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Well this is a blast from the past for sure. I haven't been looking at torrents for ages, mostly because local LEO partnered together with extortion lawyers ma
by waihtis 6y ago
Well this is a blast from the past for sure.
I haven't been looking at torrents for ages, mostly because local LEO partnered together with extortion lawyers made it uncomfortable over where I live. Literally extortion in this case, as the legal firms in this business sent blackmail letters to people who's IP addresses had been seen as part of a torrenting activity to either pay a ridiculous settlement fee or go to court.
- exikyut 6y agoWould be kinda cool to, err, "join" some majority of the Wi-Fi networks in your area and download some of the most boring stuff possible (including of course Linux distros)...
- Erlich_Bachman 6y agoIf you list that as the primary reason, why not just use a VPN?
- beagle3 6y agoWhy do you just trust a VPN provider, any VPN provider?
- TuringTest 6y agoWhat is the alternative?
- dewey 6y agoBecause for this use case of avoiding the extortion lawyers this is good enough. Nobody is going to bother with trying to go after some VPN provider when there's millions of people on normal ISPs where they just have to give them a call. As usual, it's all about knowing your threat model.
- Bnshsysjab 6y agoYou don’t think providers would be willing to sell that information for cheap? They’d just saw off country sized chunks and sell bit by bit
- dewey 6y agoThe business model of these lawyers is to join a few swarms of big popular titles, then send automated letters to the ISP, then send automated letters to the address they got from the ISP and collect money (At least here in Germany). They are only going after the low hanging fruits, it's not about catching everyone or doing deals with VPN providers located in some hard to reach country.
- Bnshsysjab 6y agoThat’s an extremely definitive point of view. What if the lawyers agree to give the VPN provider 10% of the proceeds?
- pinusc 6y agoThat VPN provider would likely be out of business extremely fast. If you offer a service that's supposed to increase privacy, and it doesn't... who's gonna pay for that service? Of course exceptions apply with law enforcement, but then again your threat model is very different there (and the VPN provider in question will not be able to say no). That being said, there are VPN providers who guarantee that no logs are kept (I believe ProtonVPN does this) and are extremely privacy-oriented. I am inclined to believe these companies, if all I'm doing is pirating a few movies.
- Bnshsysjab 6y agoVPN\seedbox providers probably don’t make the wisest business choices. They may not care bout the longevity of their business even if they do. Hosting providers that sell bandwidth to VPN services could easily log traffic. There have been numerous cases where ‘No logs’ VPN providers have been caught logging details. See the recently exposed logstash breach.
- Eremotherium 6y agoJust a tangent, but you can send Mullvad an envelope with cash and your account number as a form of payment. That's not a proof of trust but it's a statement IMO
- monadic2 6y agoIt's not so much about trust as it is about defense in depth. Many states won't cooperate with american litigation.
- 0-_-0 6y agoBecause trust is what they sell, unlike an ISP.
- waihtis 6y agoI was a very passive torrenter anyway, just found it easier to source stuff in alternative ways
- Pelic4n 6y agoRent a seedbox in eastern europe (somewhere like Belarus or Romania) and torrent your stuff from there. There's no way they can cost-efficiently get you that way.
- waihtis 6y agoTbh I dont really need illegal torrents nowadays, but thats an interesting concept for sure.
- mehdix 6y agoIt is not necessarily about illegal torrents. There are some niche files such old movies that you wouldn't find anywhere to let you watch it where you live. I used to torrent some, just to keep it alive and prevent such works from disappearing from the Internet. However, I'd still prefer to torrent from a location that reduces the chance of receiving such letters from opportunity seekers to suck some cash out of me.
- waihtis 6y agoYou do have a good point - although the extortion lawyers were just contracted by some of the big studios. Ergo, the likelihood of being hunted by the heirs of a ww2-era Polish filmmaker or similar entity are considerably slimmer. :-) Youre right though in that its generally a good idea to stay anon when torrenting.
- DangerousPie 6y agoThe law firms aren't going after everyone who is torrenting, they are going after people downloading copyrighted material. You're not going to get a letter if you're downloading a torrent of the latest Ubuntu image.
- aasasd 6y agoNot guaranteed, actually, due to the carpet-bombing strategy of targeting the ‘culprits’. Can't remember if Linux specifically was involved, but there certainly were some misfires. (Ironically, when I tried downloading fresh Ubuntu with desktop Transmission, it froze for a rather long while, presumably due to the near-two-thousand peers.)
- rendall 6y agoDoes that still happen? I thought that the ability to spoof IP addresses in torrent networks ended that. The accuser not only has to prove that the IP address hosted the file, but also that it was not spoofed; an impossible ask