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Beginner questions: VPN safe enough? How to use all these tools? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, I'd like to set the sails due to being frustrated with streaming services, but I have some questions beforehand. I hope, you can help me with that, since lurking and reading the Megathread/Wiki didn't really answer my questions. Thanks for your help.

Is just using a fitting VPN (I've read about Mullvad and ProtonVPN in this community) safe enough to not get caught? I'm located in germany, so sharing even as much as a few kB of pirated content can cost me thousands of euros. I want to be really sure, that I won't get letters from some lawyer soon. All, that I've read so far is basically: Setup VPN and your Torrent software, including kill switch and maybe get into private trackers. Thats it. Is this really enough? Can I do more to be safe? What exactly is the risk with public trackers (as they are often mentioned as the "low hanging fruit" for copyright lawyers)?
I've read the post The complete guide to building your personal self hosted server for streaming and ad-blocking, which mentions many tools to setup. I'm sure these help me find and view content. But are there good resources explaining the functionalities of this software? I'm familiar with Docker and I know about Jellyfin, but it is really unclear to me, what exactly all the other tools do.

Big thanks from a long time lurker!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Side note: I have had a bad situation where the enemy fleet caught me, and I stopped doing torrents and started using DDL with a VPN. I have a hunch because some attorneys are laying out traps in torrents, DDL might be safer rn. I have read on a few sites that this might be the case, and I have been sailing a lot smoother since then as well.

So take that for what you will, and also if anybody can confirm if DDL with VPN is as safe as it's been for me, please do, because I'm curious.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Laws depend on where you live, but in plenty of places its more or less completely legal to download pirated files, its almost universally illegal to upload them, when torrenting you are doing both.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

What, they gonna be the defendant and the plaintiff?

I don't know what type of traps OP means, unless it's software, then that's possible.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sorry to hear that. How exactly are these traps made? Is there some code executed on your side, which reveals your true IP? Or how are they doing it?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

They appear as torrent peers I think and log when they get a connection to share parts of the file to their system. I assume then they look up the IP and they try to find out if they got an IP from a known VPN provider or a private one. And then they send out the papers.

Note: In the paper it only says that they have evidence that my PC shared parts of that file 3 times in quick succession and that's it, the rest is my deduction / educated guess.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I should also note that that was in Germany, and unfortunately I can't tell you which enemy fleet burnt down my sails but let's say it was one of the big ones.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Though that shouldn't help them if you are using a VPN, right? Then they cannot see my private IP, only the VPNs IP.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I assume so. A lot of this is guesswork because obviously they won't straight up tell us.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

We also have that in France.

Some peers on torrents are indeed tracking uploaders. Here you receive a letter saying which file you shared and when.

Blockbusters are the most likely to be tracked.

For me I avoided that system with alldebrid's sort of seedbox. And direct download with alldebrid.

Here as far as I know, a datacenter IP is free to download anything and everything on torrents... Which it then uploads to DDL sites for me. And since they can't don't track DDL it's safe.