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.
What you were doing online is being watched. It is being recorded. Right now, some ISPs will will protect your identity and send warnings to you, to a point. Some ISPs will just give up your information.
They are currently working on legislation to force ISPs just shut you off If piracy is reported.
Right now, for every ISP that I’m aware of in the US, No action is actually taken against you for reports of piracy. But that doesn’t mean that this will stay the same, or, that they won’t retroactively go on a witch hunt.
You can find VPNs for a couple bucks a month. Make it a birthday request.
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.
No idea what happens nowadays also probably depends on your location too, but a friend of mine downloaded fallout 4 when it released and his isp disabled their houses internet until he went to a web page and checked off a box saying “i have deleted the following file(s) from my machine” lol
It was a tame outcome relatively speaking, but it could have been worse.
Don’t subject your family to nasty letters in their mail from your ISP. You won’t go to jail, but you might risk your internet service getting canceled, which won’t be a fun conversation with your parents.
If you’re 18 and healthy, go donate plasma at a local clinic. In the USA depending on where you are, you can make $40-$80 per week, sometimes even more if they have a big shortage. Takes about 90 minutes a session, and you just chill with a needle in your arm and browse on your phone, super easy.
Proton VPN’s most expensive plan is $108 for 2 years, you can afford that. Go to your friends or neighbors and offer to do some yard work for cash. Mow their lawn, shovel bark, dig up dead shrubs, whatever. That’s the main way I made money when I was in my teens. People will pay 20-30 bucks an hour in most places for that kind of work, so a few hours of that in a week or two and you’ve got your $108 for Proton VPN, or whatever other VPN you want to use.
Sell some crap on eBay, FB marketplace, Craig’s List, etc. Old clothes, computer parts, consoles, weights, people will buy anything. You’d be surprised how fast I’ve gotten rid of junk buy posting it online for 10 bucks.
Proton smells bad for me, too much of a walled-garden and corporate restriction aesthetic with their services. I would recommend Mullvad or NordVPN
I use Spectrum, I get warnings, so vpn it is. I’d also rather no one know than know and willingly ignore it, logging it anyway for some government goon to discover in 10 years.
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
My friend’s friend’s cousin was dinged 3 times in 10 years by their ISP, large provider in a populated area.
He or she really needs to add a password to his or her router one of these days, darn neighbors. And those pesky neighbors need a VPN too. After getting a VPN, the complaints stopped. For the neighbors, of course.
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.
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.
My friend uses a VPN and has been pirating for two decades. might just be a placebo but she didn’t get even one warning from her ISP
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 🏴☠️🏴☠️
If you are broke and cannot afford a VPN, I suggest you use I2P.
I2P is basically an internet protocol that treats all kinds of internet activity in the manner a torrent works.
Basically, you run a local node.
Traffic is routed around in a bunch of anonymized, encrypted chunks, from many different users, which are then bunched up together into packets and encrypted again.
As a client, you can only decrypt the parts of a packet that pertain to you…
But as a node, you help move packets along to every other person who is running a node, in a sort of meshnet like fashion.
The result is a free, but very slow, but also pretty well anonymized way of passing net traffic around…
…and it is also arguably more private/secure than a VPN, which can simply hand over its server logs if legally asked to…
…and it is also arguably more private/secure than TOR, which can have de-anonymization attacks run on it if enough onion nodes, or your entry/exit nodes, are either comprimised or just outright run as honey pots, which is a thing various law enforcement agencies do.
However, another downside to I2P is that it is… considerably more technically complex for most users to actually set up and use properly, than just a basic VPN for switching your geoip to watch Brazillian netflix or w/e.
But, it does allow torrenting and portforwarding, and is totally free.
Don’t expect to be able to stream any media with it though, it is again very slow.
Couldn’t you potentially have the same thing you describe for tor happening with i2p?
In some sense yes, but:
If your TOR entry exit node is comprimised, you are basically fucked.
I’ve seen estimates that roughly 1/3 of them are comprimised, run by State actors of some kind.
People seem to forget that TOR was originally invented by the US Navy and used by them and the CIA and shit to move sensitive data around in the early 2000s, possibly late 90s.
Then they handed it off to the public.
Do you really think they do not know how to defeat it, when they really want to?
…
Also… I2P traffic is more anonymized/encrypted than TOR traffic is, in that each chunk in each packet is anonymized and encrypted… each packet is kind if a sausage of a bunch of people’s data being moved around all at once, the whole point is you can’t tell whose data ia whose.
IIRC, TOR packets do not work this way, they’re specifically addressed to a single encrypted and anonymized person.
So, its easier to reverse engineer who is the actual person using the network.
Whereas with I2P, you’re always routing for others as well as receiving your own data, albeit much, much more slowly.
