If you are a pirate VPN is an essential tool. I am trying to ascertain the popularity of various VPNs in piracy community. In this excerise, I will list several Popular VPNs in the comment if you use one of them just upvote that comment and reply the reason. If you don’t find your VPN listed add a comment with just their name. Reply the reason to it. This make it easier to understand the real life user cases.
P.S: I am only looking for paid VPNs please don’t mention “free vpn”.
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Mullvad because they don’t need your name, and you can pay by cash anonymously.
They also regularly have independent security audits
and their servers run everything on RAM meaning the second it loses power all data is lost.Do they still not have port forwarding?
Nope. I’d argue that Mullvad is not for most pirates, unless you’re actually worried about being jailed for your piracy (depends on what country you’re in). If you just want to get the letters from your ISP to stop, there are much cheaper VPNs that can do that.
Mullvad is for actual privacy, which many VPNs don’t really give you. If you gave them an email address and credit card, then it ain’t private, kids!
Check out AirVPN if you want port forwarding.
Mullavad
I used Mullvad, found them great for everything and would be my only VPN if they were big enough to facilitate streaming via other countries. Due to smaller number of servers it isn’t possible to use a lot of streaming services with them…I found this out when o/s and needing to VPN into my home country to access my geo-locked streaming service.
Mullvad because https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
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Proton VPN
Same. Since I am a paying Protonmail user I’ve switched to the Proton VPN. It has been fine.
I see that Proton allows payment via PayPal. Is it possible to pay via PayPal anonymously? I don’t use PP much at all so IDK.
I’d be shocked if it were, as I think they zealously honor KYC/AML/OFAC.
AirVPN
The airvpn client feels pretty outdated compared to something like mullvad. This might not be a big deal for everyone and there are ways around it but I always see airvpn recommended but noone ever mentions this
I use the native wireguard client on Linux
The Wireguard client is good enough. I wouldn’t trust VPN providers’ custom apps to be as secure, privacy-focused or reliable as the official client ones.
Ever since I switched to Linux I don’t really use Eddie as much, but I agree it could be more intuitive. Even on Windows I typically only spent 30 seconds or less with the client, though, so it didn’t bother me.
Port forwarding, relatively cheap, runs a good Black Friday sale, and I think its log policy is decent from what I remember.
I also just switched from Mullvad to OpenVPN and I’m very happy with it. I grabbed the 3-year Halloween promo.
PIA, just because I’m lazy and it’s been fine for like a decade. If there is something better, happy to hear about it.
PIA was sold to Kape Technologies a few years back and they have somewhat questionable history and that made me switch to Mullvad. Not because I thought it’s better VPN per-se, but because I wanted away from PIA and Mullvad seemed popular.
The issue is who he sold it to – the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users’ browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.
Yeah it’s cheap as shit too
I’m on pia too I have a seed box anyway so it’s just for https queries. The seed box transfers locally via ssh
Currently proton its decent though I’m thinking of moving to mullvad even though they’ve removed portforwarding.
I did this and found it worked way better in terms of stability. Bonus is that Mullvad has a proper Linux client whereas Proton’s is just a cobbled-together mess that’s not worth using and is no where close to feature parity with the Windows client
And in the case that your Linux distro doesn’t have a client in their repos, you can very easily use Mullvad with wireguard in the terminal.
you can very easily use Mullvad with wireguard in the terminal
To be fair, same with Proton. OpenVPN and WireGuard configurations are available.
I’ve used both and much prefer Proton for sailing the seas. Connecting through France (highest speed + p2p) with port forwarding is the best torrent speed I’ve had on a VPN. The only slight annoyance is it switching the forwarded port every time it reconnects, but I run it 24/7 anyway.
Just skip the “official” client and run it through gluetun. It’s a much better experience.
So… at the risk of humiliating myself,
I’ve never once used a VPN in my entire life.I pirated games, movies, shows, music, software… and the worst thing that happened to me was getting a letter from Telus once or twice saying “Hey. Don’t do that.”
That was 5 years ago
I know it’s bad practice. But is a VPN 100% necessary? Even a free one?
While people sometimes suggest ignoring it because they say that your ISP is only sending you those notices because the laws compel them to and you downloaded something that was tracked, you may want to evaluate your risk.
Nothing has happened so far. Could something happen in the future?
Your ISP has built an entire portfolio of the things you’ve done online and which content you pirated. Who know how long your ISP retains that data, or which companies or regulatory bodies it shares this data with?
