Hi all.
I’ve pirated before, but on my own independent network. For reasons I won’t get into I’ve gone from living independently to living with roommates, and while I personally don’t have anything against piracy myself, my current concern is that because things are on a shared network, I don’t want them to get dinged by our ISP should I get caught in the act.
Beforehand, because it was my own network, my actions, my consequences to face in the rare circumstance that I do get caught (which hasn’t happened yet), everything was smooth sailing.However, even if the likelihood of this happening is low, I don’t want others facing consequences for my own actions.
What are some ways I can generally mitigate this issue? I mostly just pirate movies, and was curious if using streaming websites from FMHY or using SoulSeek would have the same risk as torrenting.
Edit: My region is Canada to help.
VPN. End of thread.
Even if you were living on your own you should only be torrenting through a VPN.
VPN with a working Killswitch or network binding.
I used to have a VPN where their “network lock” feature treated “reconnecting” the same as “connected”. Meaning that every time the connection dropped, everything was being sent in the clear.
Seedbox is also an appropriate answer.
This is why I keep a dedicated VM on its own subnet for torrenting, with the VPN handled by pfsense.
Can’t get out on the wrong IP if your NAT and Firewall rules only work for the VPN Gateway
For someone whose main focus isn’t networking, do you have a guide or similar I can read to catch up? I’m running my setup on a properly killswitched VPN, but having firewall rules that are only valid for the VPN seems like an interesting extra step.
Id start here, or whatever equivalent guide your provider has.
Essentially when you setup the firewall rules in pfsense you can specify a gateway in the advanced section of the rule.
As far as NAT, you just setup NAT for that subnet/vlan to go out over the VPN’s outward IP instead of your own.
Both are required steps to get it working AFAIK.
Can’t you just bind qbittorrent to the VPN?
VPN. With port forwarding capability if you care about performance.
I realize that some folks say “dont worry youre in canada”
We also live in a world where laws change, and whether or not you may be punished for your historical activity is unknown… you’d assume not, but really its hard to say for sure.
Protect yourself, not because you must but because you should.
You don’t need a VPN (yet, c-22, different reasons) in Canada. Look up our copyright law. Fines are capped so low that it’s malicious compliance on behalf of our government. It’s so low that it’s not worth taking you to court and they cannot sue per item like they can in USA, only for everything at once. Nobody gets sued in reality for piracy in Canada unless they are profiting off of their piracy by selling pirated material. Or web hosts. Basically, don’t be the owner of Demonoid or sell hard drives full of game ROMs on eBay and you’ll be okay.
What you need to actually consider is your ISP. Don’t use any of the major telecom mafia corps directly like Rogers, Telus, Shaw, Bell, etc. They’ll have strike systems and refuse service potentially. They have conflict of interest running streaming sites, making their own TV shows and such. Use pro end user/net neutrality supporting reseller ISP like Oxio and Teksavvy for example. They exist, just look. Park Power is another local to me. Research your local options.
You’ll still get sp00ky copyright infringement letters from 'muricans forwarded to you. Don’t respond, reseller ISP don’t care either. Print them out on toilet paper and wipe your ass with them.
I keep them like trophies. I have 36 infringement emails from Comedy Central from torrenting South Park episodes alone over the years, lmao. Those are all old since I use Debrid for TV/Movies for a long time now. DDL FTW.
like others mentioned, using vpn is best.
unfortunately free ones don’t usually allow torrents because of the huge traffic burden. but there are cheap plans and sales.
also to prevent leakage of torrent traffic:
- bind the torrent client¹ to the vpn connection in the torrent client settings. there are detailed guides on the webs for each major torrent client. some even on the vpn provider website’s help section
- enable kill switch² in the vpn client (…unless maybe you have other apps that absolutely need to stay connected regardless of vpn status)
- check the news site torrentfreak³ from time to time
footnotes
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client is another word for an app that connected to something/someone else
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this cuts off all internet access to the device if vpn disconnects
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a site for news affecting piracy and torrents, including govt crackdowns on piracy and torrent site trust rankings
if you use torrents without a VPN it can cause problems. For general streaming websites i dont think there would be any issue. soulseek also would not be an issue. The ISP reports usually come when you seed/leech a public torrent and there are bots that automatically send IP notice to the ISP of the IP they see (since its public). Therefore using private trackers is a bit more secure in this manner but for the best solution use a VPN.
I’m in camp seed box, or go the Real Debrid/Stremio route and don’t actually host any files on your network. Usenet, maybe with SoulSeek, is also a good route to go.
Otherwise, as others have said, get a VPN. Spend the money you’re not spending on streaming sites on a good one, like Mullvad.
Don’t use Mullvad, not because they aren’t good but because they don’t have port forwarding which is necessary to properly connect to others in the swarm.
