torrent like the Ubuntu ISO torrent. In the middle of download, disconnect or close your vpn connection. This should stop the download.

Not sure if reddit links are cool here but here is the guide source if anyones interested. Binding VPN to Torrent Client

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[–] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 21 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don't use a VPN, and haven't got a letter from my ISP in all the years I've been pirating.

[–] tenchiken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

This!

I haven't had one since an idiot roommate decided they wanted to fuck around. I fixed the problem (no more roommate).

Been 20 years now.

VPN seems a way to screw up decent performance when all you need is to stay away from public trackers.

[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

What happened to your roommate? That sounds kinda scary... :o

[–] tenchiken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 days ago

It was one of a few stupid things and I wound up just telling him to leave.

Kinda wish it was more dramatic and/or gory, but I usually am just too tired to turn to violence.

Besides, I'd never admit to owning that chipper shredder anyway.

[–] kevincox@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, public trackers definitely raise your chance of a notice by at least an order of magnitude. New content also tends to be more noisy than old content. I also found a drop by selecting "require encryption" although I can't imagine why it would help (IIUC most of these scanners just connect to everyone in the swarm, not sniff random internet traffic.

[–] tenchiken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 days ago

Actually there's a better reason for the encryption! You are correct that they use torrent clients to connect and record swarm nodes.

It prevents an ISP from traffic shaping against known torrent traffic!

Many ISP will watch for certain unencrypted headers and if it sees torrent will throttle it to nearly nothing. With the encryption, it all just looks like SSL.