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It is a legal requirement in Australia that ISPs record all your "metadata" which will reveal torrent activity. The bittorrent protocol necessarily makes your IP public to peers. Copyright trolls are known to leave bots as fake seeders and peers to collect IPs to mass report people.
Tl;DR: not a good idea
95% of my media comes via Usenet for I don't bother with a VPN there, but my torrent client and *arrs are behind a VPN.
Australian here. Torrenting with no vpn is a terrible idea. Right now today there may not be any litigation of end users, but if you think about whether there will be at some point over the next several years? The odds are pretty good, and you'd be the low-hanging fruit.
Your risks diminish dramatically with a vpn.
Depends on how you currently download your bounty, and if it's currently via torrents / public trackers like I do and you don't get angry nastygrams from your ISP (Britbong here), you're good to go?
If not however use of a VPN is recommended and you could go one further actually and buy yourself Usenet access, which means you don't need no VPN and you're rock and roll.
From what I recall thou you Aussies have lots of anti-pirate groups being knobheads so probably wise to hide your traffic? arrr
You will get nasty letters if you torrent on Starlink without a VPN and they may disconnect you. It's CGNAT, so performance will be crap without a VPN since you can't use port forwarding. The upload is rather slow, so you may want to consider a seedbox, especially if you use private trackers.
You'll only get the nasty letters if you use public trackers... I've been on starlink since it came to Australia and never once got a nasty letter or warning or anything, and I don't have any VPN going
You're right about the upload speed though
I run all my stuff using Usenet so I don't bother with a VPN but torrents should 100% use vpn
There are some very cheap VPNs out there. Get a year long deal on Slickdeals, or a similar site. Come renewal time , switch providers and got another discounted subscription for the following year. VPN providers fall all over themselves trying to lure you away from your current provider.
Or, even better, get a seedbox. Many of those even offer VPNs at no additional cost. So you get the insulation of never torrenting on your home connection, and a "free" VPN, that isn't shared with a million other people, for things like watching foreign streaming services or just plain increased privacy.
What I don’t get about seedboxes: you give the provider both your personal data as well as show them what you’re doing illegally. That seems like a bad idea. What am I missing?
Seedbox providers are taking on the majority of the risk by providing the service. It's in their interest to keep quiet about it. If they're served with a legal request, they'll honor it, if it conforms to their local laws. But so will your ISP, who has no incentive to protect your information.
Also, just my opinion, but I think seedbox operators tend to be people who are doing the same things their customers are.
Pay with crypto and connect using a proxy?
Very.
What's the argument for doing this? It looks like media stack includes a vpn, so the effort level isn't going to be all that different.
Echoing everyone else: definitely use a vpn if you're torrenting. Strongly consider using a seedbox if you're on starlink or anything else with poor upload speeds.
The argument for doing this is not having to pay for a vpn. But i guess thats still cheaper than a traditional streaming service lol.
Fair enough, but it's a good value for the price. Mullvad's €5/month, and while it's fallen out of favor I know people who still use PIA and get it for close to $2/month by prepaying for a few years at a time. You could probably pay for it by turning off the laptop a few hours a day to save on electricity.
Worth the price, imo.
What's the deal with PIA?
They were bought by Kape Technologies in 2019. This drove away a lot of folks because of prior security concerns with another product of theirs. I don't recall the specifics, but here's a reddit thread from the time with comments that likely shed some light on the worries from then if you're curious.
As a practical response, I've been with them since years prior to that and didn't change because I renew 3 years at a time and had 2 years left when they were bought. Figured I'd give them that time to see how things changed. Best I could tell, they didn't in any way that pisses off my ISP, so I still haven't bothered switching.
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Mullvad is top tier if you want a VPN with ethics. Its just OP doesn't seem like that what their looking for.
If all you care about is torrenting, there are tons of shitty cheap vpns you can use.
Really all you need is one that supports port forwarding.