I know this is a dumb question… But i cant really aford a vpn like at all, is it possible to torrent without using a vpn in the USA or will i get in some trouble and go to jail if i torrent without a vpn?
The reason i cant get a vpn is because im just broke and im young enough to live with family so i cant really get a job.
Do your ISP a favor and use a VPN when torrenting. They will know you’re torrenting based on traffic patterns, but they won’t know what you’re torrenting. That way they don’t have to serve you a notice or kick you off their service at the behest of movie or music studios. Your ISP may not care what you’re doing, but those businesses do, and the law is on their side.
VPN makes it extremely difficult for your ISP to spy on you, which is the whole point.
Unless you use a VPN that supports traffic pattern obfuscation. Mullvad VPN does this https://mullvad.net/en/blog/introducing-defense-against-ai-guided-traffic-analysis-daita.
How will they know you’re torrenting if all they see is a lot of wireguard traffic? You could be uploading backups to a remote location for all they know
Just gettin’ a few linux ISOs
I’ve been collecting over 10 TB of Linux ISOs this year.
The nature of uploads/downloads happening with torrents coming and going from disparate sources. Apparently it has a certain network signature that can be identified fairly reliably. ISPs don’t really give a shit about WHAT you torrent, but they will try to traffic shape it so it doesn’t affect other users on the ISP much.
I got one threatening letter (they are uncommon where I live in Czechia but they will write you after a while). I got a VPN and no more letters.
What you were doing online is being watched. It is being recorded. Right now, some ISPs will will protect your identity and send warnings to you, to a point. Some ISPs will just give up your information.
They are currently working on legislation to force ISPs just shut you off If piracy is reported.
Right now, for every ISP that I’m aware of in the US, No action is actually taken against you for reports of piracy. But that doesn’t mean that this will stay the same, or, that they won’t retroactively go on a witch hunt.
You can find VPNs for a couple bucks a month. Make it a birthday request.
Ask people from your country, or look online to see if torrenting is prosecuted there. If people don’t get letters from the ISP, you can just enable encryption in your torrent software and forget about it.
I’ve been torrenting without VPN for a decade (Spain), and never had any issues, not even traffic slowdowns.
Edit: You’re probably gonna see a lot of advice to always use a VPN. Most of this advice is from US users, who are not used to torrenting without VPNs. The truth is, as with everything, it really depends. I’m not a fan of generalized answers to questions, and the same advice isn’t as good for every situation. VPNs are a barrier of entry, and they also come with a slowdown. If you’re starting to torrent and VPNs are not necessary in your country, don’t be afraid to torrent without one. But of course, if you’re from the US, you’ll have to use one!
I think that depends very much on your jurisdiction and the type of content you download. In Germany when I did things without VPN I most of the time downloaded english content and not the latest blockbusters. Copyright enforcment companies, at least back then, were hired for specific newer movies. Now I have things more automated so I’d rather not risk tripping any wires.
Don’t subject your family to nasty letters in their mail from your ISP. You won’t go to jail, but you might risk your internet service getting canceled, which won’t be a fun conversation with your parents.
If you’re 18 and healthy, go donate plasma at a local clinic. In the USA depending on where you are, you can make $40-$80 per week, sometimes even more if they have a big shortage. Takes about 90 minutes a session, and you just chill with a needle in your arm and browse on your phone, super easy.
Proton VPN’s most expensive plan is $108 for 2 years, you can afford that. Go to your friends or neighbors and offer to do some yard work for cash. Mow their lawn, shovel bark, dig up dead shrubs, whatever. That’s the main way I made money when I was in my teens. People will pay 20-30 bucks an hour in most places for that kind of work, so a few hours of that in a week or two and you’ve got your $108 for Proton VPN, or whatever other VPN you want to use.
Sell some crap on eBay, FB marketplace, Craig’s List, etc. Old clothes, computer parts, consoles, weights, people will buy anything. You’d be surprised how fast I’ve gotten rid of junk buy posting it online for 10 bucks.
Proton smells bad for me, too much of a walled-garden and corporate restriction aesthetic with their services. I would recommend Mullvad or NordVPN
I only mentioned it because it’s what I’ve been using for a while and it’s been a good experience so far. Cheap, runs well on Linux, and is one of the few that still allows you to port forward.
There are several good ones to pick from, defs would stay away from Nord because of their advertising practices, but Mullvad is solid. I think they removed port forwarding though.
Mullvad did remove port forwarding, and it’s the only thing stopping me from cancelling my Proton subscription early. I don’t torrent often, but I wonder about getting a seedbox one day, and I’d need Proton.
I honestly don’t love them after the idiot board member’s Trump praise.
Why would you recommend Nord over Proton?
