this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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After a quick glance over your post, I have some thoughts;
ProtonVPN is good for torrenting on the paid plan, not the free plan. Proton doesn't allow torrenting on their free plan. They will block your connection if they detect that you are torrenting, or they will disconnect you from their VPN tunnel - exposing your real IP on the torrent.
Mullvad is a decent choice, though they no longer support port forwarding. ~~You are still able to download, though you won't be able to seed iirc~~
The problem with a virustotal scan is that pirated software is often false flagged for malware. It's difficult to tell what is safe from what you've downloaded. It's best to download from a trusted uploader, though that doesn't always guarantee safety as they can always go rogue (As an example, FTUApps were seen as safe until one of their uploads to 1337x contained malware).
Older uploads tend to have less false positives in my experience, though it can be very easy to become complacent.
edit; score out comment about mullvad seeding, others have pointed out that it still works fine! oops
Thanks for the report about ProtonVPN, I haven't used it in a bit so I didn't know. Do you know a better free VPN which does allow torrenting? I know a paid one would always be better, but this is for people who are just not willing to spend money. A shady free VPN is better than none.
For VirusTotal I know about the false positives, that's also why I included the reddit post on how to interpret the results. I still find a scan to be good practice to weed out the more obvious malware.
In that case, direct downloads (in conjunction with ProtonVPN free) would be a superior method. The article makes piracy sound synonymous with and exclusive to torrenting, but DDL and Usenet also exist. Many of the megathread categories have DDL links right at the top.
Cs.rin.ru is mainly gaming focused but has an FAQ that covers general DDL concepts like source trustworthiness/scene names and workarounds for filehoster limits. You could probably paraphase/quote or screenshot with credit (ironically) to save a login. The same people not wanting to sign up for a VPN might also look askance at a .ru domain.
It was only meant to be a guide about torrenting pirated software specifically, not pirating software in general. I also started by linking to the megathread to link people to other resources.
I don't really want to add a whole other section about DDL just because I feel I couldn't do it justice, and people have probably already done a better job at that.