I know this is a dumb question… But i cant really aford a vpn like at all, is it possible to torrent without using a vpn in the USA or will i get in some trouble and go to jail if i torrent without a vpn?
The reason i cant get a vpn is because im just broke and im young enough to live with family so i cant really get a job.
im young enough to live with family
Tell your parents that they’ll lose their internet if they don’t give you $20 per year for VPN.
What you were doing online is being watched. It is being recorded. Right now, some ISPs will will protect your identity and send warnings to you, to a point. Some ISPs will just give up your information.
They are currently working on legislation to force ISPs just shut you off If piracy is reported.
Right now, for every ISP that I’m aware of in the US, No action is actually taken against you for reports of piracy. But that doesn’t mean that this will stay the same, or, that they won’t retroactively go on a witch hunt.
You can find VPNs for a couple bucks a month. Make it a birthday request.
Jail probably not… however you will probably get a sternly worded letter from your ISP saying “We know you were torrenting (name of one show or movie you torrented”), This is your first warning.
In short, you won’t go to jail, but your ISPs will usually give a few warnings, and then cut off your internet.
Yes, I ignored it for a while but then got walled off by charter until I acknowledged I’d fix the torrenting issue with my account. Got a von and never had a problem again
im young enough to live with family so i cant really get a job.
This doesn’t really track, or it’s just worded weird. You can start working part-time at age 14 in most states in the US. Now, you could be a student who’s too busy with school/sports to get a job, but if you have time to pirate I doubt that’s a limiting factor.
Now, I don’t personally care what your actual case is. I’m just pointing out that your claims don’t add up.
This is a joke, right?
The US is currently economically collapsing, nearly every company/corp is firing and laying people off, an entry level job requires 3 to 5 years of experience, and something like 60% of companies freely admit to posting ghost jobs, fake online job listings that never actually result in a hire, or are just done to pretend an internal promotion is actually being competetively sourced to the whole job market.
It is extremely difficult for young people to find a job right now, one that ends up paying more than they’d lose in the costs of buying a car and gas and insurance to get to said job.
Save your lunch money for however long it takes to be able to buy a year of VPN like Mullvad in your country.
You aren’t paying for your internet so you’d be an asshole to put the account holder under scrutiny for torrenting without protection. Especially when they are also covering your rent, elecricity, gas, food, clothing, etc. Don’t be a selfish asshole.
If you can’t get VPN don’t be entitled and go off torrenting because other people say it is fine. You aren’t paying for internet so you don’t get the privilege to decide if it is fine or not.
Mullvad stopped allowing port forwarding, sadly, which complicates torrenting. They had valid reasons for dropping support, but it makes it much harder to complete a solid connection via Mullvad.
Still sad about this. Mullvad feels like the best privacy-centric choice and I’ve been using them for a year, but once I set up my media server I realized how vital port forwarding is. Ended up switching to Proton, who I’m still uncomfortable with due to their CEO’s political comments earlier this year, but they’re arguably the best choice right now.
Airvpn is supposed to be as private as mullvad but def not as user friendly in my experience.
It can’t be as private as mullvad, it has usernames and they log traffic amounts.
I use them though.
Yeah mullvad is great for certain use cases but torrenting is not one of them
Just keep any torrent you download seeding after you finished the download and you will easilly get a seed/download ratio of 2 or more.
Even without static port-forwarding, the NAT translation done by the Mullvad router will automatically keep track of external machines to which your own machine has connected to recently, in order to forward to it any connections back, and since the torrent protocol pretty much connects to the whole swarm during the download stage (even if it doesn’t download from most of them, it still connects to each swarm participant to check which parts they have), which means that after your download stage for a torrent is over, for a while (hours, in my experience) if any of those machines tries to connect back the connection gets properly forwarded by the Mullvad router to your machine because it still recognizes them as associated with your host and forwards the connection correctly.
What won’t work without static port-forwarding is starting seeding from scratch, resuming seeding after you stopped it for a while (a day or more) and very small size torrents (because the swarm changes very fast when the download size is very small and is quickly done, and the new machines in the swarm which your own machine did not connect to during your own download stage, won’t be associated in the Mullvad router with your machine so it can’t do automatic routing of their connection attempts).
The point being that it’s perfectly fine to torrent with a VPN without port-forwarding and you can do it without being a leecher as long as you’re not just downloading tiny torrents and you make sure to leave the torrents to seed for a while after the download stage is over. What you can forget about is seeding from scratch or to remote machines you did not download any data from, which is a problem if you’re trying to get a good ratio for private trackers since you can’t just fire up a torrent for seeding alone and all uploading can only happen following your downloading of that same torrent.