Proton take cash payments and xmr just like Mullvad and IVPN.
Don’t go tormenting without a VPN.
…depending on your country. Some countries don’t give a flying fuck: in that case, don’t waste money on VPNs if you don’t need it.
But im broke which is why i want to pirate, Do i just use a bunch of free trials?
Definitely don’t use your real identity before tormenting others.
Haha
r/whoosh
Bro, you can get a vpn for stupid cheap these days. Some reputable companies frequently offer deals for less than $5 per month.
Mullvad is always $5 a month. They’re fantastic.
That sucks but if you do it you’ll just be broke without internet access.
You can use a free VPN, they’re just going to log and sell all your internet traffic data.
You can earn Microsoft Rewards points by using Bing search egine in the US, redeem them for gift cards, for personal use or to sell/trade for cheap cash. I think in the US you can earn up to 15-20k points per month, a $10 gift card costs like 9k points.
AFAIK Proton has a free tier.
I think their free tier prevents you from torrenting
I think you can bypass this by using the WireGuard profile instead of their official app, haven’t tried this for quite some time though
Just checked and you are right.
Just use a free VPN like proton.
You can torrent on Proton’s free version now?
Nope. I was wrong about that. I just looked into it more and you can’t. I have always had the paid version, I didn’t realize that was one of the features missing from the free tier. My bad
All good, I don’t think anyone offers it. AFAIK I2P is the only option for free torrent anonymity.
I’ve always paid for Proton a year at a time. Given as much as I pirate its well worth it
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On behalf of whoever is paying for your internet connection, do not torment without a VPN.
If you ignore this advice, be aware that the aformentioned person will get a nastygram in the mail, complete with the exact title of the torment you downloaded. They have no qualms with outing your darkest perversions to the breadwinner(s) in your household.
Depends on jurisdiction and what you torrented. Is the US uniformally militant on torrents?
I mean I torrented without a VPN on comcast/xfinity and nothing happened besides a few emails, eventually they stopped even sending those emails. I mean I had my own unlimited mobile data plan, and everyone in my household is abusive to me so I just decided to test what happens, worse case scenario, their internet gets shut off and I’d just have to use my own mobile hotspot connection. (Don’t judge, I’m just very petty about being on the receiving end of abusive behavior and I would sabotage my own family for revenge) Welp, after like 6 months of downloads, nothing happened, I eventually stopped doing that and used a VPN because I wanted to watch some weird tv shows and movies that I didn’t want them know about.
But this is anecdotal, don’t test this at home.
In my experience the nastygram accused me of downloading a ton of different things but I there was only maybe one thing I actually did? They’re very bad at figuring out what you’re torrenting only that you are
Those letters originate from the rights holders, who have leechers in the swarm, verifying that you are actively uploading data to them. Your ISP doesnt care if you torrent, or who you torrent to. They wont originate a letter unless a rightsholder requires them to.
The rightsholder has your IP address, and the name of the file you sent them. Data for those files was sent to their leechers by your IP address, perhaps not by you, but by some machine operating on your network, or through it.
It is possible that the letter to your ISP included a list of both IP addresses belonging to several of their customers, and filenames sent from all of those customers. It is possible that the ISP sent out letters to each of the individual subscribers, and just attached the full list of files from the original complaint.
That’s essentially how I assumed they worked, and batching the complaints makes sense as to why they were accusing me of downloading random files.
My friend’s friend’s cousin was dinged 3 times in 10 years by their ISP, large provider in a populated area.
He or she really needs to add a password to his or her router one of these days, darn neighbors. And those pesky neighbors need a VPN too. After getting a VPN, the complaints stopped. For the neighbors, of course.
Use the Windscribe 10gb per month free. It works well. And if you need more use RiseUpVPN. But note it is slow. And that its completely free and volunteer run. It’s the kind of thing that if you get an income you should probably donate to if you used a lot. It’s mainly used by activists in authoritarian countries.
Adding another free alternative; The free Cloudflare Warp for a semi-VPN. You can’t choose your output node, but your traffic gets routed through their network.
It can run in proxy mode as well if you prefer only your torrent traffic being routed through it.
No idea what happens nowadays also probably depends on your location too, but a friend of mine downloaded fallout 4 when it released and his isp disabled their houses internet until he went to a web page and checked off a box saying “i have deleted the following file(s) from my machine” lol
It was a tame outcome relatively speaking, but it could have been worse.
Save your lunch money for however long it takes to be able to buy a year of VPN like Mullvad in your country.
You aren’t paying for your internet so you’d be an asshole to put the account holder under scrutiny for torrenting without protection. Especially when they are also covering your rent, elecricity, gas, food, clothing, etc. Don’t be a selfish asshole.
