If your IPS and the local authorities will not do anything if you download, upload and publish anything, what is the bare minimum of security measures you can do? Context: I live in Southamericas, here we have worse thing to deal with.
I’d say say at least use a VPN. Most of the suggested security practices are easy enough there’s really no reason not to…
Why would you use a VPN? What’s the advantage, aside from not letting my ISP know what I’m doing?
Avoid Tor Browser if you can please, it’s slow and the bandwidth might be better needed by people in difficult circumstances.
A good VPN is better for sharing media.
If tor is only used by people in difficult circumstances, it is targetable. The bad guys flood the network with compromised nodes, overwhelm clean nodes, and pretty soon, the network is useless for exactly the people who need it.
The way tor works, it is more valuable to those people when it is used primarily by people who don’t need it.
Tor browser can be used to access the site itself but don’t use it for torrenting itself.
what is the bare minimum of security measures you can do?
I guess just the normal things with p2p stuff: make sure no ports are exposed except for the essentials, update software, use SSL wherever possible.
When you don’t use VPN, people will see your actual IP adress and will launch the same kind of attacks, they also launch on servers [1] to try to hijack your system and add them to their bot net.
[1] port scans, login-attemps, applying known exploits. If this doesn’t sound scary, you should try operating a server that is exposed on the internet and then look at the number of login attemps.
I’ve personally been doing this for many years, seeding all sorts of nasty stuff and no one that I know has ever gotten so much as an email.
Feel free to use no privacy measures, but at least setup an alert so you know if your country’s police decides to start persecuting pirates.
I recommend u setup a Google alert with a query like “YOUR-COUNTRY-HERE arrestan pirateria”. So if a news article that matches that query ever gets posted online, you’ll instantly get an email
Don’t worry, it’s probably going to be killed soon like all good Google products
I wouldn’t worry about that. Google has had this feature for a VERY VERY long time.
Custom DNS and VPN, more secure would be Tor but its not everyday use fast.