I know this is a dumb question… But i cant really aford a vpn like at all, is it possible to torrent without using a vpn in the USA or will i get in some trouble and go to jail if i torrent without a vpn?
The reason i cant get a vpn is because im just broke and im young enough to live with family so i cant really get a job.
Private trackers.
In the USA when you are caught torrenting copyrighted material it is because a firm hired by copyright owners sits in the public swarm logging IPs. They then send a warning to your ISP, who in turn sends you a warning.
Private trackers are by their nature a club that tries their damnedest to prevent people working for those kind of companies from joining the site to begin with.
It is still smart to use a VPN but your ISP isn’t generally targeting your data in transit itself. It’s usually a third party company hired out who cannot see your data streams directly. Thus a private tracker reduces the need for such measures since you are less likely to run into a hired hand logging your IP from a private tracker swarm.
This guy torments.
Seriously though, if you are cautious and stick to actual communities instead of just public or private trackers run for glam, you will usually be fine. Communities clamp down really fast if there’s a report of virus etc.
The quality of releases typically is far better, since uploading crap like virus or video covered in ads is a dick move™️
It would be incredibly stupid to still not use a vpn in the states. If a kid who has never tormented before can get an invite to a private tracker, so can a consultant with an antipiracy group. And with a corporate fiber connection and limitless storage budget they could easily sit on thousands of torrents from private sites without having to worry about ratio. The site moderator would never know anything is up until all their users start getting piracy notices, and even then itd be hard to track down the one doing the logging.
Private trackers usually have a limit of active torrents you can have depending on your ratio tier. Sitting on every torrent in a private tracker for one user would be a huge red flag, so the only way to have it work would be to have many accounts. Even then, unless they’re seeding content, they will probably be kicked if their upload is 0 bytes after a month or whatever interval accounts are purged.
Sure, there are probably some studios going after high profile torrents on private trackers, but thinking they would be monitoring thousands of torrents is a stretch.
Why wouldnt they be seeding? If they own the rights or are acting on behalf of the rightsholders they dont have to worry about the criminality of it, and they have the resources to be in the highest seeding ratio if they want. They could literally build up an account to be the most active seeder on the site and just be collecting logs the whole time until they decide to burn the account and act on all the data they’ve collected.
If they have the rights to distribute it and can seed it, than what is the crime? I would have to imagine that if a studio wants to limit the spread of pirated material, hiring a firm who will distribute and spread the content the studios are looking to limit is counterproductive. IANAL but i think that if a studio were to take someone to court for piracy and it was discovered that the studio (or a hired firm) was legally providing the content to the defendant, it would be a huge hole in the case, and be grounds for dismissal.
Im not suggesting they upload it, but they literally do seed torrents to get a list of all clients who connect to them and download, because the torrent is still an unauthorized distribution for everyone else. I think it totally should be considered illegal, but thats how theyve been doing it for years.
https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-helps-to-expose-copyright-troll-honeypot-130604/
but they literally do seed torrents to get a list of all clients who connect to them and download
Actually, if I recall correctly they tend to seed only partial files because what they actually want to hit people with is distribution. If I understand the legal situation around it correctly, the act of downloading is much harder to pursue in civil court as opposed to damages for distribution. Because they need to prove that you’re not just downloading it for yourself but distributing it to others, hence sitting in the swarm and logging IPs of anyone who sends data to them.
Which is I why I used words like “usually” and “less likely.” It’s not any sort of guarantee of safety. For example, xFinity/Comcast owns NBCUniversal, and as such is technically the rights-holder for NBC content and as such they have a vested interest in potentially inspecting your traffic directly for torrents they have ownership of. In other words, I agree with your assessment here.
Yeah i mostly just wanted to add onto your comment so anyone new didnt get the wrong impression. Private trackers are definitely better but don’t protect you from anyone logging your activity. Use a VPN in north america all the time is basically the best policy.
depending on what you you plan on downloading you can probably use direct downloads instead, and you won’t need a VPN if I’m not mistaken. no idea if and how available things are, though
Use i2pd with qbittorrent
Yeah they’re gonna need qBittorment* for this though
Note that the official documentation says that it’s experimental and may leak your IP address.
Its also a (nearly?) 10 year old paradigm at this point.
TOR is ‘experimental’ in the same way I2P is.
I2P works, though it is more technically complex for an average user to properly set up than most VPNs.
Its not zero-effort, but you can safely torrent without a VPN using I2P. You’d have to have an I2P router running on the backend and use something like i2psnark to connect. Out of the box, I2P won’t work, you have to adjust the config, but after that you could go VPN-less. Two things to consider though: 1. Torrents will run slower. 2. Only trackers inside the I2P network would be reachable.
The reason i cant get a vpn is because im just broke and im young enough to live with family so i cant really get a job.
I don’t know your situation (and age) but small jobs like delivering newspapers can usually be taken up at relatively you age. They should easily cover a VPN subscription.
E.g. I was delivering newspaper biweekly for a few hours at the age of 13. Even today, the monthly pay would’ve been enough to pay for a year of my current VPN. Your guardians will have to approve the job but legally it shouldn’t be an issue.
