I honestly don’t believe I will have any legal trouble because I don’t do anything like cp or worse, I just pirate media I like, not even porn. But across users of communities, or on public trackers, is IP exposure something to be concerned about?
What do you mean by “the government doesn’t care”? Do you mean that they are not enforcing copyright protection laws to your knowledge? Or that copyright protection laws don’t actually exist in your country at all? If the laws exist but are not being enforced, there is always a possibility that they will be enforced in the future or that a change in government will lead to a change in approach. Your government could also potentially pass new laws in the future that make it easier for foreign entities to go after yourself and other pirates through your local courts.
You need to work out exactly what the law in your country says, what the government’s attitude towards piracy is and whether there is a legal precedent in your country for the prosecution of pirates. For example, in Australia we have copyright laws and a government that is at least somewhat committed to upholding them, but we also had a significant court case a little over a decade ago in which it was ruled that the ISP being sued was not responsible for the piracy its users were allegedly engaging in. This essentially set a legal precedent within Australia that allows ISPs to turn a blind eye to piracy and makes it more difficult for foreign entities to prosecute Australian pirates. This is why most court-ordered anti-piracy action within Australia is limited to DNS blocks on websites. As a result, many Australians feel safe torrenting without a VPN because they believe it is very unlikely their ISP could be compelled in court to hand over their information or that there is even the will to attempt this following that high profile defeat in 2012.
In my country it is illegal to share, but not illegal to download, since when consuming you’re not meant as a websurfer to know the source of that something. Should that law change, it cannot retroactively affect something that happened in the past. So I don’t plan ever to share anything publicly, but only the very few things I’m very passionate about to the point I want to share them with communities of friends which you can access through invites only. Sharing a back up copy with your friends is not illegal either even if the EULA or whatever says it is, unlike for example in the UK.
I was specifically asking about cybersecurity in general.
In some countries private law firms chase down infringers on behalf of copyright holders. They then attempt shakedowns with the threat of legal action if you don’t pay. They have a financial interest to catch people, and moral compasses vary.
Also, mistakes can happen (you, your family, guests using your wifi, in the courts, in the ISPs, in the law firms, in the tech they are using to identify people). Shit happens.
And if (when) it happens, then you would still have to deal with it, costing you time and money.
Understand the risks and make choices to minimize them if you can.
Sorry, I misunderstood what you were asking then since IP monitoring is a commonly used by copyright trolls.
Don’t apologize, your answer was the most informative
In my country it is illegal to share, but not illegal to download
By torrenting, you are sharing by default as it’s P2P. Even if you choose not to seed after downloading, you’re still sharing while you are downloading as other people who download after you are downloading chunks of the data from your partially downloaded data too.
So technically you are still committing a crime here.
Should that law change, it cannot retroactively affect something that happened in the past
Not necessarily. Very tyrannical governments don’t care and will tread on your rights even going backwards before the law was enacted if they so desire to do so.
Most laws don’t apply retroactively, but some can and do.
In my country it is illegal to share
But torrenting means you’re also sharing.
Yes but you didn’t create the torrent first
But who created it is irrelevant, the seeding is the legal issue.
I think that’s not necessarily true. There’s certainly some good reasons to have a distinction between the original uploader and all the rest of the additional seeders. It’s going to come down to local law.
An analogy is if you buy some illicit substance and split it up with a few friends who pay you their share. Whether or not your local authorities considers you an illegal drug dealer could be highly dependent on scale, profitability, frequency, clientele, etc. Those details could be the difference between a slap on the wrist and some hard time.
I can’t speak for every obscure jurisdiction that might exist, but I’ve never heard of that being a factor.
I don’t know the laws that well, but there is a distinction in Canadian law between uploading and downloading. I’m not entirely sure how applicable to torrenting that is, but I think there’s a reasonable argument that if you are the original uploader, you must have uploaded the content in it’s entirety, whereas that’s not necessarily true for anyone else downloading the torrent, and certainly not provably so.
@TheHooligan95@lemmy.dbzer0.com Lol. Torrenting is sharing. And for now you haven’t been visited, but I’m certain Hollywood will pay a visit to your local enforcer chief to explain to him the technicalities over fine wine & dinner.
The risk is still there. Keep your share ratios to 3 so you don’t look like a big problem as @Melkath@kbin.social put it. And when you get a letter from somebody complaining, it’s time to start looking into a VPN.
The second best thing to do is your own research into your country’s laws, and subscribing to e-mail alerts so you can know if the law will change. At least a google alert at a minimum.
I lived in Cambodia and the gov doesn’t really care about pirating media and games so I can pirate as much as I wanted but ironically they arrested one of the pirate bay founder here and deported him back to Sweden
Is the legal environment tomorrow going to be the same for you as it is today? Are they going to change the law, (or the interpretation of it) tomorrow? Have they already done so, but that news hasn’t reached you yet? If they have changed it, does a hostile entity have your information already logged?
To answer your question, yes, you should be concerned about exposing your public IP address.
I have questions:
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Does the government just “not care” or is piracy specifically legal because there aren’t local laws against it?
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While you say they don’t care right now, do you think there is a possibility that they might care in the future? Because governments often capture lots of information on their citizens with the knowledge that they can then target people that they dislike. Piracy is one of many things governments can use against a person if they really dislike them or what they’re doing.
If it’s explicitly not illegal and won’t be in the near future, I wouldn’t be too worried.
However, it might be a good idea to avoid public trackers anyway and focus on slowly growing a good reputation on private trackers. That might take some time, especially if you have a slow connection, which is quite possible in a country that doesn’t care about this sort of thing.
You won’t necessarily need a VPN for a private tracker, but it gives you a small amount of protection since at least the members of a private tracker are a (supposedly) vetted, trusted community instead of just any random person grabbing your IP.
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Oh man, normally I don’t respond to these kinds of posts because I’m always worried I’ll just be helping someone that does CP. BUt, since you 100% definitely don’t, which I think is really cool that you don’t btw, I’m going to give you the advice that you shouldn’t be concerned about IP exposure.
Use I2P guys. The more the better. It is Foss and is 100 times better then any VPN. It is only a bit slower sometimes.
Just use I2P? Can you access public trackers via I2P or do you have to use the crap internal ones?
Recent qbitorrent update supports cross sharing between public/i2p users.
But people have to enable the option, most public trackers aren’t aware off and most private trackers are not into sharing their well build closed piracy club money making scheme
If you do use a VPN for torrenting, ensure it supports port forwarding. You won’t be able to seed if the provider doesn’t allow port forwarding.
Torrenting/seeding works great with Mullvad, which doesn’t have port forwarding
How though? People that want the torrent can’t connect to you if you’re not forwarding a port.
You can connect to them though. Peers that have their ports open can allow seeders to connect to them
Do seeds actively connect to peers even when the download is complete? I haven’t used BitTorrent in a very long time, but it didn’t used to do that.
they could still be recording your IP, with intent to build a case against you, even if that requires one day in the future that your government randomly decides to bend the knee to the US. I still think that’s a long shot though.
I accidentally turned off my VPN for like a few minutes while torrenting and Comcast immediately wagged their finger at me. Cover your ass.
You need a killswitch. When my VPN goes down it terminates the BitTorrent process
What happens if you start the torrent client without the VPN already running?
Bind your torrent client to the VPN interface, then you won’t even need a killswitch.
The general philosophy: they can’t prosecute the entire populous.
If everyone is pirating, they focus on the ones who pirate the worst shit or the ones who pirate the most shit for profit.
In a sea of pirates, you don’t get tagged.
If people stop pirating, the bar for too extreme or too much lowers.
They do pirate the most extreme and the most prolific pirates, however.
A story as old as time.
They do pirate the most extreme and the most prolific pirates, however.
Wait, so the cops pirate the pirates?
So the pirated pirates, pirate the pirates stuff the pirates pirated from other pirates who could possibly be pirated pirates posing as pirates?
Pretty much.
Predictable.
dont give 'em anything to fuck with you down the road. seems a no brainer. “Mrs. TheHooligan95? ahh yes we are here to confiscate your home because your son TheHooligan95 illegally downloaded Ninja Kods 3 back in 2001. No, you cant talk to your son. He was already executed for corporate treason this reason.”
This sounds accurate
People have and will be executed for dumber reasons.