Don’t subject your family to nasty letters in their mail from your ISP. You won’t go to jail, but you might risk your internet service getting canceled, which won’t be a fun conversation with your parents.
If you’re 18 and healthy, go donate plasma at a local clinic. In the USA depending on where you are, you can make $40-$80 per week, sometimes even more if they have a big shortage. Takes about 90 minutes a session, and you just chill with a needle in your arm and browse on your phone, super easy.
Proton VPN’s most expensive plan is $108 for 2 years, you can afford that. Go to your friends or neighbors and offer to do some yard work for cash. Mow their lawn, shovel bark, dig up dead shrubs, whatever. That’s the main way I made money when I was in my teens. People will pay 20-30 bucks an hour in most places for that kind of work, so a few hours of that in a week or two and you’ve got your $108 for Proton VPN, or whatever other VPN you want to use.
Sell some crap on eBay, FB marketplace, Craig’s List, etc. Old clothes, computer parts, consoles, weights, people will buy anything. You’d be surprised how fast I’ve gotten rid of junk buy posting it online for 10 bucks.
Proton smells bad for me, too much of a walled-garden and corporate restriction aesthetic with their services. I would recommend Mullvad or NordVPN
Why would you recommend Nord over Proton?
Proton take cash payments and xmr just like Mullvad and IVPN.
I only mentioned it because it’s what I’ve been using for a while and it’s been a good experience so far. Cheap, runs well on Linux, and is one of the few that still allows you to port forward.
There are several good ones to pick from, defs would stay away from Nord because of their advertising practices, but Mullvad is solid. I think they removed port forwarding though.
Mullvad did remove port forwarding, and it’s the only thing stopping me from cancelling my Proton subscription early. I don’t torrent often, but I wonder about getting a seedbox one day, and I’d need Proton.
I honestly don’t love them after the idiot board member’s Trump praise.
My friend’s friend’s cousin was dinged 3 times in 10 years by their ISP, large provider in a populated area.
He or she really needs to add a password to his or her router one of these days, darn neighbors. And those pesky neighbors need a VPN too. After getting a VPN, the complaints stopped. For the neighbors, of course.
Its not zero-effort, but you can safely torrent without a VPN using I2P. You’d have to have an I2P router running on the backend and use something like i2psnark to connect. Out of the box, I2P won’t work, you have to adjust the config, but after that you could go VPN-less. Two things to consider though: 1. Torrents will run slower. 2. Only trackers inside the I2P network would be reachable.
The reason i cant get a vpn is because im just broke and im young enough to live with family so i cant really get a job.
I don’t know your situation (and age) but small jobs like delivering newspapers can usually be taken up at relatively you age. They should easily cover a VPN subscription.
E.g. I was delivering newspaper biweekly for a few hours at the age of 13. Even today, the monthly pay would’ve been enough to pay for a year of my current VPN. Your guardians will have to approve the job but legally it shouldn’t be an issue.
If you torrent without a VPN the conversation about a warning by the internet provider on behalf of some rights holder will be way worse than asking about ideas for a small (summer) job.
does anyone still gets a newspaper?
Just use ProtonVPN. They have a free tier. No credit card required. Its slightly slower speeds, but it will keep you from getting in trouble while sailing the high seas 🏴☠️🏴☠️
Proton’s free tier doesn’t support P2P traffic anymore.
Interesting. I did not know that.
So here’s the deal is you “really” can’t afford $30 a YEAR:
I use a VPN called windscribe. You can buy this 1 year VPN for $30. You can buy it through the Google play store.
I also have the “Google Rewards” app that pays you in Google play store credit for taking short surveys or taking pictures of receipts.
I get $50 to $100 per year in play store credits to spend on Google play.
See where I’m going with this? I pay for my yearly subscription with my “free” play store credits I get.
=Free VPN. Like right now I’ve got almost $40 in play store credits (the free credits you earn have to be spent in a year. It spends the oldest credits first) and I have like 4 months left before I have to renew my VPN subscription. Since I never enjoyed any pay to win styles of games, at this point I practically run out of things I even want to buy with my credits before they start to expire. I’ve bought probably a thousand dollars worth of apps and games over the years and haven’t ever spent a single cent of my own money on any of them. Nothing but the reward app credits. I buy the “pro” versions of apps I use to remove ads, even if the ads don’t bother me or I don’t use that particular app very much.
This, and something to note is never lie to Google Rewards as you’ll then stop getting surveys altogether if they catch you out with their trap questions
Have you ever visited XYZ waterpark
If you haven’t, even if it’s a real place just say no and wait for the next survey because they’ll trip you up trying.
also I’m sure that DNS adblocking on my phone also stops the Google Rewards surveys. I haven’t gotten any for months now lol
I adblock all my phones and back when I tried to use it I have it installed and never got any surveys for months. So that probably does it.
