Before I say anything further, yes I know how much the recommended VPNs cost. I can read. Please do not interrogate me about it.
I’ve been wanting to get into torrenting for a while, particularly contributing to private trackers related to music (and to a lesser extent retro games, though I don’t have much original stuff to put there as it’s harder to find rare games than rare music). FMHY recommends RiseUp if I must get a free VPN while I’m working on my financial situation, though I’m not sure whether it’s been tested in court. What are my options, if any?
Use someone else’s wifi.
I used to park my car in a Home Depot parking lot when I went to work with a laptop torrenting until the battery died.
I lived above a Starbucks for a while, that was the best VPN I ever had!
Hard to get a positive seed ratio this way, but definitely seems like best bet for someone that can’t afford airvpn
RiseUp is slow and intended for activists and the politically vulnerable. It’s not for poor people who cannot afford a $5 a month VPN. You will be fucking over people with much more legitimate use cases than yours if you start using it for torrenting.
I see… Not sure what I’m supposed to do then.
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Public WiFi exists and it’s also pretty easy to get free condoms.
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No u
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Pro tip: Never use public WiFi without wearing a condom.
You can get into private trackers and trust them. Not recommended, but some do.
Generally speaking, the copyright trolls only target public trackers and DHT. There have been some instances of them making way into TL and others. Your ISP could also identify torrenting on private trackers if they wanted to, even with mitigations. In my experience and from what I hear, most ISPs do not go to these lengths.
So, there a risk doing the above. Whether or not it’s worth it until you can afford a decent VPN is up to you.
Aside: Please do not use a free VPN for torrenting (or tor, for that matter). They are either like RiseUp and run on donations for people who really, really need them, or Proton which is commercial and specifically try to block or slow down the traffic. Either way, if ruins it for everyone else.
Either way, if ruins it for everyone else.
How does it ruin it for everyone else? One slow peer does not ruin the network.
I meant in the context of the VPN. It slows down the network for everyone on one which is run by donation. For commercial companies, it incentivizes them to further lock down what users can do or what speeds they get.
If you use private trackers, a VPN is irrelevant. All you need to do is fully encrypt your traffic in your torrent client so your ISP can’t see what you’re doing. It’s been working just fine for me for 15 years, and I’ve never gotten a letter.
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I’m kind of in a bind financially in general. Job market is complete ass and I struggle as-is. Not sure what I’ll do there.
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Because I guess giving myself some off-time means I must be a lazy bum who isn’t putting in any work to get a job and work on my skills. Fuck off.
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Well, I’m glad you never get exhausted or anything I guess.
In the US, internet piracy is not a crime, but a civil infraction. And yes, our media overlords have been trying to make it a crime for decades.
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I mean you can avoid all that. If you’re just interested in music and retro games then just use soulseek and use the rom megathread. both of which are going to be either peer to peer or direct downloads. no torrenting.
Rom megathread (web search it) has quite literally everything. no need to search, no need to torrent, it’s all right there. And soulseek with Nicotine+ just works like napster. sign up, be sure to share your music library, and then have at it.
I use slsk, I’m just trying to find more places to upload the rare music I have to so it’s less likely to become lost.
right so you just keep your music folder open so people can do just that. More audiophiles are going to be on soulseek than some random torrent tracker.
I don’t understand why you insist on torrenting when you can’t safely do so. You’re going to get way more traction sharing your rare stuff on soulseek than you will torrenting it I can guarantee that.
It’s not that I’m trying to switch away from slsk, it’s that I’m trying to do more in addition to slsk.
You could also consider looking into a private tracker. It’s not 100% safe but much more safe than a public tracker. It’s also kind of fun getting into it, but hard to get invited.
Look at newsgroups - some indexers are free, others have a lifetime fee that’s reasonable. I moved to nzbs and haven’t looked back - I can’t get dinged for sharing copyrighted stuff if I’m only downloading, never uploading.
there exists a free newsgroup indexer that contains binaries?
There’s a few - but typically the free ones have limits on the number of downloads per day.
Nzbfinder and bin search used to be okay.
Which ones are okay now?
any specific lifetime fee indexers you recommend?
Nzb geek and planet are two good ones.
Borrowed WiFi is definitely your best bet. Find a place with a fast public WiFi network you can reach from your car.
I wouldn’t do this because the wifi will make sure you never do this again because of dmca strikes
Mullvad is €5 a month for total of €60 for a year.
Save up then torrent. If you live in the US you risk way more in fines than what €60 for a year of VPN would cost.
You basically have 5 (?) devices there. Share the cost with 4 friends and it’s 1 Euro a month.
Tribler or i2p.
Edit: there are also non-bittorrent p2p networks out there like Retroshare, but I haven’t used them, so don’t know how useful they are.
What are the adoption rates of those compared to a standard private tracker?
Dunno, I haven’t used private trackers in 10 years. You can add any magnet link to Tribler and it will go through exit nodes to hide your IP, kind of like Tor does for browsing clearnet. I haven’t used i2p in a while either; back then, I used the Postman tracker, and don’t know if that’s still what most people do or not. I personally just use a paid VPN, because there really isn’t a good way to set Tribbler up with an *arr stack.
I don’t usually recommend this, but since you are in a situation where you really can’t afford a VPN or a seedbox and live in a country where torrenting is prosecuted then I think that grants a free pass to abuse the tor network a bit and torrent over tor.
There are some guides online on now to route the traffic, note that it’s very easy to leak traffic if you don’t know what you’re doing. Look for a good guide . I’m guessing the safest way to do it is by using Whonix.
If going that route avoid downloading big torrents if you can find smaller ones or try to search for direct downloads first.
And also, I don’t usually say this, but, avoid seeding. Yes leeching is bad, but saturating tor is probably worse I think.
Torrenting on TOR is actively discouraged for a reason. It will also be slow and exit nodes are probably in many blacklists, so you won’t get good seeds.
If you want to torrent over a shadownet, use I2P. It allows torrenting (the Java I2P client even includes torrent software). It also has its own internal trackers. And due to the way it works, you can tunnel traffic for others without risk of getting flagged for something illegal or other people’s torrents (which happens with many other TOR alternatives that allow torrenting).
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