Removing the support for forwarded ports - Blog | Mullvad VPN
mullvad.net
Today we announce that we no longer support port forwarding. New port forwards will no longer be supported, and existing ports will be removed 2023-07-01.

Dang. Genuinely good service ruined by the abuse of csam promulgating fuckheads who deserve to rot for their evil

  • neo [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Presumably that is the reason, yes. Mullvad's really good service makes it a target for those who wish to host and distribute csam. This causes their IPs to be blacklisted or hosting providers to drop them.

    But now the many cool legitimate uses (like piracy, hosting servers without exposing your own IP, punching through NAT where you don't have control over the gateway, etc) are all ruined, too.

      • neo [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        yes you can. if you never used port forwarding before (you'd know) nothing will change for you.

          • spectre [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            In minimally technical terms, it works as sort of a "reverse VPN", providing privacy if you want to accept connections rather than establish connections. You can see how this would be an issue when it comes to the distribution of csam

          • neo [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            see my other comment i just posted

      • RION [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        from what i'm reading you can still download but this makes it a lot harder to upload/seed. if you're on a private tracker or really want to pay it forward with a good sharing ratio then this is no bueno

        • FuckYourselfEndless [ze/hir]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Can't you use the torrent client to port forward? I am using QBittorrent and Mullvad and I still get some amount of upload though I can't remember if I port forwarded anything using Mullvad.

          • RION [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Apparently there are some settings in torrent clients to help juice your upload but that's only optimizing what your VPN already allows? I'm basing this all off a few threads in r/mullvadvpn so I'd go there if you want more concrete info

            • neo [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Port forwarding is a feature to establish a route from within one network to another network. Imagine Mullvad is acting as your router. You used to be able to go into Mullvad's website and get a forwarded port. This means you could set your torrent client's port to match what Mullvad gave you, making your torrent client directly reachable to anyone on the internet.

              Without the port forwarding feature, you can only connect to other "reachable" torrent clients that are directly exposed to the internet.

              If you have never set up this feature from Mullvad's site before, you will not experience a change in anything. But the benefit with a forwarded port is that you can communicate to more peers in a swarm, because you can connect to both reachable and non-reachable clients. Technically, it's the non-reachable ones who can reach you.

              For well-seeded and alive torrents this doesn't matter to much. For creating new torrents and sharing them, or connecting to nearly dead torrents, this sucks.

              Also, port forwarding isn't just about uploading. It's just about establishing connections.