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

  •  fades   ( @fades@beehaw.org ) 
    11•1 year ago

    For VPN, I use mullvad which is quite reasonable in pricing and is quite good with speeds and such as well as privacy concerns.

    Back when I used OS X for torrents I used an app called Transmission. Not sure if it still exists or if there are better alternatives these days. (Edit: transmission app’s website)

    I can’t help when it comes to courses tho, you just need to find a torrent site like torrentleech or ipt or whatever that has the content you’re looking for.

    I say learn about torrents first, don’t bother talking about what you want to torrent. Once you have a working understanding then go in search of the niche content you’re talking about here.

    Feel free to ask me any torrent related questions

  •  hamsteronvase   ( @hamsteronvase@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
    5•1 year ago

    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.

    •  amanneedsamaid   ( @amanneedsamaid@sopuli.xyz ) 
      2•1 year ago

      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.

  •  ModularTable   ( @modulartable@beehaw.org ) 
    3•11 months ago

    Here’s my advice:

    • Don’t torrent without a VPN, seriously!
    • +1 for Mullvad VPN, it’s privacy focused and works great!
    • Use qBittorrent, it’s the standard torrenting software that basically everyone uses nowadays. It’s lightweight and reliable.
    • Make sure to set up qBittorrent after installing it, go into settings and bind your network interface to your VPN so even if your VPN is off accidentally or gets kicked off somehow you will be safe. You can also setup the “kill-switch” functionality in most VPNs so that it kills qBittorrent if it goes off, but that’s not always 100% reliable.

    As far as Udemy courses, I’ve yet to find a good source for them myself, at least any relatively newer courses. I’ve never tried to find art courses but I’d say using a torrent search engine like Knaben or qBittorrent’s built in search functionality.