A fully VPN’ed family member got hit with an automated copyright strike and when looking into how it happened I found out that using the default qBittorrent config with a killswitch-enabled ProtonVPN meant that the home IP address was being leaked. I verified it through a few tools, including ipleak(dot)net’s fake magnet link feature which showed both the VPN and home IPs when connected. I’m at best a tinkerer so I’m not sure if this is a Proton-exclusive problem at all, or if the killswitch useage is even relevant, but that’s what they were using and figured this all might be worth mentioning since it was certainly a shock to us and not something we’ve seen brought up before.
The solution was to change which network interface qBittorrent was set to use via “Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Network interface”. Which one to pick will depend on the protocol you’re using in Proton’s client, but unless you’re confident in what you’re doing I’d recommend testing each with the ipleak(dot)net (or similar) torrent tool until you’re only seeing the VPN IP show up.
Hope this is useful! (and not common knowledge that we were just wildly ignorant of)
oh snap. i was not aware of that magnet service. thats handy for testing clients. scribbles down notes
Yeah it was a useful find! No idea about how trustworthy ipleak is though so do use with caution. There were a few other similar services I found while going through this, but I’m not having luck finding my notes on it at the moment… ipleak was just an easy one to remember the name of.
yeah, not a huge deal. I’ll be using it to as a smoke test for the personal media archive and distribution application im building.
got tired of not having reasonably priced archive storage.