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Beginner questions: VPN safe enough? How to use all these tools? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, I'd like to set the sails due to being frustrated with streaming services, but I have some questions beforehand. I hope, you can help me with that, since lurking and reading the Megathread/Wiki didn't really answer my questions. Thanks for your help.

Is just using a fitting VPN (I've read about Mullvad and ProtonVPN in this community) safe enough to not get caught? I'm located in germany, so sharing even as much as a few kB of pirated content can cost me thousands of euros. I want to be really sure, that I won't get letters from some lawyer soon. All, that I've read so far is basically: Setup VPN and your Torrent software, including kill switch and maybe get into private trackers. Thats it. Is this really enough? Can I do more to be safe? What exactly is the risk with public trackers (as they are often mentioned as the "low hanging fruit" for copyright lawyers)?
I've read the post The complete guide to building your personal self hosted server for streaming and ad-blocking, which mentions many tools to setup. I'm sure these help me find and view content. But are there good resources explaining the functionalities of this software? I'm familiar with Docker and I know about Jellyfin, but it is really unclear to me, what exactly all the other tools do.

Big thanks from a long time lurker!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

VPN, in addition to masking your real IP, will also encrypt all of your Internet traffic, even from your ISP.

So does https. The only difference is that the ISP no longer can see which sites you are visiting. But now the VPN provider does.

What does that mean? Encryption is a means of making your data unreadable to everybody except those with permission to view it (you and the other person you’re talking to; servers in this case). Your ISP (otherwise known as your Internet Service Provider) is not your friend. They will turn your Internet traffic data over if asked.

Nope. Everyone who has the key can read the data. But usually only parties with permission do have it. Also no one is saving all the traffic data. Only metadata usually. And that is true for the VPN provider mostly too. They also have to turn over the data if they want to operate in the given country. The key is either using a VPN who claims (you as a user cannot verify it) to have zero logging or a very short log retention. Or to use a VPN provider outside your countries jurisdiction.