Before I say anything further, yes I know how much the recommended VPNs cost. I can read. Please do not interrogate me about it.
I’ve been wanting to get into torrenting for a while, particularly contributing to private trackers related to music (and to a lesser extent retro games, though I don’t have much original stuff to put there as it’s harder to find rare games than rare music). FMHY recommends RiseUp if I must get a free VPN while I’m working on my financial situation, though I’m not sure whether it’s been tested in court. What are my options, if any?
You can get into private trackers and trust them. Not recommended, but some do.
Generally speaking, the copyright trolls only target public trackers and DHT. There have been some instances of them making way into TL and others. Your ISP could also identify torrenting on private trackers if they wanted to, even with mitigations. In my experience and from what I hear, most ISPs do not go to these lengths.
So, there a risk doing the above. Whether or not it’s worth it until you can afford a decent VPN is up to you.
Aside: Please do not use a free VPN for torrenting (or tor, for that matter). They are either like RiseUp and run on donations for people who really, really need them, or Proton which is commercial and specifically try to block or slow down the traffic. Either way, if ruins it for everyone else.
Borrowed WiFi is definitely your best bet. Find a place with a fast public WiFi network you can reach from your car.
I wouldn’t do this because the wifi will make sure you never do this again because of dmca strikes
You could also consider looking into a private tracker. It’s not 100% safe but much more safe than a public tracker. It’s also kind of fun getting into it, but hard to get invited.
Look at newsgroups - some indexers are free, others have a lifetime fee that’s reasonable. I moved to nzbs and haven’t looked back - I can’t get dinged for sharing copyrighted stuff if I’m only downloading, never uploading.
An alternative that hasn’t been presented yet.
Why not use less well known foreign public trackers? Rutracker has a stupid amount of content, including a lot of niche music content.
If you are worried about Rutracker being too well known, you can try Mazepa Torrent. This is only relevant for movies and shows. Their collection isn’t as good as rutracker, but they have most new releases. While the default audio language is Ukrainian, English is always included (this would an issue for non-English language movies/shows, but English subtitles are usually included).
Without passing any moral judgement on you whatsoever, if you posted this without a VPN, your post is permanently tied to your IP address and thus your home and is evidence of your intent to commit a crime, even if you said it’s “for research”. I wouldn’t do that again and now I’m worried for you in general if you weren’t worried to post this.
Generally nobody can afford to lose their privacy. It’s $1/device/month per person if you get 5 other people to share a Mullvad account and you shouldn’t do it because you’re trying to pirate. A VPN is not a tool for piracy. You should be conducting all internet activity in it unless you do not care about the government seeing it.
I’m kind of in a bind financially in general. Job market is complete ass and I struggle as-is. Not sure what I’ll do there.
Mullvad is €5 a month for total of €60 for a year.
Save up then torrent. If you live in the US you risk way more in fines than what €60 for a year of VPN would cost.
I use Cloudflare Warp and make qbittorrent only able to torrent if it’s connected to Warp
Does that have port forwarding though? Because if not, seeding isn’t going to work.
Find a friend in a less shit place you can proxy through.
Tribler or i2p.
Edit: there are also non-bittorrent p2p networks out there like Retroshare, but I haven’t used them, so don’t know how useful they are.
What are the adoption rates of those compared to a standard private tracker?
Dunno, I haven’t used private trackers in 10 years. You can add any magnet link to Tribler and it will go through exit nodes to hide your IP, kind of like Tor does for browsing clearnet. I haven’t used i2p in a while either; back then, I used the Postman tracker, and don’t know if that’s still what most people do or not. I personally just use a paid VPN, because there really isn’t a good way to set Tribbler up with an *arr stack.
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Honest question, why would you need a VPN if you want to download from private trackers?
Usually, copyright owners target people on public trackers and on the DHT. Not a problem if you only get into private trackers.
You can use torrent to direct link services like seedr.cc, however they have max size limit.
I’d go for usenet. Only downloading, no uploading. Torrents are shit.
Much of what I want to do is uploading though. Also IIRC Usenet isn’t any better in terms of price. The prices aren’t bad gor Usenet or VPNs, my finances are just in the shitter.
I believe there are free VPN services. Maybe Proton has a free version? I know they offer a basic free version for Vivaldi browser. Just make sure they provider doesn’t log traffic.
Now is black Friday, some VPN services are 75% off, that may be an option if you have at least something to spare. Sure, it’s money, but a fine for illegal downloading costs much more.
Otherwise public wifi spots but speeds are probably shit.
Another option is installing Tails on a bootsble USB stick and connect through tor. But then speeds are also shit.
Proton VPN’s free tier doesn’t let you forward ports and generally doesn’t like torrents. And you’re really not supposed to torrent via Tor.
