Why there's a "cookie" feature in bittorrent?

Windows specific questions, problems.
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sam1275

Why there's a "cookie" feature in bittorrent?

Post by sam1275 »

Hello.
In the "tools" menu, there's a "manage cookies" button, it will show cookies from trackers I used. But why do I even need this? Doesn't it bad for privacy? I don't see this feature in other torrent clients such as utorrent, or do they also have this and just hide the setting for it? Can I disable it?
Thanks.
Last edited by sam1275 on Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
johnny jackhammer
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Re: Why there's a "cookie" feature in bittorrent?

Post by johnny jackhammer »

I was just wondering the same thing. Especially when I saw the MPAA cookie!
bmn

Re: Why there's a "cookie" feature in bittorrent?

Post by bmn »

Someone should investigate the way qB accepts cookies and stores them indeed. I also found several questionable cookies there.

Generally I don't see any reason to accept the cookies from HTTP based announcers since there are peer_id to identify the client for peer information purposes and passkey is for authentication/authorization/accounting purposes.
johnny jackhammer
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Re: Why there's a "cookie" feature in bittorrent?

Post by johnny jackhammer »

Bump
scragly

Re: Why there's a "cookie" feature in bittorrent?

Post by scragly »

Some RSS feeds require cookie based authentication in order to be able to pull data properly.

In the past, there was some basic attempts at handling these cases but it wasn't globally managed, seemingly tied to individual torrent sessions as a workaround. This wasn't really as robust as it could have been and occasionally broke, so when a fix was worked on, the current form of the proper cookie manager that is able to manage cookies globally in the client was added , allowing the cookies to be easier to view and manage.

There's an open Issue ticket specifically asking for the option to not store any cookies which has been marked as a duplicate of the open Issue ticket discussing the nature of the feature which also contains a request to be able to disable them.

I'd suggest giving feedback over on those respective issue tickets, at least giving the ticket a thumbs up to show you're in agreement with the suggestions made. The more agreements for a ticket, the higher a priority it will be for devs to discuss and possibly implement.
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