Reading https://overengineer.dev/blog/2019/04/08/very-precarious-narrative.html explains vulnerabilities to VPNs. I was aware of several of them, but some I wasn’t.
Are VPNs still useful for torrenting?
Depends, largely on how motivated people are to identify you.
If you infrequently torrent a few games and movies, using a VPN will probably be enough to deter most of the law firms specializing in churning out copyright notices. They go for the low hanging fruit first, aka the users without a VPN.
If you on the other hand were to engage in torrenting highly illegal stuff, and were therefore to become a target of state law enforcement, you’d be in a whole different kind of trouble. A VPN would likely not be sufficient.
@Dislodge3233 also not a fan of how the over engineering article is written. Goes into a lomg diatribe about how your traffic is encrypted with https but fails to highlight the fact that the site you visit is still visible in the request headers and is tied to you ip address. Not to mention anything about DNS requests.
And yes tracking by sites like google and Facebook are a challenge, but thats why using a good adblocker like ublock origin and disabling unnecessary javascript is importantThere was a lot of backlash a week or two ago when Mullvad announced that they would stop supporting port forwarding, as it seems like many people who were using Mullvad for torrenting were doing so because of the support for port forwarding. I’m still using Mullvad even though I don’t port forward, but most of my torrenting is done through a separate seedbox.
I don’t get the port forwarding issue. If I’m torrenting something on port 78660 but my only outgoing ports visible to others is port 8081, then couldn’t I just tell my torrent software to use port 8081?
I don’t really understand how torrenting is impacted by this, unless all torrent clients use a baked in port number (which from what I’ve seen over the last few decades, all torrent clients allow you to change the outgoing port)
Outgoing ports aren’t the issue. At least one client involved in the transfer must have a port available that does not filter out incoming traffic. That means you can still download and upload even without a forwarded point, but you can only upload and download from people with forwarded ports. If you have port forwarding, you can download and upload with everybody.
You lost me in that middle part. Are there any further resources I can read to understand this better?
Probably this discussion explains it better than I did.
Oh I see!
- Without port forwarding, you are a passive node that can only interact with active nodes but not other passive nodes.
- With port forwarding, you are an active node that can interact with everyone (active + passive).
- Passive nodes can upload/download but from fewer peers (only active nodes)
- Active nodes can upload/download but from everyone
I feel like this article has as much fear-mongering as the adverts it’s railing against! I agree with the article in that there are two big issues with using a VPN: 1) Cruddy VPN services that aren’t worth the money, and 2) Users connected to a VPN don’t change their behavior and give themselves away.
For #1, use a service that’s been well vetted (handles DNS, IPv6 properly, doesn’t keep logs, anonymous payments, killswitch, etc). ProtonVPN, Mullvad, iVPN are good choices imo. For #2, ah, see https://mullvad.net/en/help/first-steps-towards-online-privacy/
Yeah I kind of agree. Most of the Mullvad is obvious stuff tbh. Reading the link I posted, I thought browsers had betrayed my trust or something. It was good to see the note about Firefox multi containers though.
Yeah, sure, it’s obvious if you’re in the tech world, but not so much for the Nebraska farmer. Those of us in tech forget how magical things are for those who don’t understand. For 9/10 in the world, what is obvious to us is straight up dark arts. This sort of article is not aimed at you or me, but the guy in Idaho that wants to look up some gay porn and not get caught by his wife.
I’d 100% suggest using a VPN as others have said if you’re in the USA or any country with anti-piracy laws. Otherwise you’re asking for a copyright notice in the mail. Don’t chance it.
If you are tech savvy and the stuff you want to torrent is somewhat mainstream, I would recommend torrenting over i2p. You should be able to find all the info you need to get started on their website: https://geti2p.net/
i2p is an anonymity network similar to tor, but the implementation allows for torrenting much better than tor. It is worth noting that i2p is not a drop-in replacement for a vpn and you will only be able to access content on the i2p network, however you can easily request that things be added and there will usually be a seeder in a day or two.
Comparison to Tor for those curious https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor
Where are you making requests? So far I’ve just been watching what goes up on Postman
You can make requests on the wishlist section of postman.
Don’t use one you don’t trust. But yes in general they are still useful. If you want to be extra shure rout your traffic through VPN and TOR
If you’re using a reputable VPN and properly compartmentalizing your activities then a VPN is great. Don’t torrent on the same VPN server that you use for daily use. They caught pompompoopi partly because he forgot to enable his vpn a couple of times and leaked his private IP as well as using the same VPN server for illegal activities and his google accounts.
The best method is definitely to have separate devices with different VPNs and different purposes for each device. It’s a lot of work though.
So not sure if this is bad (in the selfish way, like not seeding torrents) but to avoid needing a VPN, I use real-debrid which will download it for me and then I can directly download the file without a torrent client.
As a bonus it let’s you stream high quality TVs/movies on Kodi.
Yes if you are in a country that actually cares about you torrenting stuff (ex: USA). Generally a simple WireGuard instance will do the job very well.