You got me curious, because while I don’t have the app installed for the longest time I do have a female fam member who used to demolish me in rewards and still uses it.
But, only blocks adverts at home while on WiFi and pretty sure she doesn’t have PrivateDNS enabled.
Seems she’s only getting surveys whilst out and about shopping so I’ve asked her to enable her exit node at home next time shopping.
For science…
edit: goddamn formatting via Boost is nuts 🙈
Interesting. I never gotten surveys where I can upload receipts. Could it be a region thing? I’m not in the Western World Countries (in South East Asia), and from what I remember, only gotten “Have you been to” surveys.
I’ll always remember my favourite survey
Made me giggle that one, totally apt for a lad from Bradford :D
Stick to private trackers, the risk of being caught is dramatically lower (harder to get it, smaller user base, companies target the big public ones)
Most private trackers require seeding seedboxes.
I’m sure OP would find it hard to find an Invite without spending money.
Where are you getting these ideas from? I’m on multiple private trackers and none require a seedbox. They may require a seed ratio, but that’s a totally different matter.
Also, some private trackers offer invites from time to time and some provide a way to be invited via an interview. I got into two of them by interviewing.
Really can’t say that’s the case. A lot of PTs have bonuses points and other things for long term seeding, and you can then buy upload or reduce download, or regular site wide free-leech, or free-leech over xGB, or Perma freeleech while you seed 1tb. You can do perfectly fine on a home connection as long as you don’t mind keeping some torrents seeding (like you ideally should be to share back) You can go from open reg PTs to mid or elite teir PTs off a home connection and no seedbox (if you out in some elbow grease).
If you permanently seed all you’ve downloaded and you’ve been using a tracker for a while, bonus points + upload should usually cover all your downloading needs.
Starting out is difficult without a seedbox though. Especially of you don’t use Cross-Seed to seed to multiple trackers. In that case it is considerably easier to pay for a seedbox.
Private tracker security is, at best, security theater. You (a random nobody) can get an invite with nearly no effort. You really think a billion dollar industry can’t manage to get in and spoof as a legit user? There are entire companies that specialize in corporate espionage. Use a VPN (or seed box) even on private trackers.
They absolutely can of course. However, its easier for them to go after the easier fish that are public and advertise/make profit off work, much the same way a theif will levitate toward the least secure/most attractive house to rob. That said, country makes a huge difference - risk profile between a US citizen and say a Romanian is very different.
How do you go about finding and joining such a venture
- keep a eye on https://redlib.trux.dev/r/OpenSignups/ for sites that briefly open for anyone to signup
- keep a eye on https://lemmy.world/c/opensignups (not as trafficed as reddit sadly, might be better lemmy alternatives around)
- Look for sites that do IRC interviews (MAM, RED, OPS)
- Invite from a trusted friend (Note: I recommend being slow and steady and avoiding invites, its safer to ‘make it your own way’ - You can potentially lose your account(s) if someone youve trusted does something dodgy like buy/sell accounts - you have to absolutely 100% trust the person longterm and anyone theyve invited)
- Once into a reputable site and rank up a little through seeding/account time, look for invite/power user forums to request invites to other sites. This is how you branch out over time and ‘recruit’ your way through trackers.
- If your into ebooks MAM is a excelent starting place, its incredibly easy and forgiving and has a good invite section to springboard from (and friendly/welcoming community).
Info:
- sites/acronym list (exhaustive) https://hdvinnie.github.io/Private-Trackers-Spreadsheet/
- https://wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/Private_trackers (older but still interesting/relevant)
- https://redlib.trux.dev/r/Piracy/comments/19bl0dn/the_complete_guide_to_climbing_the_ranks_of/
- Pay for a month for TorrentLeechs seedbox promo to get an invite.
- wait for opensignups. HUNO, FearNoPeer, onlyencodes are solid options.
- do an “interview” at MAM. After downloading and seeding all you’ve downloaded for a few months, you’ll be able to get into the trackers mentioned above and a few others (e.g. Aither).
If you use only private trackers you can skip the VPN. If you use public ones, your ISP might take issue
If you convert a magnet link to a .torrent file (there are many sites that can do that) and then upload the .torrent file to archive.org, they’ll download the files to their servers as part of their archival process, then you can just download the files via standard https, you ISP will only know you downloaded from archive.org.
But archive.org isn’t really meant to be used this way, so this is probably unethical. But I think section 230 protect them (for now), so its not like they’ll get shutdown or anything (correct me if I’m wrong).
Ugh. Doesn’t IA have enough legal issues already?