If you can’t get VPN don’t be entitled and go off torrenting because other people say it is fine. You aren’t paying for internet so you don’t get the privilege to decide if it is fine or not.
Mullvad stopped allowing port forwarding, sadly, which complicates torrenting. They had valid reasons for dropping support, but it makes it much harder to complete a solid connection via Mullvad.
Still sad about this. Mullvad feels like the best privacy-centric choice and I’ve been using them for a year, but once I set up my media server I realized how vital port forwarding is. Ended up switching to Proton, who I’m still uncomfortable with due to their CEO’s political comments earlier this year, but they’re arguably the best choice right now.
Airvpn is supposed to be as private as mullvad but def not as user friendly in my experience.
It can’t be as private as mullvad, it has usernames and they log traffic amounts.
I use them though.
Just keep any torrent you download seeding after you finished the download and you will easilly get a seed/download ratio of 2 or more.
Even without static port-forwarding, the NAT translation done by the Mullvad router will automatically keep track of external machines to which your own machine has connected to recently, in order to forward to it any connections back, and since the torrent protocol pretty much connects to the whole swarm during the download stage (even if it doesn’t download from most of them, it still connects to each swarm participant to check which parts they have), which means that after your download stage for a torrent is over, for a while (hours, in my experience) if any of those machines tries to connect back the connection gets properly forwarded by the Mullvad router to your machine because it still recognizes them as associated with your host and forwards the connection correctly.
What won’t work without static port-forwarding is starting seeding from scratch, resuming seeding after you stopped it for a while (a day or more) and very small size torrents (because the swarm changes very fast when the download size is very small and is quickly done, and the new machines in the swarm which your own machine did not connect to during your own download stage, won’t be associated in the Mullvad router with your machine so it can’t do automatic routing of their connection attempts).
The point being that it’s perfectly fine to torrent with a VPN without port-forwarding and you can do it without being a leecher as long as you’re not just downloading tiny torrents and you make sure to leave the torrents to seed for a while after the download stage is over. What you can forget about is seeding from scratch or to remote machines you did not download any data from, which is a problem if you’re trying to get a good ratio for private trackers since you can’t just fire up a torrent for seeding alone and all uploading can only happen following your downloading of that same torrent.
Yeah mullvad is great for certain use cases but torrenting is not one of them
If you are broke and cannot afford a VPN, I suggest you use I2P.
I2P is basically an internet protocol that treats all kinds of internet activity in the manner a torrent works.
Basically, you run a local node.
Traffic is routed around in a bunch of anonymized, encrypted chunks, from many different users, which are then bunched up together into packets and encrypted again.
As a client, you can only decrypt the parts of a packet that pertain to you…
But as a node, you help move packets along to every other person who is running a node, in a sort of meshnet like fashion.
The result is a free, but very slow, but also pretty well anonymized way of passing net traffic around…
…and it is also arguably more private/secure than a VPN, which can simply hand over its server logs if legally asked to…
…and it is also arguably more private/secure than TOR, which can have de-anonymization attacks run on it if enough onion nodes, or your entry/exit nodes, are either comprimised or just outright run as honey pots, which is a thing various law enforcement agencies do.
However, another downside to I2P is that it is… considerably more technically complex for most users to actually set up and use properly, than just a basic VPN for switching your geoip to watch Brazillian netflix or w/e.
But, it does allow torrenting and portforwarding, and is totally free.
Don’t expect to be able to stream any media with it though, it is again very slow.
Couldn’t you potentially have the same thing you describe for tor happening with i2p?
In some sense yes, but:
If your TOR entry exit node is comprimised, you are basically fucked.
I’ve seen estimates that roughly 1/3 of them are comprimised, run by State actors of some kind.
People seem to forget that TOR was originally invented by the US Navy and used by them and the CIA and shit to move sensitive data around in the early 2000s, possibly late 90s.
Then they handed it off to the public.
Do you really think they do not know how to defeat it, when they really want to?
…
Also… I2P traffic is more anonymized/encrypted than TOR traffic is, in that each chunk in each packet is anonymized and encrypted… each packet is kind if a sausage of a bunch of people’s data being moved around all at once, the whole point is you can’t tell whose data ia whose.
IIRC, TOR packets do not work this way, they’re specifically addressed to a single encrypted and anonymized person.
So, its easier to reverse engineer who is the actual person using the network.
Whereas with I2P, you’re always routing for others as well as receiving your own data, albeit much, much more slowly.
I don’t think the cia/nsa or fsb is gonna involve themselves to investigate…
check notes
… people pirating movies and games…
They’re more worried about dissidents.
