Ive thought about torrents but they require a paid vpn from what i know? I dont really want to pay, which is why im thinking about piracy because im not made of money and cant afford a vpn. Im just not sure if its possible to be safe and sail the seven seas all for free?
What would you advise i do? what did you do when starting out?
Seems like a lot of people replying need to work on their reading comprehension…
Use private trackers only. Public trackers are way easier to identify you on.
Disable DHT, PeX and Local Peer Discovery in your BitTorrent client. This will prevent you connecting to random public peers.
If you’re just interested in movies/TV I recommend streaming sites with an adblocker. Just so much easier and safe enough. Find sites on fmhy.netUse private trackers only. Public trackers are way easier to identify you on.
Source on that? This is the first I’ve heard of it
deleted by creator
Lemmy.ml account and making a snarky, nonsense comment. Name a more iconic duo.
I2p
qBitTorrent in I2P only mode is free and safe.
It’s slow and limited selection, but there’s good stuff.
last i tried the trackers were dogwater. Waste of time unless you’re looking for 3yo items.
There’s plenty of new stuff on Postmaster, especially if it’s big-budget or sci-fi leaning. But you’re right, it can be difficult to find some media, especially if it’s niche. For free, there’s more being posted than can reasonably be watched or listened to.
ITT buncha folks with no reading comprehension, free != pay little.
if ISP/government are looking for folks doing the thing, get a torrent client for your laptop/phone, send links to it, and then seek out some free wifi, like a coffee shop or sumsuch. loiter about, limit download speeds so they don’t ban your freeloading ass and there you go - adventure, fresh air, you don’t gotta download “watch dogs”, you’re living the game!
Also MAC address spoofing. Use it when using public connections, makes it so they can’t track your device easily or ban the device from the networks. It should go without saying to use this but people don’t talk about this, and I think certain people would rather people not know about it at all.
Unfortunately any unencrypted file sharing, or really any unencrypted internet usage at all, carries some risk of ISPs or governments snooping on what you are doing. BitTorrent is just particularly notable because of its history and that by the nature of the protocol, you are uploading (seeding) in addition to downloading.
A good VPN is a few bucks a month and provides a lot of other benefits. It’s worth considering.
Find someone in your circle of friends who can give you an invite to a private tracker or use usenet. Also vpns arent necessarily “required”. It will depend on your area and your download setup.
usenet
Doesn’t that require a minimum of two paid services?
Depends on your location, your isp, and how patient you can be. There are free providers and indexers.
You can also find private torrent sites with temporary open registration on opentrackers (mostly new ones but not only). There you can find invite forums (so mind your stats).
There are communities for gaining entry into these, I don’t know what they are off the top of my head but they exist and I’ve successfully used them
You could use a free VPN like Proton if you’re worried about getting caught. You can also use DNS over https to hide what sites you’re visiting from being visible, and you might not even need a VPN depending on your area, as others have mentioned. I’ve pirated so much stuff for years and never gotten any angry letters.
You could use a free VPN like Proton if you’re worried about getting caught.
Proton’s free plan does not support P2P.
I thought it just doesn’t support port forwarding, and only one side of a torrent connection needs to have it
No, proton free blocks torrent use
How do they block it exactly? Do they block it the way most public Wifi does, or do they go an extra step and attempt to block trackers? If it’s the former it’s possible to bypass it, but it will limit how fast or good the torrenting experience will be.
In most country you don’t risk anything by just visiting the site. But just so you know, while DoH or DoT are very good things for privacy, it’s not enough to prevent your ISP form seeing the site you visit. They can still see the SNI unless the site has setup ECH but it’s very rare.
fmhy has a beginners guide, there’s lots of options that don’t require torrenting
for torrenting specifically, I’ve been using cloudflare’s vpn (1.1.1.1) without issues, though it requires a bit of setup with wireguard
Mooch off someone else’s paid VPN.
yt-dlp and a streaming site
I use this one so I don’t have to keep track of sites that go down:
Better to use fmhy, gives backup websites as well.
You can pirate over IRC XCDD. Without VPN the IRC server, other people on the server as well as the servers you are downloading from know your IP but it’s significantly less exposure than torrents since you aren’t seeding anything.
direct downloads and JDownloader2, but your mileage will vary with availability
Mullvad will coat you 5 bucks a year. If you don’t pay for it, you’re the product.
A month… but still valid tho. You can even send them a letter with cash in it and they’ll charge your account
Check out Tribler. Its based on similar tech as the Tor network and allows for anonymous downloads and uploads. IRC is still a pretty decent option too, if a bit of work.
I2P
What would you advise i do?
If you can afford to and if what you are looking for is even available (for non-DRM’d download) through legal channels, I advise purchasing the content legally. (Yes, I know what community I’m commenting in… :D ) Doing so supports the artists that make the content.
Otherwise, I would check and see if what you are looking for is on Youtube or in Anna’s Archive. You can download things from Youtube using either
yt-dlp(give it a Youtube link) orspotdl(give it a Spotify link and it will download the song, album or playlist from Youtube and tag the songs using Spotify or Musicbrainz metadata). The current addresses to Anna’s Archive can be found on their Wikipedia page.I also like Usenet, currently, for a lot of the more esoteric, hard to find elsewhere things (like TV shows that don’t have DVD releases and aren’t on Youtube). Just a heads up if you go this route, the Usenet provider “Eternal September”, while free, does not provide access to the groups where binaries (things like video, music, epubs, and pdfs) are posted. They only provide access to the discussion side of Usenet, which has been largely dead for the last 10-15 years. Generally, Usenet access is fairly cheap, as are the nzb trackers needed to download binaries from Usenet.
Torrents don’t require a VPN, however, torrenting does broadcast your IP address for all the world to see if they decide to look. A VPN is used to obfuscate your IP address to minimize the odds of trouble with your ISP, the rightholders (who might sue) or depending on where your are, law enforcement. Just don’t ever use the “free” VPNs that are out there. They tend to be honeypots or malware vectors.
People not seeding things has made bittorrent pretty much useless for anything not currently popular. The only thing I use bittorrent for nowadays is speeding up the download of larger downloads, like Linux install disks. Works well for that. But if there’s not at least 15 seeders for the file your looking for, you may never actually be able to finish downloading the thing.
what did you do when starting out?
I’m getting to be an old fart. I was using Napster (early predecessor to bittorrent, now long dead), IRC and random ftp and gopher sites on a dialup modem in the late 90’s and into the mid 2000’s. Dial-up BBS’s were fading out into obscurity, and I hadn’t really heard of Usenet (even though that was during it’s hayday) and Bittorrent hadn’t been invented yet.
