If your country persecutes individual piracy. Mine doesn’t.
Our ISPs are too cheap and lazy to even try looking. I still use I2P, but only because I need to justify my tin foil hats collection.
I have had like 14 while I was still in school here in canada. if things haven’t changed you just ignore them because they can’t do jack if you don’t respond. Someone I worked with was blown away when I told him this because back home he was banned from all but the slowest ISP.
That is supposedly the case in Australia as well but I haven’t got a letter from telstra since around 2004 and I have never used a VPN and watch all my shows and movies via torrents so either I’m extremely lucky or they stopped bothering.
Though recently I started paying the $4 / month for Real Debrid for better streaming performance, which is just as good as a VPN for torrent anonymity. I used to be fundamentally against the idea of paying anything to pirate but honestly this is worth it, I’ve even been able to watch a few shows that had 0 seeders because they were previously cached.
Scroll down and there’s a section about Australia on here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Buyers_Club
Basically, they fucked it up so bad in Aus no one’s ever tried again.
Yep, my govt only cares about porn, manga, hentai, online gambling sites, reddit and duckduckgo.
A VPN is just essentially a change in ISP.
Yeah there is no way Surfshark, NordVPN and other services are compromised and or straight up run by the NSA
let’s say that VPNs are compromised and “they” know that you’re downloading “illegally”
in order to prosecute, “they” have to prove you’re a pirate and show how they know
would they compromise their backDoor to go after a tiny pirate?
you don’t really need to scare quote they in this context. The NSA and similar organizations are real and operating at this scale right now.
Will they compromise their back door to go after a pirate? No. Will they collect data on you to profile you and your activities and use that in the future? Yes.
It is not if, it is when the digital police state is imposed will we know the real end state of this level of data collection. My warning about them is not just about the pirates, its about installing their software and letting them port mirror you and cache your dns calls for years to target you later.
This is why I compose all my messages on an air gapped computer and send them out from my compound with couriers.
Oh also people use VPNs to buy DIY hormones online, what happens when the inevitable US anti trans witch hunt happens?
Title is probably true, but also it’s less likely for the NSA to leak your info than say an ISP that openly sells your info. I highly doubt that the NSA sees someone pirating Photoshop as a priority. VPNs can help with preventing a random ad from logging your real loose location, have built in DNS ad block, open up region locked content plus a list of other benefits.
VPNs absolutely help with general privacy, like not putting your personal phone number on a public registry. They are not intended to perfectly hide you from a super power’s intelligence agency lol
For anonymity, yes. Sure you might fool Google trying to match your IP to your traffic but that’s about it
Everyone knows it’s impossible for the NSA to buy rack space in Bulgaria, where they literally don’t have to deal with any US legal process.
It’s also impossible for the NSA to market such a service via pop-privacy blogs and social media profiles.
The funny part about this is that the Snowden leaks showed that the NSA actually put a lot of effort into doing shit like this specifically to avoid all the paperwork which came with accidentally collecting data from US citizens. Keeping the data and analysis off shore means no pesky FISA paperwork.
Yes, a hosted seedbox paid with crypto and self managed keys is the way to go for torrenting
If you are worried about VPN’s, why are you not worried about seedbox providers?
What evidence do you have that no-log VPNs are compromised by the NSA? What about VPNs based in other countries like Canada?
And make sure it’s a VPN that supports port forwarding. Sharing is caring.
or just use Usenet.
I don’t use a VPN because my government has acknowledged that an IP address cannot identify what individual was using it.
I know that government prosecutions for fraud against government use IP addresses
The IP address identifies the company or home the fraud was done from, the account the money went to identifies the individual
If breaking the law and able to afford to make it difficult for prosecutors, it’s probably best to make it difficult for the prosecutors, we may have an activist pro copyright holder government in future and logs are forever (or 5 years)