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What VPN do you use and why? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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If you are a pirate VPN is an essential tool. I am trying to ascertain the popularity of various VPNs in piracy community. In this excerise, I will list several Popular VPNs in the comment if you use one of them just upvote that comment and reply the reason. If you don't find your VPN listed add a comment with just their name. Reply the reason to it. This make it easier to understand the real life user cases.

P.S: I am only looking for paid VPNs please don't mention "free vpn".

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

So.... at the risk of humiliating myself,
I've never once used a VPN in my entire life.

I pirated games, movies, shows, music, software... and the worst thing that happened to me was getting a letter from Telus once or twice saying "Hey. Don't do that."

That was 5 years ago

I know it's bad practice. But is a VPN 100% necessary? Even a free one?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

While people sometimes suggest ignoring it because they say that your ISP is only sending you those notices because the laws compel them to and you downloaded something that was tracked, you may want to evaluate your risk.

Nothing has happened so far. Could something happen in the future?

Your ISP has built an entire portfolio of the things you’ve done online and which content you pirated. Who know how long your ISP retains that data, or which companies or regulatory bodies it shares this data with?

Laws may change.

Up to you on what you want to do with this information.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

ISP can’t track bittorrent content without downloading the same torrent as you. They only see domain names of trackers and ip addresses of peers. The content itself is either obfuscated or encrypted.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Fair point. There is temporary obfuscation, and certainly not end to end encryption when torrenting.

The creator of BitTorrent himself has this to say:

“The so-called ‘encryption’ of BitTorrent traffic isn’t really encryption, it’s obfuscation. It provides no anonymity whatsoever, and only temporarily evades traffic shaping. There are better approaches to obfuscation, and I’ve got a great team of engineers who are quite eager to fight that battle, but I’m hoping that everything can be resolved amicably without getting into a serious arms race.” Source: https://torrentfreak.com/interview-with-bram-cohen-the-inventor-of-bittorrent/

In my opinion using a trusted VPN not just for torrenting, but also for sourcing pirated software or other content is just a best practice.

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