If you are a pirate VPN is an essential tool. I am trying to ascertain the popularity of various VPNs in piracy community. In this excerise, I will list several Popular VPNs in the comment if you use one of them just upvote that comment and reply the reason. If you don’t find your VPN listed add a comment with just their name. Reply the reason to it. This make it easier to understand the real life user cases.
P.S: I am only looking for paid VPNs please don’t mention “free vpn”.
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Mullvad because they don’t need your name, and you can pay by cash anonymously.
They also regularly have independent security audits
and their servers run everything on RAM meaning the second it loses power all data is lost.Do they still not have port forwarding?
Nope. I’d argue that Mullvad is not for most pirates, unless you’re actually worried about being jailed for your piracy (depends on what country you’re in). If you just want to get the letters from your ISP to stop, there are much cheaper VPNs that can do that.
Mullvad is for actual privacy, which many VPNs don’t really give you. If you gave them an email address and credit card, then it ain’t private, kids!
Check out AirVPN if you want port forwarding.
Mullavad
I used Mullvad, found them great for everything and would be my only VPN if they were big enough to facilitate streaming via other countries. Due to smaller number of servers it isn’t possible to use a lot of streaming services with them…I found this out when o/s and needing to VPN into my home country to access my geo-locked streaming service.
Mullvad because https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
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Proton VPN
Same. Since I am a paying Protonmail user I’ve switched to the Proton VPN. It has been fine.
I see that Proton allows payment via PayPal. Is it possible to pay via PayPal anonymously? I don’t use PP much at all so IDK.
I’d be shocked if it were, as I think they zealously honor KYC/AML/OFAC.
AirVPN
Port forwarding, relatively cheap, runs a good Black Friday sale, and I think its log policy is decent from what I remember.
The airvpn client feels pretty outdated compared to something like mullvad. This might not be a big deal for everyone and there are ways around it but I always see airvpn recommended but noone ever mentions this
I use the native wireguard client on Linux
The Wireguard client is good enough. I wouldn’t trust VPN providers’ custom apps to be as secure, privacy-focused or reliable as the official client ones.
Ever since I switched to Linux I don’t really use Eddie as much, but I agree it could be more intuitive. Even on Windows I typically only spent 30 seconds or less with the client, though, so it didn’t bother me.
I also just switched from Mullvad to OpenVPN and I’m very happy with it. I grabbed the 3-year Halloween promo.
So… at the risk of humiliating myself,
I’ve never once used a VPN in my entire life.I pirated games, movies, shows, music, software… and the worst thing that happened to me was getting a letter from Telus once or twice saying “Hey. Don’t do that.”
That was 5 years ago
I know it’s bad practice. But is a VPN 100% necessary? Even a free one?
I find incredible that it’s absolutely illegal for anyone to read your letters and only the police can do that and only if a judge grant them the right to do that case by case, and a private telecommunications company can read absolutely all your digital communication with no judge involved and no one blinks an eye.
I’m gonna google “How to bomb Telus Headquarters and assassinate their board of directors” and see how fast they respond
Generally CnD letters are not generated by the ISPs themselves. ISPs don’t care what you do unless legally obligated to. When you get a CnD letter, it’s usually because someone working for a copyright holder was on a torrent and snagged your IP, then sent an infringement notice to your ISP, who in turn sends a CnD to the current holder of the IP, i.e. you.
At no point does your ISP have to read your digital communications themselves. Any one of your peers on a torrent can tell what your public IP address is, it’s inherent to the BitTorrent protocol. Copyright holders take advantage of this to catch pirates.
and a private telecommunications company can read absolutely all your digital communication
Well maybe. It’s one of the reasons e2e encryption is so imperative to online privacy. For instance, turning on https everywhere, then your isp can only see which servers you’re connecting to, not what’s in your traffic to them.
And to point it out up front, yeah the distant end’s servers likely have some for of that traffic captured, but now law enforcement has to dig up every company that they’re trying to pull info from. Which is significantly more difficult than just relying on a one stop shop arrangement.
And for the best privacy, like security, a multi-layered approach is better. So throw in a VPN, throw in something like a mullvad browser, throw in pseudonymous accounts, throw in different usernames + passwords across accounts, throw in…
The letters from your ISP have nothing to do with them monitoring your traffic. When you torrent, you’re connecting to a public network of seeders and leechers. Copyright holders pay people to monitor that public list of IP addresses, and they record your IP (because you connected publicly, in the open, and uploaded or downloaded). Then, they send your ISP a letter reporting that your did an illegal thing, and asking them to punish you. Finally, your ISP sends you a letter making some vague threats and asking you to stop. They might make you do a training course to educate you on why piracy is bad, and they might cut off your internet until you pass a quiz and promise not to pirate stuff again. They go through this charade not because it actually accomplishes anything, but because they don’t give a shit, and they’re just doing the bare minimum to keep lawyers off their back.
While people sometimes suggest ignoring it because they say that your ISP is only sending you those notices because the laws compel them to and you downloaded something that was tracked, you may want to evaluate your risk.
Nothing has happened so far. Could something happen in the future?
Your ISP has built an entire portfolio of the things you’ve done online and which content you pirated. Who know how long your ISP retains that data, or which companies or regulatory bodies it shares this data with?
