You can’t forward ports on mullvad. You know if that matters to you. Airvpn and proton allow port forwarding.
We are swiftly reaching a time where boycotting companies run by people you disagree with will negatively impact your ability to function. Consider abandoning this type of purchasing in the future.
Private trackers: they’re easy to get into. Ipt will probably temporarily open signups this month, mya is always open afaik and plenty of others have signups where you just have to take a test they give you the answers to. Once you’re in you just gotta maintain a ratio by seeding instead of just downloading all the time and climb the “tracker ladder” to get to the ones you want.
Mya is the one most people start with now.
On VPNs: you have to understand your own security, just like anything else. Ones like mullvad refuse to keep information about you (your login credentials are a random string of numbers and they do cash transactions similarly anonymized), and ones like proton allow you to use information that isn’t tied back to you (it’s your responsibility to make sure that information can’t be tied back to you!). It’s worth learning about them now even if you’re not in a position to pay for one because knowing will help you make good decisions when you are in that position.
If you aren’t gonna use a vpn then require encryption, disable dht and pex, use doh or dot and only use private trackers.
Require encryption, distributed hash table and peer exchange are options in your client. Requiring encryption means a mitm observation of your traffic won’t show you are doing torrenting. Turning off dht and pex prevents someone who’s not a member of your tracker jumping into the swarm and clocking users. DNS over https or tls makes requests to get the ip of a website from the url encrypted, so a mitm observer can’t even see that you went to the bad website to ostensibly do bad things. Private trackers get you out of the low hanging fruit category where enforcement is usually focused.
Of course, anyone who monitors traffic patterns will know you’re torrenting, so laws (or a change in laws or enforcement strategy) can still get you.
If you read all this way and you want to know what the solution is, it’s not i2p or tor, it’s a vpn service. I know you said you don’t want that, but it’s the solution to your problem. You figured out yourself that i2p and tor don’t suit your needs already.
Good vpns have infrastructure that makes it impossible to keep logs and will pass independent audits. They will also not have a history of turning over users data or otherwise acting badly.
I use airvpn for torrenting. It works fine as long as you’re not in Italy.
If you want to understand how a person can trust and afford a vpn, ask away. If you cannot or do not want to use a credit card, use a vpn service like mullvad or proton that accepts cash.
E: edited for a typo
BF16 of deez nuts
At least a couple of years ago, rd was looked down upon because users only share within the rd network so despite using torrent technology and maybe even torrent releases only subscribers get the benefits.
If you want an off ramp from it, private trackers are easy to get into now. They want interviews where they give you the answers first and people still fail them.
What are you torrenting and watching on?
If you’re one of those people who just leaves their computer on at home all day you can go ahead and set up the arr stack in preparation for getting that pi5 you mentioned.
No matter if you stick with rd or switch to something else: If you have a spare old computer lying around you can use that too. People will say “no, your power bill!” but the cost is almost always negligible and the hard drives you add for more storage will be the same power draw no matter what. For me, running twelve drives in an old gaming case with a 4th gen i5 comes out to a little under a buck more a month than my rpi3 in the same (not really, I couldn’t plug the sas expander and hba into it, but with the drives in a set of external enclosures) configuration. And the rpi was less stable. And less upgradable. And less powerful and less efficient as I started to use the cpu more.
A free/$20 “junk” pc starts to look a hell of a lot better in the long term when it’s competing against a platform that can only be cheaper per month at idle.
Please bear in mind that even if you were to figure out a process for torrenting without a vpn in a jurisdiction with a law against it that you don’t want to bear the repercussions of, you still need to seriously audit and understand your own security practices.
Just last week, the guy who runs the website “have I been pwned”, which hosts a searchable database of credentials that have been found in data breaches, was phished and had to add the people on his mailing list to his own websites database of people who suffered from data breaches.
This person is a security consultant to many organizations all over the world and operates one of the first resources used to figure out the breadth and depth of an individual or organizations exposure to leaks.
There are many cases just like this ripped from the headlines example.
If experts in the field cannot guarantee their own security, it follows that you cannot do so either and you may be well served by thinking critically about your own capacity to perform the research required to accomplish the task you’ve laid out for yourself.
To put it more succinctly, and I have to ask that you read the following with as much kindness, understanding and warmth as possible:
You are likely not capable of figuring this out for yourself in a way that keeps you safe from the law.
Please be careful out there and make good decisions. Not everyone on Reddit or lemmy is an expert and many people don’t have your best interests in mind.
That’s probably a bad idea.