If you torrent without a VPN the conversation about a warning by the internet provider on behalf of some rights holder will be way worse than asking about ideas for a small (summer) job.
does anyone still gets a newspaper?
I only use them to dry my shoes and to wrap bio waste, but there’s still about 3 (bi-weekly) newspapers getting delivered to my door. They are ad supported and I don’t know anyone reading them, except for a few people over the years which complained about not receiving theirs.
I almost forgot there’s also the community sheet (“Gemeindeblatt”), which includes local events, trash collection dates, job postings: coincidentally they are currently in need of someone delivering this local paper for the next few weeks.
im young enough to live with family
Tell your parents that they’ll lose their internet if they don’t give you $20 per year for VPN.
I got one threatening letter (they are uncommon where I live in Czechia but they will write you after a while). I got a VPN and no more letters.
Save your lunch money for however long it takes to be able to buy a year of VPN like Mullvad in your country.
You aren’t paying for your internet so you’d be an asshole to put the account holder under scrutiny for torrenting without protection. Especially when they are also covering your rent, elecricity, gas, food, clothing, etc. Don’t be a selfish asshole.
If you can’t get VPN don’t be entitled and go off torrenting because other people say it is fine. You aren’t paying for internet so you don’t get the privilege to decide if it is fine or not.
Mullvad stopped allowing port forwarding, sadly, which complicates torrenting. They had valid reasons for dropping support, but it makes it much harder to complete a solid connection via Mullvad.
Still sad about this. Mullvad feels like the best privacy-centric choice and I’ve been using them for a year, but once I set up my media server I realized how vital port forwarding is. Ended up switching to Proton, who I’m still uncomfortable with due to their CEO’s political comments earlier this year, but they’re arguably the best choice right now.
Airvpn is supposed to be as private as mullvad but def not as user friendly in my experience.
It can’t be as private as mullvad, it has usernames and they log traffic amounts.
I use them though.
Yeah mullvad is great for certain use cases but torrenting is not one of them
Just keep any torrent you download seeding after you finished the download and you will easilly get a seed/download ratio of 2 or more.
Even without static port-forwarding, the NAT translation done by the Mullvad router will automatically keep track of external machines to which your own machine has connected to recently, in order to forward to it any connections back, and since the torrent protocol pretty much connects to the whole swarm during the download stage (even if it doesn’t download from most of them, it still connects to each swarm participant to check which parts they have), which means that after your download stage for a torrent is over, for a while (hours, in my experience) if any of those machines tries to connect back the connection gets properly forwarded by the Mullvad router to your machine because it still recognizes them as associated with your host and forwards the connection correctly.
What won’t work without static port-forwarding is starting seeding from scratch, resuming seeding after you stopped it for a while (a day or more) and very small size torrents (because the swarm changes very fast when the download size is very small and is quickly done, and the new machines in the swarm which your own machine did not connect to during your own download stage, won’t be associated in the Mullvad router with your machine so it can’t do automatic routing of their connection attempts).
The point being that it’s perfectly fine to torrent with a VPN without port-forwarding and you can do it without being a leecher as long as you’re not just downloading tiny torrents and you make sure to leave the torrents to seed for a while after the download stage is over. What you can forget about is seeding from scratch or to remote machines you did not download any data from, which is a problem if you’re trying to get a good ratio for private trackers since you can’t just fire up a torrent for seeding alone and all uploading can only happen following your downloading of that same torrent.
Just use ProtonVPN. They have a free tier. No credit card required. Its slightly slower speeds, but it will keep you from getting in trouble while sailing the high seas 🏴☠️🏴☠️
Proton’s free tier doesn’t support P2P traffic anymore.
Interesting. I did not know that.
I’m in a country where there’s no legal precedent against torrenting, so it’s somewhat safe, but it’s still better to use one anyways. You never know when the laws might change, and it’s best if there’s no record of your IP/timestamp torrenting.
Either way, there’s a risk-reward tradeoff of not using one, but the risk is much higher in the US, and if you’re made an example of, it could be life ruining. You’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s worth paying to mitigate the risk.
yes it’s important. take it from someone who is also young, but learned their lesson quickly
Jail probably not… however you will probably get a sternly worded letter from your ISP saying “We know you were torrenting (name of one show or movie you torrented”), This is your first warning.
In short, you won’t go to jail, but your ISPs will usually give a few warnings, and then cut off your internet.
Use the Windscribe 10gb per month free. It works well. And if you need more use RiseUpVPN. But note it is slow. And that its completely free and volunteer run. It’s the kind of thing that if you get an income you should probably donate to if you used a lot. It’s mainly used by activists in authoritarian countries.
Adding another free alternative; The free Cloudflare Warp for a semi-VPN. You can’t choose your output node, but your traffic gets routed through their network.
It can run in proxy mode as well if you prefer only your torrent traffic being routed through it.
If you use only private trackers you can skip the VPN. If you use public ones, your ISP might take issue
Yes, I ignored it for a while but then got walled off by charter until I acknowledged I’d fix the torrenting issue with my account. Got a von and never had a problem again
