Hey there, dear community, I migrated here from reddit. I wanted to dabble in piracy (Udemy and Art-Courses) for a while, but never knew how to start + a VPN is quite pricey if I don‘t use it/ use it incorrectly.
I wanted to know if there are „beginner tutorials“ for MacOS (I‘m even new in this OS).
I read the Megathread and it was kinda helpful for me not to barge in blindly, but I‘m the kind of person who needs a little handholding
Never torrent without 1)a VPN, one that 2)gives you a dedicated IP.
A VPN is great for most things, but not quite enough for torrenting.
This is because (everyone please correct me if wrong) torrenting is peer-to-peer which means that someone seeding to you can see your real isp-issued IP address. They can contact your ISP and whine about you.
If some copyright guardian sets up a honeypot, they could get your identity even if you use a VPN.
The solution is to use a VPN that gives out a substitute IP address they own (and therefore keep private) which then redirects traffic to you.
There may be better ones out there but I haven’t bothered looking ever since I signed up with privateinternetaccess and use their “Dedicated IP” setting.
Either you’re confused or I’m confused.
Every VPN is going to obfuscate your IP. That is literally how they work. You don’t need a dedicated IP setting for them to do that.
Additionally, I don’t think a copyright holder would need to set up a honeypot. They can just start downloading a torrent like anyone else and they’ll grab all the IPs of people uploading/downloading since torrenting is p2p and you’re freely sharing your IP with others.
I suspect they’re thinking about port forwarding. For another torrent to connect inbound to you, you need to have a port open for inbound connections and most VPNs don’t provide this as standard.
But you can still torrent if you don’t have ports… But you can only initiate outbound connections to other peers. And it works two way… Those peers you connected to can request data from you without problem.
However if there are too many peers without ports then it becomes a problem because no-one can successfully connect with each other.
That’s more or less right but there’s more to it.
First, even if you have a good VPN, you can have dns leaks which is where your VPN is masking your ip but they can still id you cz your pc is configured to look up domain names outside of your vpn and your real ip is exposed. The good news is that you can configure things to avoid this and then use sites like ipleak.net / ipleak.org / dnsleaktest.com to verify you don’t have any dns leaks. probably also a good idea - BEFORE you start downloading shit - to use ipmagnet or something similar to do a test torrent to make sure your ip isn’t being leaked by your torrent client.
Second, not all VPNs are equal. Especially the free ones suck. cz what happens is they see some ip from a honeypot torrent, then they subpoena the VPN who owns that ip and demand your real ip. The free ones will roll over instantly and rat you out cz there’s no money or anything else in it for them so why would they help. Not all of the paid ones are automatically good either tho. There’s a lot of lying bastards who say they are “no log VPNs” but aren’t really cz they still turn things over when subpoenaed. So you have to do research to find out which ones are telling the truth. Usually you can find things online about certain VPNs having been takin to court and really not having any logs to give authories (like Private Internet Access aka PIA who got subpoenaed by FBI but had nothing to give them so their users remained safe) or having trusted third party audit firms who have been allowed to visit and look over/confirm their settings really have no logs. These sites are good reading before you pick a true no-log VPN:
https://proprivacy.com/vpn/comparison/best-no-logs-vpns
https://torrentfreak.com/best-vpn-anonymous-no-logging/
I hear Mullvad is one of the best but I think they are a little pricer than some of the others. I used both Nord and PIA before and never had issues with either.
Stuff other guy said about port forwarding is also true if you are using port forwarding (generally this is something you need to set up on the router so you would probably know if you are using it)
Like you say, they probably don’t need to. But historically, there have definitely been fake torrents out there that are essentially used as honeypots. Varies widely as to how they do it. like some might have a video sample or something, some might just be a bogus file that looks about the right size, and so on.
Having a dedicated IP is not necessarily as important as having support for port forwarding. For example, Torguard has support for port forwarding, and their implementation happens to bind the port to a dedicated IP. In that case, port forwarding is the feature that matters for torrenting, as it will make you more easily connectable to peers you’re sendind / receiving data to / from.