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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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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