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.

    • 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.