The risks of downloading music at home with wifi (midwest.social)

submitted 2 months ago by clark@midwest.social to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Like the stupid newbie goober I am, I forgot the first step to downloading music: do it in a public setting with a public wifi. Ended up downloading it all at home off of our private wifi. Did use a VPN but forgot to switch it from my home country. Kind of wondering how easy it is to trace me and persecute me for this. I am not the one handling the ordeal with the wifi, that would be my lovely mother.

Cheers y'all!

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[-] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 49 points 2 months ago

To add a bit: It doesn't make a difference whether you're use a cable or the wifi. It's still the same internet connection. What helps is the VPN connection. And it doesn't really matter if you're setting it to your home country or a random one. If it protects you as intended, they can't find you either way. And if it doesn't, you may be screwed either way.

[-] sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The country of the vpn server does matter, as does the home country. Your traffic may be encrypted and the vpn company may not keep logs, but the datacenters they're renting likely do. Always favor countries that have the strongest privacy laws. i.e. not the US.

[-] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Is there some precedent to believe that they correlate (encrypted) datacenter traffic, find the patterns and actually use that somehow?

I mean I can see how that'd theoretically work under certain circumstances and low network load on the VPN server. But that's really complicated, circumstantial, unreliable and takes lots of effort and probably can't be used in court anyways. So I wonder if that's ever been done. Maybe for some circumstancial evidence for some proper crimes to find out where to investigate? And I mean I'm pretty sure the NSA snoops everywhere. Still they're unlikely to be able to look inside with just these tools. And they're also unlikely to prosecute some swedish user for some lame copyright violation.

[-] ryannathans@aussie.zone 8 points 2 months ago

Highly dependent on how much the government wants to prosecute lol, likely not currently an issue for music

[-] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

Luckily I live in a country that doesn't really seem to give a shit. I still use a VPN, but a friend of mine didn't bother at all and used to be downloading constantly. Eventually he got a phone call from his ISP asking him to not seed so much lol

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 5 points 2 months ago

It happened many times, for example this is the latest https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/inside-the-fbi-the-911-s5-cyber-threat-061124.mp4/view

They saw the encrypted traffic between the VPN server and the botnet command server, matched with the traffic between ISP and VPN

It took years and years: this extensive investigation with the collaboration of law enforcement of multiple countries is only for big criminals

[-] just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 2 months ago

What are you talking about bro? What do you think the date center will do if vpn company doesn't keep logs?

By design vpn encrypts the the traffic between you and vpn provider that means its the ip of the vpn that talks to data center. For all intents and purposes it is the vpn company talking to data center. Even if data center is malicious and decides to take action it will take this action against vpn provider which will not link back to you.