Hey everyone! One of my main issues with piracy in general are VPNs, because I absolutely HATE subscription services.
As far as i’m concerned, we need VPNs so that when torrenting, people cant see our IP adress and other information that can be potentially used againt us. I’ve heard that there’s people who log those IP adresses so that they can like “report” people doing piracy or sth like that. Correct me if i’m wrong.
So, with this purpose in mind, I understand that VPN services are useful because they can help hide our real information. But as I said, I dont like subscription services and I saw that there’s the option to selfhost a VPN.
But I thought a bit about it, and, if I’m using a selfhosted VPN using, for example, a raspberry pi or a laptop, isn’t the imformation of that laptop ALSO potentially dangerous? Because it is connected to your own ISP and it has the same location as you have (if you set it up at yout home).
I know this may sound dumb, but I don’t know much about this. And I can’t find information about this.
If you are going to selfhost your vpn then you are going to “hide” behind your vpns ip, which probably leads to you anyway. VPN services are often contacted by authorities and why they work is because they refuse to disclose the information.
Precisely this. If the authorities suspect you of digital piracy, they’re going to go to your VPN provider and demand the information of the user involved. If that provider is you, you might as well not have used one in the first place.
Because it is connected to your own ISP and it has the same location as you have (if you set it up at yout home). And sharing your own IP to internet.
Basically using self hosted VPN in same location is same as not using VPN as you are exposing same IP to the internet.
VPN doesn’t hide IP, it just routes your traffic to internet via VPN server (and exposes that IP to the internet).
If you’re on the same network it does literally nothing.
If you mean on a VPS, you might have to pay for the high bandwidth and they might monitor your traffic and blacklist you.
Everyone here is correct that what your thinking wont work and let me clarify why. When you torrent something the IP address used to download content is shared with everyone in the pool. You get caught when companies or 3rd parties trying to enforce copyright are in that pool and record every IP. So however you download the content, the front facing IP needs to be with an ISP that doesn’t give a fuck about copyright, usually another jurisdiction with lacks copyright infringement laws. If you host a VPN at your house your still using the same ISP which will still bring either a letter or shutdown of service.
It is not, since your home IP address will show up just like you were using QBittorrent on your computer. VPN by itself just allows you to access a network somewhere else.
The main point of paying for a VPN service is that it is not located in your home network. If you don’t want to use subscription services you could look for a lifetime deal on the internet (got one for Windscribe myself).
A better option might be pirating over i2p but I have not tried that yet.
Vuze is a torrent client with an optional I2P plugin called I2PHelper. I2PHelper has a built-in I2P client, meaning that you don’t need to bother with the rather clunky I2P interface.
If you’re self hosting a VPN and using it from within the same network there’s not really much point because externally it’s going to be the same thing.
It’s handy for cases where you want to access your home network from outside but pointless if you’re seafaring.
Your self-hosted VPN has to be plugged into the internet somewhere. If that IP address is associated with you, the VPN hasn’t done anything.
The number of people who are using the VPN server also lends plausible deniability.
“No I wasn’t pirating anything! That was someone else! I was just using it because I like my privacy and don’t trust my government to not snoop on it!”deleted by creator
A normal connection goes from You -> Destination but with a commericial VPN it goes You -> VPN -> Destination. If You and your VPN are the same then it makes absolutely no difference, your IP address hasn’t changed. The VPN has to be a different location for it to make sense.
Yes, but you have to keep in mind part of the point of the VPN is so that it’s not running on your home network and exposing your home IP. Having an RPI or laptop running OpenVPN server from your home isn’t going to help you in terms of privacy when you’re just exposing your home IP. Also, running your own VPN means you will have a dedicated IP which will be tied to you versus running a commercial VPN which would have shared IPs (but likely wouldn’t offer port-forwarding so it would be worthless for seedboxes).
What I do on mine is rent a cheap VPS with unlimited bandwidth, I run OpenVPN server on that VPS using Nyr’s openvpn-install script and then on my local seedbox server I connect to my OpenVPN server. I have qbittorrent-nox listening on the tun0 interface on my local seedbox, and then on my OpenVPN server VPS I have an iptables prerouting rule to route traffic from the inbound torrent port to my local seedbox server.
It works very well for me, even though I only use private trackers so it’s overkill in my case.
You can set up a “self hosted” VPN on a cloud service like Linode but you still would have to pay for their service which is $5 US a month for 1TB of traffic. the advantage is that you can make sure there are no logs and once it’s setup it’s fairly maintenance free. This guide is a bit older but i used back then which worked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxpX_mubz2A&t=685s. PS i don’t use it anymore but would if my situation changes.
edited to add “self hosted”
But the linode ip is directly linked to you! Be careful
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additionally, linode will most likely keep logs of what traffic goes where. They can see that you connect to sexymommys[dot]org
For reasons already explained by others, a self-hosted VPN for the purpose of hiding torrent traffic is kinda like getting a burner Google phone number but mentioning your real phone number in the voicemail recording. That doesn’t mean a self-hosted VPN is useless, though! It would give you remote access to your home network. Take that raspberry pi you mentioned and configure it with pi-Hole for a more private DNS experience. With a self-hosted VPN, you can connect your phone to your home network remotely and get that same DNS protection. Set the laptop up as file storage that you can - after connecting to your home VPN - access from anywhere with an internet connection.
It’s not a bad idea, just not the best use-case for this purpose. I personally use ProtonVPN for my bittorrent traffic, and I also have a self-hosted VPN for connecting to my home network while I’m away to access things like my NAS. Subscription services aren’t inherently bad - a good VPN service is worth paying a reasonable price for.
Yeah I also use ProtonVPN but I use the free version. Which I think blocks P2P connections. It doesn’t say so specifically but I’ve tried and it just doesn’t download anything.
I guess I will have to find a way to pay a VPN. If I find one which is trusted and pretty cheap I’ll try it.
