Is semi-fake downloading possible?

Hi

Some trackers consider download stats for user class progression. Even if I only get freeleech stuff my connection is slow and I'd still have to deal with downloading & deleting a lot of useless stuff.

Obvious solution to this is reporting fake stats to the tracker but the problem with that is discrepancy in upload stats of real seeders of the faked torrent.

My question is, is it possible to do a semi-fake version of this, meaning the torrent client would still connect to the peers and request pieces (more pieces than we would normally get with our connection), and seeders would actually send those pieces, but our torrent client would never actually download them over the network, just report to tracker and seeder as OK.

Is it even possible protocol-wise? If it is, does one of the existing tools support such an operation?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by thekidsalacia

seeders would actually send those pieces, but our torrent client would never actually download them

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Those things are mutually exclusive for obvious logical reasons.

I suggest faking download on new and active torrents where the size of the swarm lets you blend in, or trying your luck with https://www.sb-innovation.de/showthread.php?t=14913.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by anon

Those things are mutually exclusive for obvious logical reasons.

I suggest faking download on new and active torrents where the size of the swarm lets you blend in, or trying your luck with https://www.sb-innovation.de/showthread.php?t=14913.

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Thanks. Please let me steer the question a bit, then.

What if I get a cheap VPS that I can run a torrent client with fast connection, but very small disk storage. Is it possible to mod a client (or abuse one of the existing tools) to get pieces, but toss them into /dev/null (while maybe keeping a very small cache of at most).

I guess this would be more feasible, and I don't think it'd even count as cheating as long as the tracker has no hit&run rules.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by thekidsalacia

Is it possible to mod a client (or abuse one of the existing tools) to get pieces, but toss them into /dev/null (while maybe keeping a very small cache of at most).

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The way BitTorrent (non-sequential downloading and uploading of one or more files) and the null device (takes streams, is not a directory, returns nothing when read) operate make them incompatible on this regard. Even ignoring that, torrents would go into an error state as soon as uploading or hash or file checking are required, which during the course of regular usage occurs... often.

A "black hole" feature that downloads pieces and immediately discards them without checking or uploading anything, keeping some sort of fake state data about which ones it's supposed to already have, would be theoretically possible to add to a mod. But there are no implementations of this.

What you could do is making sure your seedbox has enough space for one full-sized torrent, then using queue management features to immediately stop and delete after completion and move on to the next one. Or maybe simply downloading stuff you're interested on :rolling_eyes: