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.
If you’re using a reputable VPN and properly compartmentalizing your activities then a VPN is great. Don’t torrent on the same VPN server that you use for daily use. They caught pompompoopi partly because he forgot to enable his vpn a couple of times and leaked his private IP as well as using the same VPN server for illegal activities and his google accounts.
The best method is definitely to have separate devices with different VPNs and different purposes for each device. It’s a lot of work though.
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.
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.
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.
@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
