I was just reading through the interview process for RED, and they specifically forbid the use of VPN during the interview. I don’t understand this requirement, and it seems like it would just leak your IP address to the IRC host, which could potentially be used against you in a honeypot scenario. Once they have your IP, they could link that with the credentials used with the tracker while you are torrenting, regardless of if you used VPN while torrenting.
The speedtest requirement is to ensure that you can seed effectively. Its for the overall health of the network not so they can geolocate you. If geolocation was a concern, then your IP would be plenty.
They say that they don’t have a minimum speed requirement and the speedtest result doesn’t affect your application. Also considering that they specify that you choose the node geographically closest to you (instead of the lowest latency one) and the only other information in the test is latency, it does sound like they’re either looking for vpns or your location.
IP is quite unreliable when it comes to geolocation, especially if you have a dynamic ip