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?
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.
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 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.
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 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.
+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.
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.
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.
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).
@Alextheacceptable In Germany, there are lawyers specialised on torrents. They collect German IPs from the peers list and mass-sue them over distributing copyrighted material. They always ask for a settlement payment of more than 5000€. It can usually be escaped by taking it to court, but I recommend not going through that.
So, depends on your location. Over here, download one movie without a VPN and you have a shit ton of legal crap coming your way.
Makes me think… if you exclusively use IPv6 you might be fine because they can’t geolocate you that easily 🤔
Would that really matter, though? Afaik, they could still just… ask your ISP who that IP was assigned to, which is what they’re going to do with IPv4 anyways.
@SolOrion They don’t deal with ISPs outside the country, because they can’t sue them at a German court.
So they need to know it’s a German ISP beforehand so they can request personal information accordingly. But maybe they could still figure it out from IPv6 address ranges… I’m not entirely sure.
Yes you can do that easiely with a ripe whois query. And they definitely do.
@the1HOknocks @Alextheacceptable @SolOrion dammit.
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”.
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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