if I went to a library or something, and torrent a file, nobody would be able to tell who it was as its a public place and the library couldn’t be held accountable. thoughts?
They could also see your MAC address and lookup which vendor that MAC address matches to.
They could then use the cameras there to see who has a laptop that matches and possibly identify you that way.
I’d say if you are going to do it use a vpn no matter what.
They may still lock you out or block torrent traffic, or possibly block your vpn from working. So make sure the vpn kill switch is on in case it suddenly stops working.
In this day and age everyone should be using a MAC address spoofer, especially on Public Wifi, many of them track mac addresses and impose limits based on time and data usage.
If you’ve ever been using public Wifi and noticed it got slow or stops working after a time, that’s why. Some will even be up-front about it by asking you to pay for it after a time.
I don’t have experience with them, so I’m not too sure how they work or how reliably they work.
Mainly I just use the one built-in to settings of Gnome, I never torrented on public wifi (most public wifi I’ve used is too slow to download without chewing up all the bandwith) but the MAC address randomizer seems to work very well, even with the ones that use timed paywalls (where they let you use it for a time then lock your MAC address out and ask you to pay).