Laws may change.
Up to you on what you want to do with this information.
ISP can’t track bittorrent content without downloading the same torrent as you. They only see domain names of trackers and ip addresses of peers. The content itself is either obfuscated or encrypted.
Fair point. There is temporary obfuscation, and certainly not end to end encryption when torrenting.
The creator of BitTorrent himself has this to say:
“The so-called ‘encryption’ of BitTorrent traffic isn’t really encryption, it’s obfuscation. It provides no anonymity whatsoever, and only temporarily evades traffic shaping. There are better approaches to obfuscation, and I’ve got a great team of engineers who are quite eager to fight that battle, but I’m hoping that everything can be resolved amicably without getting into a serious arms race.” Source: https://torrentfreak.com/interview-with-bram-cohen-the-inventor-of-bittorrent/
In my opinion using a trusted VPN not just for torrenting, but also for sourcing pirated software or other content is just a best practice.
That’s because you’re in Canada. We don’t need to worry like Americans can. It’s not really necessary for us.
I think of it like having sex with or without a condom. If you don’t use a condom, there’s a chance to get an STD (or get “caught”). It’s not a guarantee to get caught, your IP address needs to end up in the pool of addresses they collect to send out DMCA notices so it won’t happen every time. But having a “condom” (VPN) reduces your chances by nearly 100%, assuming it’s properly setup which usually is a very simple process
Same here. Started with IRC, then private trackers. Always force encryption. Zero issues. VPN is a waste of money for piracy.
I’ve only gotten two strikes in my life, 7-8yrs ago. And I feel like this was because my brother was downloading then recent, popular movies (which I almost never do). But before that, never did, without a VPN, and I used to pirate a lot more. Even further back, used to have a roommate who would go on movie and show torrenting sprees. We never got strikes. And that was when commercial VPNs weren’t really a thing yet, but copyright strikes were well known. I’ve known others who’ve never gotten strikes either.
So I’d say no, not 100% necessary at all. But it’s free or cheap enough to mitigate the risk. So that’s why I use one when I do pirate, which is rare these days.
No, you don’t need it if you have trustworthy private trackers. Most people on here just use Pirate Bay or some shitty public alternative that’s seeded with all the planted stuff that the RIAA looks for
PIA, just because I’m lazy and it’s been fine for like a decade. If there is something better, happy to hear about it.
PIA was sold to Kape Technologies a few years back and they have somewhat questionable history and that made me switch to Mullvad. Not because I thought it’s better VPN per-se, but because I wanted away from PIA and Mullvad seemed popular.
The issue is who he sold it to – the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users’ browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.
Yeah it’s cheap as shit too
I’m on pia too I have a seed box anyway so it’s just for https queries. The seed box transfers locally via ssh
Currently proton its decent though I’m thinking of moving to mullvad even though they’ve removed portforwarding.
I’ve used both and much prefer Proton for sailing the seas. Connecting through France (highest speed + p2p) with port forwarding is the best torrent speed I’ve had on a VPN. The only slight annoyance is it switching the forwarded port every time it reconnects, but I run it 24/7 anyway.
Just skip the “official” client and run it through gluetun. It’s a much better experience.
I did this and found it worked way better in terms of stability. Bonus is that Mullvad has a proper Linux client whereas Proton’s is just a cobbled-together mess that’s not worth using and is no where close to feature parity with the Windows client
And in the case that your Linux distro doesn’t have a client in their repos, you can very easily use Mullvad with wireguard in the terminal.
you can very easily use Mullvad with wireguard in the terminal
To be fair, same with Proton. OpenVPN and WireGuard configurations are available.
Proton because I have their Unlimited plan.
AirVPN because of port forwarding.
What do you use it for?
The port forwarding? It makes torrenting work better.
Interesting, I haven’t experienced anything like this with regards to torrent failures. I don’t entirely follow what failure means in this context though. I have torrents that have never completed due to lack of seeds and peers. I don’t think I’ve had a torrent fail in thousands over the last few years (data based on my current NAS box, but was true prior to that too)
The link above explains it better than I can, but without port forwarding it’ll still work, but it works better with an open port.
Yeah but the reason to do it is stated as:
If you are OK with your downloads failing in 10% of cases then continue as usual.
Unless I’m missing something, there’s no point in me pursuing it as I don’t have the problem described, because my Torrents aren’t failing.
I have torrents that have never completed due to lack of seeds and peers.
That’s what failing means here. You know how you sometimes see a torrent site list a non-zero number of seeders but when you try to download it, you don’t connect to any of them and it shows 0 seeders in your client? That’s what happens when neither you nor the seeders have port forwarding set up.
ProtonVpn
AirVPN, limited on details for signing up, can pay in crypto and easy port forwarding.
Good config generator as well
You should add an option for Mullvad.
I use PIA because it was the cheapest on their 3.3 year plan, and it has a good node geographically close to me with port forwarding. I only use it for torrenting, so I don’t care if it’s a CIA Honeypot or whatever.
Currently testing Windscribe because they had good offer for a yearly subscription and some interesting features like ad block (mostly useful for mobile). Their privacy level is sufficient for what I’m doing currently, but if I ever need I’ll just Mullvad.