Not only are you going from committing a crime in private to committing a crime in public, you’re putting yourself in one of the most vulnerable positions possible when it comes to computer security (every few months there are new attacks developed specifically to target users of free public wifi).
Even if that wasnt a problem to you, businesses often have content blockers and traffic shaping to prevent you from torrenting and when they don’t you’ll be competing with everyone else actively streaming video and audio to their phones as well.
It’s also trivial to figure out who’s torrenting on public wifi and has been for years.
If you’re truly concerned about this new law then public wifi isn’t the solution.
E: and if all that doesn’t convince you and you go through with it, you’ll be causing a problem that will actively make people look for you so the wifi isn’t completely jammed up.
I tried a lot of the alternatives before switching to a vpn for torrenting.
For a long time I only used private trackers with encryption required and dht and whatnot off. It worked pretty good, especially with traffic shaping on the router.
If you really want to avoid paying money that’s where I’d start. The problem you’re gonna run into comes from how the law is used against piracy, who does it and how.
If I were gonna go that route today I’d set up doh or dot first. Both are free if you want to use mullvads servers.
Good luck.
Free vpns sell your data. It’s why they’re free. Processor cycles and bandwidth cost money so if you want someone to use their processor cycles and their bandwidth to encrypt and route your traffic through their servers without clandestinely peeking, and using lawyers and advanced security techniques to ward off the police, you gotta pay them.
In order to seed torrents you need to have a port on your vpn endpoint that is accessible to the internet and gets passed to the computer running your BitTorrent client. This is called port forwarding. There are only so many ports, so a vpn provider that offers port forwarding will probably charge more and you might not be able to get certified hood classics like :42069 because someone is already using it.
I use airvpn for torrents but depending on your European country you might not be able to. There are other port forwarding vpns. The cost is cheap, most come out to less than $5 a month.
Most let you run multiple devices at the same time so you might have your computer at home torrenting through the vpn while you’re away at work browsing porno on the toilet connected to the vpn which lets you get past the work content blockers.
So… just pay for a port forwarding vpn.
Look into the t-series thinkpads. T480 is the meme one, but many newer models are very inexpensive and modular. I don’t have dells, but people who do recommend the Inspiron or Vostro ones. They’re similarly cheap and repairable. There are business class hp laptops for cheap too.
For my needs these computers have been very useful and fast.
Often a whole parts unit (bad screen, no ram, no hd for example) of one of these laptops can be had for the price of a single replacement part from one of the smaller manufacturers.
Because they’re so common, new production third party replacement batteries are available and new old stock as well.
If you value environmentally friendly actions, using these machines is literally taking plastic out of the waste stream.
If you haven’t already bought something:
What do you have now?
I would generally recommend against chromebooks. They’re often aimed at the lowest end of the market and have esoteric processors and boot processes that will make you frustrated.
I would generally recommend against small laptop manufacturers like framework etc. because of parts availability. People will say that you can get parts from the manufacturer but for how long? People will say you can make the parts themselves because the design is open source but I have a board etching setup, hot air station and injection molding machine and I don’t do that.
Obviously if you just want to “vote with your dollars” the above doesn’t matter.
If you want to get a laptop that’s gonna run linux well and last a long time get a used business class machine. There will always be a huge market for parts and they have almost always had someone put the effort in to document getting their distro to work right on their work assigned computer.
The black sheep option is to get a mac. Parts are everywhere for cheap and every microsoldering and computer repair shop will work on them because so many people have them and want to get them fixed. Obviously do your research first, but asahi is coming along and you’ve always got a Unix system to fall back on if it isn’t working out.
Boycotts are useful alongside militancy. The Montgomery bus boycott for example, was powerful because it gave an alternate path to resolve disputes that were playing out through marches and demonstrations that faced violent opposition.
Boycotts do not generally succeed at their aims if they are not accompanied by that militant wing.
I don’t know of any actions taken by proton that align with the ceos positions you oppose, for example: selective logging and reporting targeted at people in opposition to the trump government. I don’t know of any militant opposition or public demonstrations against those actions even if they did exist.
So I don’t think a boycott of proton would be effective at its goals even if they were explicit and achievable.
More broadly speaking, political action needs to be weighed against the negative repercussions it can bring; which is why in America, for example, lots of political demonstration tends to be younger people with less to lose.
When weighing that decision against having access to a privacy focused (if you don’t give them any identifying information) service, it may make more sense to abandon the boycott in order to get the service.
You could also just use airvpn, but it’s a little spartan and has a different feature set.
Anyway that was the whole point, that it’s easy to jump into an ineffective type of boycott that really hurts you by exposing you to prosecution and also doesn’t actually accomplish your political goals.