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Beginner questions: VPN safe enough? How to use all these tools? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 9 months ago by lazarus@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Hi, I'd like to set the sails due to being frustrated with streaming services, but I have some questions beforehand. I hope, you can help me with that, since lurking and reading the Megathread/Wiki didn't really answer my questions. Thanks for your help.

Is just using a fitting VPN (I've read about Mullvad and ProtonVPN in this community) safe enough to not get caught? I'm located in germany, so sharing even as much as a few kB of pirated content can cost me thousands of euros. I want to be really sure, that I won't get letters from some lawyer soon. All, that I've read so far is basically: Setup VPN and your Torrent software, including kill switch and maybe get into private trackers. Thats it. Is this really enough? Can I do more to be safe? What exactly is the risk with public trackers (as they are often mentioned as the "low hanging fruit" for copyright lawyers)?
I've read the post The complete guide to building your personal self hosted server for streaming and ad-blocking, which mentions many tools to setup. I'm sure these help me find and view content. But are there good resources explaining the functionalities of this software? I'm familiar with Docker and I know about Jellyfin, but it is really unclear to me, what exactly all the other tools do.

Big thanks from a long time lurker!

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[-] zaine00@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I might start sounding like a shill, but Mullvad has a great track record so far. They've been raided by police and they've walked away with nothing. They also fairly recently migrated fully to a diskless RAM only infrastructure also.

The previous poster kind of hinted on this, but Mullvad removed port forwarding from their services, so keep that in mind.

Also for payment, Mullvad will accept cash over mail so you can't be traced digitally by payment.

[-] lazarus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

XD cash over mail, ok. But I guess for only a couple of euros that is worth a try. They seem to be located in Gothenburg, Sweden. Might try that. Honestly their website is really based. Thats for the suggestion with cash over mail.

For what would I need port forwarding?

[-] hangonasecond@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

Makes you connectable. If you don't forward ports for your torrent client you can only connect to peers who are port forwarding, meaning you will download and upload more slowly in most cases.

[-] Cinner@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

You'll need port forwarding for private torrent sites so people can download from you better.

[-] ShepherdPie@midwest.social 1 points 9 months ago

Mullvad is no longer good for torrenting as they removed port forwarding meaning you can't open a port for others to connect to for seeding. This might get you by on public trackers alone where it's common to just download a file and never seed it back, but you'll quickly get banned from any private trackers.