I know this might seem like a stupid question, but it’s only because I did something stupid. I (ironically) got a copyright infringement notice from my ISP for downloading a whole season of Mr. Robot, without a VPN. I’m kinda tight on money so I thought I’d risk it and go without it, but I realize my mistake now, so I’ve resubscribed to PIA. But I’m wondering if that’s enough.
I’m on someone else’s network so if we get one more notice, or worse, our service gets terminated, I’ll be in big trouble. I activated my kill-switch on my VPN, and set dnsleaktest.com as my homepage for my browser. Is there anything else I can do to continue torrenting safely? Or is it best just to cease and not risk it? I’m in the US if that matters for legal reasons.
If you are forgetful about making sure you’re connected to VPN before you start torrenting, have it startup when you computer boots. You can always turn it off. Other than that, as you’re apparently doing with leak testing, just make sure your public IP is not the one your ISP gave you.
Remember that using port forwarding can identify you (cyberghost don’t offer it for this reason). I had ghostpath pass on a warning because they were advised that port ##### was used for pirating.
I know qBittorrent allows you to bind the program to a specific adapter so you can prevent torrenting explicitly unless you’re connected to your VPN. Not sure about other clients but I believe it’s a fairly standard feature. Not going to endorse any VPNs either as there’s a lot of good ones, but there was some ruckus recently about PIA being acquired and a potential reduction in their privacy.
I wondering if torrent clients can leak any other information to copyright holders and government agencies than my IP? I use VPN to download copyright protected materials but also I’m usually don’t use VPN to download other stuff via torrent clients. I’ve read somwhere that torrent clients can leak list of my other torrents even when they are stopped and… search terms (whatever that means ?). For example I have torrents A and B in my client library. A is copyright protected, B not. I start to download A only when I’m connected to VPN network but I have turned off VPN when downloading B while there is still unfinished A in my library. Can anyone connect my real IP to that A torrent? I’m using mostly BiglyBT and uTorrent.
That depends on your VPN provider. It has to do with whether or not they keep logs. Many claim they don’t keep them, but it’s hard to verify. Nord makes a big deal out of it so the likelihood of “exposure” by turning over any information is infinitesimally small.
I’m not endorsing Nord, I’m using it as a comparison; although I do use and like Nord.
If the IP you’re showing to the world is not your real IP, and you aren’t leaking, and using best practices, then “ya”, you’re as good as you need to be.
i’m curious as to how port forwarding through a VPN can be set up incorrectly (or correctly for that matter). Are you saying that the VPN vendor had it set up incorrectly or that I did?
For background, i was using huagene’s transmission VPN docker container using ghostpath VPN with a specific static port forwarded to my account.
There are some guides online that show you what you need. I made sure I read guides for every step.
For a decent experience you’ll need to pay for your Usenet provider and you most likely need to pay for your indexer. You’ll also need an NZB downloader; I use SABnzbd. This works with sonarr and radarr so it all just works (most of the time).
I’ve been using NordVPN for a year, and I’m wholly satisfied. I paid about $100 for 3 years get 6 devices to connect, and can optionally run it through the router (via OpenVPN) if I don’t want the number of devices restricted. I get great speeds, ESPECIALLY for torrents, but more important to me is the fact that they don’t keep user logs, they aren’t bound by US laws (making it near impossible to turn over ISP logs) and for my modest uses, provides the anonymity I can live with.