Laws may change.
Up to you on what you want to do with this information.
ISP can’t track bittorrent content without downloading the same torrent as you. They only see domain names of trackers and ip addresses of peers. The content itself is either obfuscated or encrypted.
Fair point. There is temporary obfuscation, and certainly not end to end encryption when torrenting.
The creator of BitTorrent himself has this to say:
“The so-called ‘encryption’ of BitTorrent traffic isn’t really encryption, it’s obfuscation. It provides no anonymity whatsoever, and only temporarily evades traffic shaping. There are better approaches to obfuscation, and I’ve got a great team of engineers who are quite eager to fight that battle, but I’m hoping that everything can be resolved amicably without getting into a serious arms race.” Source: https://torrentfreak.com/interview-with-bram-cohen-the-inventor-of-bittorrent/
In my opinion using a trusted VPN not just for torrenting, but also for sourcing pirated software or other content is just a best practice.
That’s because you’re in Canada. We don’t need to worry like Americans can. It’s not really necessary for us.
Same here. Started with IRC, then private trackers. Always force encryption. Zero issues. VPN is a waste of money for piracy.
I’ve only gotten two strikes in my life, 7-8yrs ago. And I feel like this was because my brother was downloading then recent, popular movies (which I almost never do). But before that, never did, without a VPN, and I used to pirate a lot more. Even further back, used to have a roommate who would go on movie and show torrenting sprees. We never got strikes. And that was when commercial VPNs weren’t really a thing yet, but copyright strikes were well known. I’ve known others who’ve never gotten strikes either.
So I’d say no, not 100% necessary at all. But it’s free or cheap enough to mitigate the risk. So that’s why I use one when I do pirate, which is rare these days.
No, you don’t need it if you have trustworthy private trackers. Most people on here just use Pirate Bay or some shitty public alternative that’s seeded with all the planted stuff that the RIAA looks for
AirVPN because of port forwarding.
What do you use it for?
The port forwarding? It makes torrenting work better.
Proton because I have their Unlimited plan.
ProtonVpn
Come on, don’t waste Tor resources for downloading pirated content. That’s what VPNs are for. Journalists and activists in countries like Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. rely on Tor in order to do their work, just use a VPN for downloading, it’s also much faster.
Tor is for privacy and to circumvent censorship. What OP is asking is privacy…You could help them running a relay or bridge, it is easy, I have a few running.
I run 2 nodes at my house, several nodes (including exit nodes) on different VPS providers and I use the Snowflake addon in all of my browsers. But Tor is meant for people who require anonymity and the ability to circumvent censorship, not for those who don’t want to pay for a VPN.
I was running in the past years 2 guard/middle relays, now I prefer only bridges and snowflake, to help users in a countries with censorship, like Iran or turkmenistan.
That’s great! All parts of the network are important.
I love seeing these posts because I’ve been pirating for almost 20 years and never once have I paid for or used a VPN. I’ve never received a letter from my ISP about it. If you use a trustworthy private tracker you don’t fucking need it. Downvote me all you want but I’m not wrong.
Do you have any invites? I’m a good seeder.
I do have invites but 2/3 people I’ve invited were banned for HnR so generally I don’t invite people unless I know them. If I invite another user who doesn’t seed I’ll lose my invites completely so I’m understandably wary about handing them out
Makes sense.
Okay so appereantly you have exclusive sources trackers. I would also love to join one and seed but I never do, cause I thought the most illegal thing was the sharing/seeding part. What id you guys thoughts on that?
Someone has to seed. I am willing to risk it for the biscuit.
A true hero indeed.
I think you meant to reply to my post. Yes it’s the exclusive trackers that keep you safe from needing a VPN, seeding is always part of torrenting. You can earn your way into those bigger private trackers by joining an invite forum and contributing enough, once you show good ratios form other sites you’ll get invites to the big ones like TorrentLeech
Well I honestly replied to both of you guys cause I found it interesting how he asked for a invite for the private torrent club.
Thanks for explaining it! Do you perhaps know a forum where I can start, or at least one you can recommend? I want to get a paid VPN once I am not a student anymore.
Proton VPN since it’s cheaper than ExpressVPN but apparently faster than other paid VPN options, while also having port forwarding to improve torrent connectivity.
Currently testing Windscribe because they had good offer for a yearly subscription and some interesting features like ad block (mostly useful for mobile). Their privacy level is sufficient for what I’m doing currently, but if I ever need I’ll just Mullvad.