I don’t think the cia/nsa or fsb is gonna involve themselves to investigate…
check notes
… people pirating movies and games…
They’re more worried about dissidents.
I mean… the FBI and INTERPOL/EUROPOL routinely do things like infiltrate dark web black markets for physical things, services, hacked data, hacks themselves, that exist mainly or only on a .onion site, then honeypot the users for 6 to 12 months, then crackdown on as many as they can at the same time.
They also go after rom hosting sites, they go after the sites that host torrents and trackers…
Sure, call those ‘Law Enforcement’ agencies instead of ‘Intelligence’ agencies if you want to, fact of the matter is they often collaborate and share methods, practices and just direct intel.
Kinda like how US police have largely militarized after getting all the surplus guns from Iraq 2 and Afghanistan.
…
Have you never seen a website with a:
“THIS SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED AND SHUTDOWN”
Banner replacing the main site?
If not, you must not have been pirating anything for very long, or even just following that genre of news.
Happens all the time, and its often a big smorgasbord of collaborating LE/Intel agencies with their logos on the banner.
But tor is not built to torrent.
Stick to private trackers, the risk of being caught is dramatically lower (harder to get it, smaller user base, companies target the big public ones)
Private tracker security is, at best, security theater. You (a random nobody) can get an invite with nearly no effort. You really think a billion dollar industry can’t manage to get in and spoof as a legit user? There are entire companies that specialize in corporate espionage. Use a VPN (or seed box) even on private trackers.
How do you go about finding and joining such a venture
- Pay for a month for TorrentLeechs seedbox promo to get an invite.
- wait for opensignups. HUNO, FearNoPeer, onlyencodes are solid options.
- do an “interview” at MAM. After downloading and seeding all you’ve downloaded for a few months, you’ll be able to get into the trackers mentioned above and a few others (e.g. Aither).
Most private trackers require seeding seedboxes.
I’m sure OP would find it hard to find an Invite without spending money.
If you permanently seed all you’ve downloaded and you’ve been using a tracker for a while, bonus points + upload should usually cover all your downloading needs.
Starting out is difficult without a seedbox though. Especially of you don’t use Cross-Seed to seed to multiple trackers. In that case it is considerably easier to pay for a seedbox.
Really can’t say that’s the case. A lot of PTs have bonuses points and other things for long term seeding, and you can then buy upload or reduce download, or regular site wide free-leech, or free-leech over xGB, or Perma freeleech while you seed 1tb. You can do perfectly fine on a home connection as long as you don’t mind keeping some torrents seeding (like you ideally should be to share back) You can go from open reg PTs to mid or elite teir PTs off a home connection and no seedbox (if you out in some elbow grease).
Where are you getting these ideas from? I’m on multiple private trackers and none require a seedbox. They may require a seed ratio, but that’s a totally different matter.
Also, some private trackers offer invites from time to time and some provide a way to be invited via an interview. I got into two of them by interviewing.
On behalf of whoever is paying for your internet connection, do not torment without a VPN.
If you ignore this advice, be aware that the aformentioned person will get a nastygram in the mail, complete with the exact title of the torment you downloaded. They have no qualms with outing your darkest perversions to the breadwinner(s) in your household.
Depends on jurisdiction and what you torrented. Is the US uniformally militant on torrents?
I mean I torrented without a VPN on comcast/xfinity and nothing happened besides a few emails, eventually they stopped even sending those emails. I mean I had my own unlimited mobile data plan, and everyone in my household is abusive to me so I just decided to test what happens, worse case scenario, their internet gets shut off and I’d just have to use my own mobile hotspot connection. (Don’t judge, I’m just very petty about being on the receiving end of abusive behavior and I would sabotage my own family for revenge) Welp, after like 6 months of downloads, nothing happened, I eventually stopped doing that and used a VPN because I wanted to watch some weird tv shows and movies that I didn’t want them know about.
But this is anecdotal, don’t test this at home.
In my experience the nastygram accused me of downloading a ton of different things but I there was only maybe one thing I actually did? They’re very bad at figuring out what you’re torrenting only that you are
Those letters originate from the rights holders, who have leechers in the swarm, verifying that you are actively uploading data to them. Your ISP doesnt care if you torrent, or who you torrent to. They wont originate a letter unless a rightsholder requires them to.
The rightsholder has your IP address, and the name of the file you sent them. Data for those files was sent to their leechers by your IP address, perhaps not by you, but by some machine operating on your network, or through it.
It is possible that the letter to your ISP included a list of both IP addresses belonging to several of their customers, and filenames sent from all of those customers. It is possible that the ISP sent out letters to each of the individual subscribers, and just attached the full list of files from the original complaint.
That’s essentially how I assumed they worked, and batching the complaints makes sense as to why they were accusing me of downloading random files.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah mullvad is great for certain use cases but torrenting is not one of them
