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?
Do you have a dvd/blu ray disc drive? You could go to your local library and go hog wild on their selection
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.
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
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).
where I live last I checked even if an IP holder sends you a cease and desist or other letter you can just ingore it and they can pound sand. If its worse for your country you kinda need the vpn.
Decade and a half ago I torrented all the time and didn’t get caught until I stupidly downloaded something from the top 100 torrents on pirate bay.
Not sure how safe torrents are now.
Never have had any issues with direct downloads and streaming. Just use your head, adblock, and virus scan your downloads (knowing that keygens or cracked exes may show as viruses).
For safest option and free: Use an up to date web browser with a good adblocker (ublock origin is the current best), stick to direct downloads using a download manager to manage the 12+ parts, and virus scan everything that you download. Download from trusted sites from the megathread. Direct download is generally safe, unless you live in one of the few countries cracking down on fitgirl repacks specifically. Then that site is off limits for you.
You can use torrents without a VPN, it’s just not safe. You could be caught and the penalty will vary based off of what you’re downloading, where you live, and who you use for an ISP.
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.
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.
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
Only use direct downloads. For example https://rentry.org/megathread-games#direct-downloads I don’t torrent, I don’t use a VPN, nor pay for anything in order to pirate. Sometimes you might have to wait for slower download speeds but often times there is a mirror that will cap out my speeds of 200mb/s
Where are you based? You might decide whether you think torrent without VPN is too risky based on the local law. I’m in a country where there is a three strikes system, with two notices before risking a fine, I’ve used torrents for circa 20 years without VPN and I’m still waiting to receive my first notice.
yarrlist has a list of servers that are like the old fmovies, some are worse than others so use an adblocker.
I concur with others that your question depends a lot on where you live.
In my country if I take a “seedbox” in a datacenters I’m pretty much safe to pirate. The copyright holders don’t bother with that.
On the other hand I have received a threatening email from some government agency because I downloaded a blockbuster movie on torrent without a VPN.
Your first step should be to check if there is any precedent of people having legal troubles or ISP threats after pirating where you live.
Then you can decide on the available avenues to go around that.
In many countries, anti piracy laws can be very dumb (mostly because they are the result of technically illiterate lawmakers).
Again I could pirate everything online if the IP that does it for me is in a datacenter. But the second I would do that directly at home and I could get in trouble.
For example I could have a seedbox download for me some content on torrents and then upload it to a file hoster like mega or something. And then I download that file without triggering any copyright holder scanners. It’s stupid but if the torrenting is done by a business for me, it’s off radar. But it’s quite risky if I do it myself…
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.
Go to the piracy Wiki, there’s a bunch of websites where you can do direct downloads. That way you won’t have to torrent, and therefore don’t have to worry about your ISP looking and complaining about that unencrypted torrent traffic.
It depends where you live if you need a VPN or not.
Mulvad is 5 euro per month for up to 5 devices. You could split it with 4 other people…