I mean… the FBI and INTERPOL/EUROPOL routinely do things like infiltrate dark web black markets for physical things, services, hacked data, hacks themselves, that exist mainly or only on a .onion site, then honeypot the users for 6 to 12 months, then crackdown on as many as they can at the same time.
They also go after rom hosting sites, they go after the sites that host torrents and trackers…
Sure, call those ‘Law Enforcement’ agencies instead of ‘Intelligence’ agencies if you want to, fact of the matter is they often collaborate and share methods, practices and just direct intel.
Kinda like how US police have largely militarized after getting all the surplus guns from Iraq 2 and Afghanistan.
…
Have you never seen a website with a:
“THIS SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED AND SHUTDOWN”
Banner replacing the main site?
If not, you must not have been pirating anything for very long, or even just following that genre of news.
Happens all the time, and its often a big smorgasbord of collaborating LE/Intel agencies with their logos on the banner.
But tor is not built to torrent.
I use Spectrum, I get warnings, so vpn it is. I’d also rather no one know than know and willingly ignore it, logging it anyway for some government goon to discover in 10 years.
Private trackers.
In the USA when you are caught torrenting copyrighted material it is because a firm hired by copyright owners sits in the public swarm logging IPs. They then send a warning to your ISP, who in turn sends you a warning.
Private trackers are by their nature a club that tries their damnedest to prevent people working for those kind of companies from joining the site to begin with.
It is still smart to use a VPN but your ISP isn’t generally targeting your data in transit itself. It’s usually a third party company hired out who cannot see your data streams directly. Thus a private tracker reduces the need for such measures since you are less likely to run into a hired hand logging your IP from a private tracker swarm.
This guy torments.
Seriously though, if you are cautious and stick to actual communities instead of just public or private trackers run for glam, you will usually be fine. Communities clamp down really fast if there’s a report of virus etc.
The quality of releases typically is far better, since uploading crap like virus or video covered in ads is a dick move™️
It would be incredibly stupid to still not use a vpn in the states. If a kid who has never tormented before can get an invite to a private tracker, so can a consultant with an antipiracy group. And with a corporate fiber connection and limitless storage budget they could easily sit on thousands of torrents from private sites without having to worry about ratio. The site moderator would never know anything is up until all their users start getting piracy notices, and even then itd be hard to track down the one doing the logging.
Private trackers usually have a limit of active torrents you can have depending on your ratio tier. Sitting on every torrent in a private tracker for one user would be a huge red flag, so the only way to have it work would be to have many accounts. Even then, unless they’re seeding content, they will probably be kicked if their upload is 0 bytes after a month or whatever interval accounts are purged.
Sure, there are probably some studios going after high profile torrents on private trackers, but thinking they would be monitoring thousands of torrents is a stretch.
Why wouldnt they be seeding? If they own the rights or are acting on behalf of the rightsholders they dont have to worry about the criminality of it, and they have the resources to be in the highest seeding ratio if they want. They could literally build up an account to be the most active seeder on the site and just be collecting logs the whole time until they decide to burn the account and act on all the data they’ve collected.
If they have the rights to distribute it and can seed it, than what is the crime? I would have to imagine that if a studio wants to limit the spread of pirated material, hiring a firm who will distribute and spread the content the studios are looking to limit is counterproductive. IANAL but i think that if a studio were to take someone to court for piracy and it was discovered that the studio (or a hired firm) was legally providing the content to the defendant, it would be a huge hole in the case, and be grounds for dismissal.
Im not suggesting they upload it, but they literally do seed torrents to get a list of all clients who connect to them and download, because the torrent is still an unauthorized distribution for everyone else. I think it totally should be considered illegal, but thats how theyve been doing it for years.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-helps-to-expose-copyright-troll-honeypot-130604/
but they literally do seed torrents to get a list of all clients who connect to them and download
Actually, if I recall correctly they tend to seed only partial files because what they actually want to hit people with is distribution. If I understand the legal situation around it correctly, the act of downloading is much harder to pursue in civil court as opposed to damages for distribution. Because they need to prove that you’re not just downloading it for yourself but distributing it to others, hence sitting in the swarm and logging IPs of anyone who sends data to them.
Which is I why I used words like “usually” and “less likely.” It’s not any sort of guarantee of safety. For example, xFinity/Comcast owns NBCUniversal, and as such is technically the rights-holder for NBC content and as such they have a vested interest in potentially inspecting your traffic directly for torrents they have ownership of. In other words, I agree with your assessment here.
Yeah i mostly just wanted to add onto your comment so anyone new didnt get the wrong impression. Private trackers are definitely better but don’t protect you from anyone logging your activity. Use a VPN in north america all the time is basically the best policy.