White rich girl picked you out of the lineup. Don’t worry, DNA science won’t prove you’re innocent for another decade after justice has been carried out.
It’s a security risk but it’s not a legal problem
Assuming the government defs doesn’t care and wont cooperate with lawsuits.
Yes and no. Knowing your IP is sort of like knowing a PO box you rent. It can be used to try and transmit stuff to you, it can also be crudely geolocated, or if the person you’re buying it from gives you up it can be traced directly to you as a person.
If someone wanted to, and you had terrible safety practices (such as opening mail you aren’t expecting, the digital equivalent would be having software listening to ports) they could send you something harmful but this is probably not very likely unless you are pissing powerful people off (e.g. you’re using that IP to distribute anti mossad documentaries or something :P). Your biggest threat is that somebody finds out who you are by going to your ISP and making them give you up.
If you are confident that this is very high effort and you are a small fish it’s not much of a risk.
I’m in the same boat. There have been numerous copyright lawsuits that have been thrown out by the courts in my country; however, I pirate because I’m poor AF so I can’t afford a VPN anyway.
inb4 someone recommends a cheap VPN: No.
Cheap VPNs typically are cheap for a reason, and those reasons typically make them not worth the savings (like logging data and selling it)
Of course if your country doesn’t care then sail away brother and be sure to seed
My country unfortunately cares a lot so a VPN is mandatory for me
I am selfhosting VPN for 2.49$ a month. Speed is up to 700 mbps in my case and I have additional services like PiHole + unbound.
How on earth do you selfhost a VPN?? I’ve never heard of that
The majority of VPNs are self-hosted. The most common use cases for a VPN are things like connecting to an employer’s network when working from home, or connecting to your home server when away from home.
Commercial VPNs that route all your traffic through them aren’t the usual VPN use case.
You still need someone else’s computer. Making a cloudflare proxie or other cloud platform is useless and not secure, specially if you’re torrenting or trying to hide your IP.
I’m pratically sure they even block the torrent protocol and do not allow port forwarding on most cloud VPS.
Yeah proxies are great, but only if you have somewhere to route your traffic.
A proxy is no less secure than a VPN, assuming it’s using encryption like TLS. It’s not as good for torrents since you can’t port forward, but fundamentally people that use commercial VPNs are using then just like a proxy. Some providers like NordVPN do offer HTTPS proxies in addition to their VPN service.
A proxy operates on the application level; a VPN on the OS level. Both the VPN and the proxy are susceptible to OS-level threats. The proxy is also susceptible to application-level threats that the VPN is not. A misconfigured or exploited torrent client, for example, could ignore the proxy and expose your public IP. With a properly functioning VPN, that faulty application can only expose the public-facing end of the VPN tunnel.
Self hosted VPNs are not suitable for sailing the seas. Self-hosting a VPN server only provides remote access to your local network. It does not provide any sort of privacy benefits, because the tunnel exit is an IP address traceable to you.
If they are paying for it, it’s either not self-hosted, or they are paving a licensing fee for the VPN software they are running locally.
If you’re self-hosting a VPN that you’re using for piracy, you’ll still have an unique IP associated with you, and your hosting provider knows that you’re using that IP. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?
If you’re “self hosting VPN” then both your ingress and outgoing VPN servers are showing THEIR I.P. address publicly, which is then tied back to you through DNS/Hosting services, so, Lucy, splain that to me
Simple: make friends with someone with high speed internet who’s not very savvy, keep up the charade until they allow you to borrow their computer. Then you install a headless vpn server with logging disabled. Boom, high speed local VPN that doesn’t point to you. Just buy them a $2.50 beer once a month to keep up pretenses in case you need to do maintenance.
lulz
It’s good opsec to have a VPN when torrenting but thats largely due to the risk of being identified commiting a crime.(Or at the very least, having your ISP send you an angry letter about copyright infringement)
If thats not part of your threat model, then you dont need to worry.
Or you live in a country that purelly doesn’t care about it to the point you can have a ssedbox running 24/7 throught your network.
Bonus points if it also shows your “location” to be 100km away. To the point that it sometimes shows you to be in another country next to your.
Another point when it changes your public address dailly.
