Ive thought about torrents but they require a paid vpn from what i know? I dont really want to pay, which is why im thinking about piracy because im not made of money and cant afford a vpn. Im just not sure if its possible to be safe and sail the seven seas all for free?
What would you advise i do? what did you do when starting out?
Free Options:
- Go to your local library, borrow DVDs, Music CDs, and Audio books. Take them home a use one of the many free software options to rip the content onto your own computer.
- Stream recording. You can find all kinds of free streaming sites to watch movies and TV shows. You can use the ytdl command line tool to rip those movies and shows to your own computer, and I don’t think that will trigger your ISPs alarm bells, I might be wrong though. If that is too advanced or isn’t working, just go full goblin mode and start playing the media full screen, then use OBS or another free screen cap software to record your screen. Set it and forget it.
- Torrent raw and risk it from your own home. Depending on your country, this might not actually be a big deal.
Cheap Options:
- Mullvad is $6 per month. You can almost certainly afford that. But if you truly can’t, then if you’re in the US (idk about other countries) donating plasma can net you $30-$40 on the low end and $60-$80 on the high end. And assuming you’re reasonably healthy, you can donate once a week. Even just one session at the low end would net you 4-5 months of VPN access.
- Sell stuff on Ebay, Craigslist, etc. You probably have some old junk laying around. Old computer parts, clothes, random tools, etc. All you need to do is find something worth 6$ and bam, there’s a month of VPN.
- If you live in an area with multiple ISPs and you pay for your own internet, call the other ones and tell them what you’re currently paying for internet, ask them if they can beat it by at least $10 a month. They will almost always say yes, and they will often include free installation and equipment set up too. You’re now saving at least $10 a month on your internet and can afford a monthly VPN plan.
Search whatever you’re looking for with yandex.com - they don’t block pirate sites. Be sure to have uBlock Origin on your browser, you WILL need it. Direct Download (ddl) sites can often have 3+ redirects before the actual, real download link, so it’s good to save favorites when it’s only 1
For shows, animes and movies, you’re better off finding streaming sites, which you can find above.
Lastly, telegram. Yes, the app. You can find several channels/groups that share stuff. I follow a couple that share IT/Gaming/Animation related courses. You can find series, animes and other stuff, too.
It depends where you are in the world. Some countries care more about copyright laws. Sometimes you can get away with torrenting with little to no consequences.
Otherwise, stick to direct download and streaming websites. There are a lot of great sites for movies and tv shows. They tend to come and go. Just remember to install an ad blocker. For games, you’ll need to look at direct downloads. Some good links in other comments.
This. I live in Brazil, I torrent often and have never received any letter from my ISP or anyone. Close to 20 years now surfing the p2p waves.
I’m in the UK and have been torrenting for about that long too. I have had exactly one threatening email from my ISP, over a Hogwarts book from memory. I ignored it and exactly nothing happened. Somehow JK managed to survive, imagine that.
Mooch off someone else’s paid VPN.
I2p or opendirectories or direct downloads. Id personally opt for i2p as at least you give something back.
That being said a vpn is cheap.
ITT buncha folks with no reading comprehension, free != pay little.
if ISP/government are looking for folks doing the thing, get a torrent client for your laptop/phone, send links to it, and then seek out some free wifi, like a coffee shop or sumsuch. loiter about, limit download speeds so they don’t ban your freeloading ass and there you go - adventure, fresh air, you don’t gotta download “watch dogs”, you’re living the game!
Also MAC address spoofing. Use it when using public connections, makes it so they can’t track your device easily or ban the device from the networks. It should go without saying to use this but people don’t talk about this, and I think certain people would rather people not know about it at all.
Hey, this could get you started. Its not the same but you can try “c/Archive” and/or “c/YouTube” but its not much yet :-) You can also try IRC Downloading its free no seeding needed and if you use SASL/SSL you don’t need vpn. There is also something like this “Only One Petabyte and 464,392 files” of shows/movies, should be enought for you for a while =) I mean who needs torrents if you can easily download direct LOL
Only use direct downloads. For example https://rentry.org/megathread-games#direct-downloads I don’t torrent, I don’t use a VPN, nor pay for anything in order to pirate. Sometimes you might have to wait for slower download speeds but often times there is a mirror that will cap out my speeds of 200mb/s
Well first off, torrenting doesn’t “require” a VPN, you may want to look up your area etc… in most of the united states, basically if you torrent without a VPN, there’s a chance that your ISP will detect it and typically they will send you a letter saying “we know you downloaded _____ illegally, if we catch you again, we will cancel your service”.
which depending on what you are going for (like say new releases and big name targets are what they will be watching for the most)… that could take years to even happen.
