• 1 Post
  • 60 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

help-circle









  • Can’t talk for the free tier, but my Usenet account comes bundled with a paid Privado account, and that’s working ok so far. The connections have been reliable, fast, and low latency.

    My main issue has been that it doesn’t support port forwarding. Also, some GeoIP services locate many of their servers in the Netherlands, instead of where Privado says they are. Idk who’s right, but it’s definitely a problem if you want to pick a specific location.





  • I’m no expert on the topic, but I’ve also never heard of a case where a seedbox user was sued because of torrenting. As far as I can tell the seedbox providers only ever get takedown requests, they never have to hand over user data or logs. I believe that’s mostly because of the jurisdictions they operate in, but some also have restrictions like blocking public trackers.

    There are probably a bunch of things that contribute to this. Seedbox providers fighting against information requests, their logs not being as valuable in court, law firms not knowing whether the IP they’d get would even lead to an address (as opposed to IPs of providers they know to be cooperative), the fact that you only downloaded from the seedbox and never uploaded anything yourself, and so on. Torrenting lawsuits are already pretty weak, and adding all this uncertainty probably makes it not worth the effort.


  • The juristiction where the provider operates, and the logging/disclosure requirements are very important! ISPs are often required to keep logs, VPN/Seedbox/Hosting providers usually are not. I’m not a lawyer and so on, but I could also imagine that logs from some VPN showing your IP was used to download/upload something are not as good as evidence as a mandatory (and probably somehow checked/verified) logs of an ISP are.

    Another thing are provider incentives. If you’re running a general purpose hosting business you probably don’t want any shady stuff on your servers, and so you’re pretty happy to comply with any reasonable information request in that direction. As a VPN/Seedbox provider your business depends on people feeling safe and private on your servers, so you’ll do everything in your power to fight these requests, and there is a lot that can be done to fight them. And ofc if they do as they say and don’t keep logs then they don’t even have the requested information.

    You operate it behind a VPN and the seedbox is just a means to get a 24/7 running Linux machine

    I don’t think you need Seedbox + VPN. You can do that of course, but just one is usually enough. The important bit is that other torrent clients don’t see your personal home IP address, and the provider that does know your IP doesn’t have the obligation or incentive to disclose it. But if you want the extra protection you could search for VPN/Seedbox providers that accept crypto as payment, and chain multile VPNs or VPNs and a Seedbox, so none of them have the full picture. I think that’s pretty overkill though, and probably hell to set up and maintain. At that point you should probably go with Tor or I2P instead, because that’s basically how they operate (onion/garlic routing).

    seedbox is just a means to get a 24/7 running Linux machine

    They usually have very beefy connections, far better than what you get for your home internet, especially when it comes to uploads (asymmetric subscriber lines etc.).




  • If you don’t want to pay for an account anywhere (VPN/Usenet/Debrid/…), then you might want to try out Torrent + I2P. I haven’t used it myself, but from what I know it’s a slower but completely provider-less alternative to VPNs for anonymization, and Torrents are free ofc.

    That being said, you’ll have a much easier time if you pay for a seedbox for example. It’s just a small server in a datacenter somewhere, that happens to be better connected and more private than your typical home internet connection, and that you can use however you like.