Reading https://overengineer.dev/blog/2019/04/08/very-precarious-narrative.html explains vulnerabilities to VPNs. I was aware of several of them, but some I wasn’t.
Are VPNs still useful for torrenting?
Depends, largely on how motivated people are to identify you.
If you infrequently torrent a few games and movies, using a VPN will probably be enough to deter most of the law firms specializing in churning out copyright notices. They go for the low hanging fruit first, aka the users without a VPN.
If you on the other hand were to engage in torrenting highly illegal stuff, and were therefore to become a target of state law enforcement, you’d be in a whole different kind of trouble. A VPN would likely not be sufficient.
@Dislodge3233 also not a fan of how the over engineering article is written. Goes into a lomg diatribe about how your traffic is encrypted with https but fails to highlight the fact that the site you visit is still visible in the request headers and is tied to you ip address. Not to mention anything about DNS requests.
And yes tracking by sites like google and Facebook are a challenge, but thats why using a good adblocker like ublock origin and disabling unnecessary javascript is important
There was a lot of backlash a week or two ago when Mullvad announced that they would stop supporting port forwarding, as it seems like many people who were using Mullvad for torrenting were doing so because of the support for port forwarding. I’m still using Mullvad even though I don’t port forward, but most of my torrenting is done through a separate seedbox.
I don’t get the port forwarding issue. If I’m torrenting something on port 78660 but my only outgoing ports visible to others is port 8081, then couldn’t I just tell my torrent software to use port 8081?
I don’t really understand how torrenting is impacted by this, unless all torrent clients use a baked in port number (which from what I’ve seen over the last few decades, all torrent clients allow you to change the outgoing port)
You lost me in that middle part. Are there any further resources I can read to understand this better?
I feel like this article has as much fear-mongering as the adverts it’s railing against! I agree with the article in that there are two big issues with using a VPN: 1) Cruddy VPN services that aren’t worth the money, and 2) Users connected to a VPN don’t change their behavior and give themselves away.
For #1, use a service that’s been well vetted (handles DNS, IPv6 properly, doesn’t keep logs, anonymous payments, killswitch, etc). ProtonVPN, Mullvad, iVPN are good choices imo. For #2, ah, see https://mullvad.net/en/help/first-steps-towards-online-privacy/
Yeah I kind of agree. Most of the Mullvad is obvious stuff tbh. Reading the link I posted, I thought browsers had betrayed my trust or something. It was good to see the note about Firefox multi containers though.
Yeah, sure, it’s obvious if you’re in the tech world, but not so much for the Nebraska farmer. Those of us in tech forget how magical things are for those who don’t understand. For 9/10 in the world, what is obvious to us is straight up dark arts. This sort of article is not aimed at you or me, but the guy in Idaho that wants to look up some gay porn and not get caught by his wife.
It’s not obvious to everyone though! VPN adverts make their services sound magical.
I think the most important behavioral change takeaway is not logging into services or doing the same activities while the VPN is active (if being anonymous is your goal). I do all my VPN torrents stuff through a Docker instance to avoid those pitfalls.
I’d 100% suggest using a VPN as others have said if you’re in the USA or any country with anti-piracy laws. Otherwise you’re asking for a copyright notice in the mail. Don’t chance it.
