I don’t live in the US, so my ISP doesn’t really seem to care what I torrent, but the megathread vehemently recommends to always use one. Since VPNs aren’t cheap and I’m on a strict budget (wouldn’t pirate otherwise), is it really that dangerous to torrent without one?
yes. sorry. it’s cheaper then buying countless games and software, whatever you use it for. think of it as getting a massive discount on things you’d have been forced to buy otherwise. overtime, you’d spend thousands of dollars in games, etc. VPN monthly cost is a small price to pay comparibly
I’ve always seen this as a question of risk. What you’re asking is the digital equivalent to “Do I really need to wear my seatbelt when driving?”
You can drive around your car two hours a day, every day, without a seatbelt, and be fine for years. You can say you live in a calm neighborhood and say no one ever drives recklessly there. Everyone is still going to tell you to always wear your seatbelt.
You can be very careful about what you torrent. You could possibly torrent lots of things with no problems at all. All it takes is one person at one other endpoint grabbing your IP from one torrent and reporting, to cause a lot of problems.
It’s up to you if you want to take that risk, but when you’re asking for advice no one is ever going to tell you that you don’t need one, and if they are they’re probably giving bad advice. There are enough horror stories that many don’t think it’s worth the risk.
I find that most VPNs are so heavily shilled that by that very nature, makes them suspect. Since the days of Napster, WinMX, Bearshare and the like, I’ve gotten exactly 2 “Hey, knock it off” letters from my ISP. And they were both from new-release, mouse-affiliated movie releases from a public tracker.
Get in with some of the private trackers and 99.9% of the worry disappears. Try not to upload terabytes of data, and the majority of ISPs (I mean, two of the 3 that seem to have the monopolies at least) wont even bother sending the notices.
It depends very much on the copyright laws on where you live. You said you don’t live in the US, which already makes you better off than a lot of people here -However, Europe also has very strict © laws. So it is always recommended.
Alternatively if price is an issue (NEVER use a “free” VPN) you could torrent over I2P, which is free and very safe (at least as safe as tor, if not moreso).
Also the next release of qbittorrent is about to have built in I2P support (but also standard I2P comes with its own torrenting software).
I’ve been torrenting in the US for a decade and a half without a VPN, including as a kid on my parents network LOL, and only got warnings, maybe once every couple years. Tons of copyrighted materials. ATT then Charter, YMMV.
I was brought up thinking I live in a central europe. The “heart of europe” they called it. Only once I realized that I torrent without a VPN without consequences, I accepted the fact that I’m eastern european AF.
shit, guess I am eastern European despite never having left North America. My ISP just doesn’t give a shit.
I personally wouldn’t take the chance. Mullvad is €5 a month, and is worth it to me. My ISP completely shut off my service before ever giving me a notification. I had to completely restart service after going full Karen and blaming it on “my kids.” I would do a few searches and find posts or info relevant to your area or ISP.
Mullvad stopped providing port forwards, so they’re not ideal for torrenting anymore. They were great before.
But barely anyone else provides it too. Proton has it kind of but the amount of servers are restricted so yeah great higher ping/slower speeds depending on where you are from
+1 for Mullvad! They were raided with a search warrant by Swedish Police who ended up leaving empty handed because the customer data they wanted simply does not exist
How’s the speed on Mullvad? I have gigabit currently and don’t really want to compromise the speed of my connection
Incredibly good. You will probably lose like 100mbps compared to without, at 1gbps.
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Yes, it is really that dangerous. People recommended VPNs for a reason. Whether you personally are realistically at risk is an unknown - relatively few people are actually the targets of anti-piracy action. As others have pointed out, copyright trolls generally operate in specific countries and regions.
Still, I would never recommended engaging in copyright infringement without some form of protection. I understand you are poor but it really is a silly risk to take. The way almost all pirates get caught, at least from what I’ve seen, is through stupidity or complacency (one could argue they are the same thing). This is why the megathread tries to recommended best practice wherever possible.
Yes, you need some way to hide your IP when torrenting in the US unless your ISP doesn’t care about copyright letters. If you don’t want to use a VPN, a debrid service or I2P are other options as well that can hide torrents from your isp. Another option is to not torrent and stick to ddl and streaming
debrid service is the way, because they have so many other uses besides torrenting.
A VPN is not necessary for torrent usage.
But if you live in a country that enforces copy right etc online, it’s highly recommended, as a VPN will make it almost impossible to track you down.
A VPN is like a costume. You don’t need to wear one to do something illegal, but wearing one will make it much harder for authorities to identify you.
A VPN is like a costume that makes you look just like some other guy and you need his permission to wear the costume, and he also may know everything that you do in the costume, and may say he’s not keeping track of what you’re doing in the costume but still be lying and later compelled to tell others what you were doing in that costume.
It’s a minor protection, but depending on where your VPN provider is located, it may not even be “minor protection”.
What if i have self-hosted vpn? am i safe now? (wireguard)
Nope! The server provider will definitely be monitoring your activity and probably will report you for torrenting. VPNs shift trust, even self-hosted ones. Do you trust Amazon AWS or Google Cloud or whatever provider you’re using? I certainly hope not.
You’re probably fine, but I recommend just getting a free VPN to keep your ISP at bay. I don’t like Proton, but they do have a free VPN. Google around and you can find some others too, if that one is too slow
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Just remember with free things - if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product!
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