Now as far as safe, and lower risk… you could always look up pirating on the IRC… it’s not the most user friendly route out there, but that’s kind of the point, it’s ancient technology and for the most part no one bothers to monitor it.
and then of course there’s just tons of bootleg streaming sites. bottom line anything that’s not peer 2 peer, is pretty much impossible for ISPs to identify what you are doing on… and thus are pretty safe.
ISP will detect it and typically they will send you a letter saying “we know you downloaded _____ illegally, if we catch you again, we will cancel your service”.
It’s actually the studios that own the content you are torrenting that will seed the torrent and then collect a list of all IP addresses that connect to them, then they ask your ISP to shut your internet off.
You ISP doesn’t actually care if you torrent, because if they cancel your internet they lose out on money.
Unless your ISP is a content owner, which several are now. Comcast/Xfinity is NBC for example. Plus Comcast makes a lot of profit on cable TV, so they have reason to ger people to stop. That being said, I dont know anyone who was simply downloading for personal use who got their service canceled. But it is a major risk in the IS since most ISPs have near monopolies at least over broadband speeds, so the majority have no other options.
True, I guess the process is the studios have deals/threats to sue the ISPs if they don’t do it.
Either way regardless of their reason or motives. The ISP is the one that’s in charge of sending the threat and dealing the punishment, and again the key point is (again region may vary, do research on your ISP), but typically they send a warning first. So in short, if you just want to get started quickly, you can just start torrenting with no VPN (you should probably seed things for as little time as possible), and hope you can afford a VPN before you get the threatening letter, if you do get the threatening letter… then stop all peer 2 peer based piracy until you can afford to do it safer.
There is also Usenet, access is cheap but not free.
Substantially more pricey than a vpn
Buy usenet around black friday, super cheap. I currently pay $18/yr for usenet, any useful VPN is way more expensive.
So much pricier that when you take a Usenet subscription they’ll often add a free vpn on top, as a treat
Seems like a lot of people replying need to work on their reading comprehension…
Use private trackers only. Public trackers are way easier to identify you on.
Disable DHT, PeX and Local Peer Discovery in your BitTorrent client. This will prevent you connecting to random public peers.
If you’re just interested in movies/TV I recommend streaming sites with an adblocker. Just so much easier and safe enough. Find sites on fmhy.netUse private trackers only. Public trackers are way easier to identify you on.
Source on that? This is the first I’ve heard of it
Common sense?
Choose one of the following scenarios which you think has the least chance of getting caught when cheating on your partner:- Anal in broad daylight at the local public park.
- Anal in shady motel out of town.
Lemmy.ml account and making a snarky, nonsense comment. Name a more iconic duo.
I2P
Ive thought about torrents but they require a paid vpn from what i know?
if you live in the US, fair, it’s probably required, but at the same time, 1 year of vpn probably costs the same as 2 months of whatever random netlflix/hulu streaming service. If you have a roommate, split the price? I wouldn’t trust a VPN with anything more sensitive than torrents (without extensive research). Then again, I’m not totally sure I’m willing to vouch for the value of a VPN vs your free options.
You never said what you’re trying to pirate, so I hope this is helpful in finding you solutions that don’t require a VPN:
I2p
qBitTorrent in I2P only mode is free and safe.
It’s slow and limited selection, but there’s good stuff.
last i tried the trackers were dogwater. Waste of time unless you’re looking for 3yo items.
There’s plenty of new stuff on Postmaster, especially if it’s big-budget or sci-fi leaning. But you’re right, it can be difficult to find some media, especially if it’s niche. For free, there’s more being posted than can reasonably be watched or listened to.
Unfortunately any unencrypted file sharing, or really any unencrypted internet usage at all, carries some risk of ISPs or governments snooping on what you are doing. BitTorrent is just particularly notable because of its history and that by the nature of the protocol, you are uploading (seeding) in addition to downloading.
A good VPN is a few bucks a month and provides a lot of other benefits. It’s worth considering.
fmhy has a beginners guide, there’s lots of options that don’t require torrenting
for torrenting specifically, I’ve been using cloudflare’s vpn (1.1.1.1) without issues, though it requires a bit of setup with wireguard
