In addition to the traditional setup where Bittorrent clients ask the tracker for peer information, Bittorrent clients can also discover other peers by themselves by using some sort of a distributed hash table (DHT). DHT is not used if the torrent is marked as private.<br />
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It appears that CentOS 6.3 torrents were made with the private bit set. I'm currently seeding 357 OSS torrents, of which only 9 are marked as private (6 CentOS 6.3 torrents, OpenDisc.10.12, salix(64)?-mate-13.37), so the trend is clearly to have the torrent's private bit cleared in open source torrents. Torrents prior to 6.3 didn't have the private bit set.
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