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Comment by stjohnswarts | Hacker News Reader

If you're gonna do this stuff always always always use a VPN, and not a free VPN. Honestly I use a VPN for literally everyhing. My two mobile phones and 3 PCs and a home server. If I can't get to a site because they block VPNs then fuck them I'll spend my money somewhere else.

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This is good advice, but it should probably be extended by saying that the VPN you chose matters. At least around here many VPN are just as inclined to share your internet usage with law enforcement and/or the law firms sending out those letters as ISPs are.

So you gotta make sure you use a VPN that doesn’t out you to the authorities, and, can’t be made to do so.

Or just live somewhere where consuming copyrighted content isn't a crime

Yeah or change the laws everywhere so copyright isn't a crime. Easy peasy.

I live in a country where that will never happen

So either rent a server in some country that doesn’t recognize copyright law, or uproot your entire life and move there? Why would anyone choose the second option?

the UK would be a good example of what they're referring to. in the UK there's absolutely no enforcement of consumer internet piracy laws whatsoever

Wait. Is this true? As in they have laws they just don't enforce them?

You get fined by your ISP (cough Virgin cough)

There's more of a focus on "commercial-scale" pirates. There used to be fines handed out to individuals but I thought they had given up on that a while back, but maybe not: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/09/customers-of-v...

> As we said earlier, such campaigns don’t have a terribly strong history of success in the UK. The courts have also previously warned such firms to be very careful about the use of threatening language, given that those being targeted are not yet proven to be guilty of what they are accused.

> Voltage seems to require the letter recipients’ to convince the firm that they weren’t responsible, but in law, the burden of proof is normally on Voltage to prove that the recipient is the one responsible and not the other way around.

Also see:

* https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-its-a-crime-uk-govt-ignored-...

* https://www.lewissilkin.com/en/insights/shipwrecking-online-...

* https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/new-law-to-deter-...

No, it isn't. Parent poster just talked out of his arse.

evidence for this?

Digital Economy Act 2017 increased the already-existing penalties to max 10 years in prison for copyright infringement - which you technically commit every time you fire up BitTorrent without blocking upload. The same act (and its predecessor 2010 bill) compels ISPs with over 400k subscribers (i.e. all the big ones) to monitor subscribers for such activity.

Then you have stuff like this: https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2020/09/17/uk-police-take-un...

The fact that prosecuting authorities tend to go after distributors rather than consumers is simply due to a value-for-money calculation. There is no formal or informal decriminalisation of consumer piracy, if they could find a cheap way to go after everyone they would - and they likely will, sooner or later.

if we've had laws such as that since 2017, and they were being enforced, you would have heard of people getting sentences, or even fines, right?

surely you can find stronger evidence than the police taking the unprecedented step of contacting - contacting, not arresting, or fining - a few tens of thousand in one region of the country?

Well, there is. You usually get a redirect to a website that says

THIS HAS BEEN BLOCKED BY THE HIGH COURT

or some shit. and then at that point you find the other domain that isn't, or just type in the IP. It's all very shallow

Or use another DNS service (Quad9, Cloudflare, Google, etc.) and never even be aware the block exists :)

that's not enforcement of consumer piracy laws. that's enforcement of distributor piracy laws

That's not true. ISPs are supposed to monitor their networks for illegal activity and notify consumers if they detect them doing illegal things. I got threatened with disconnection about 10 years ago, because my then-wife was downloading TV series fairly regularly via BitTorrent.

Also, people using stuff like IPTV and the likes are routinely cracked down on, with jail sentences and all.

I honestly have no idea how you could come up with a sentence like that. The UK is among the most piracy-restricting countries in Western Europe, because of the massive influence of a certain media-baron over the political landscape among other things.

because everyone I know pirates and no one I know has had an issue with it. I've never read an article about anyone being prosecuted for it. respectable people do it without fear

10 years ago is a long time

with popcorn you are simultaneously distributing, and that is the main problem

Yeah, I have had 0 copyright notices ever just downloading stuff, until literally this last week when I actually decided to stop being a leacher and seeded all the torrents I still had the files downloaded back up to 3x ratio. Got 3 copyright notices in a few days and then they actually flat out turned my internet off this morning until I called them. So finally got around to buying and setting up Mullvad and now all will be good from now on hopefully.

Where were you located?

Dallas, Texas with Spectrum for the last 3 or 4 years.

Would it be enough to slice the data between different connections when a country with restrictive laws is detected, so that no user is actually sharing working copies, not even single pages, portions of a song or single frames of a movie? That would be doable by separating data at atomic level, say odd nibbles here, even nibbles there, and transmit/receive them on different connections so that even by intercepting 100% of a transmission from point A to B there would be no chance to reconstruct the data, even in case the encryption, if present, was broken. The only way would be to tap also other connections containing the other half plus data for reconstruction, which would probably require physical access to the endpoint, or a court permit to intercept all data from to that endpoint, which is totally doable but on a whole different level, that is, if they are doing that then the user is already in trouble.

You trust your mobile phone data to some sketchy VPN provider but not your Local ISP?

You have never dealt with US ISPs I see... We have usually 1 or 2 ISPs and they are all spying on you for the MPAA and RIAA. So you clearly don't know what you're talking about here.

Would something like Private Relay be good enough, or should I just use Mullvad?

I would say use Mullvad or ExpressVPN. That said I don't have a clue what Private Relay is

Has anyone ever been fined or dropped by their ISPs though? I must have got like 5 letters for downloading movies and nothing else ever happened.

Instead of calling your ISP, they will call your VPN provider..

VPN doesn't hide your ip, it only makes it harder to look up. I don't think VPN protects you like people think they do.

I don't say you shouldn't use one, but I will say that the most popular VPN providers are probably already backdoored by the US government.

What are good VPNs to use?

Mullvand is the best I've found. It's a bit expensive though.

I'll second the Mullvad recommendation.

I don't even care that much about torrents or geo-locked stuff, I just trust them more than my ISP.

Setup was incredibly smooth and straightforward.

IIRC Mozilla also re-sells Mullvad's service under a name like (IIRC) FireFox VPN, which, last I'd heard, was still the only way to directly fund development of the browser.

Agreed. I was a happy Mullvad customer for a few years until Proton offered me a deal that was too good to pass up. I like to change up my VPN provider and/or account every couple of years anyway so I'll probably go back to Mullvad when my current term is up.

> IIRC Mozilla also re-sells Mullvad's service under a name like (IIRC) FireFox VPN, which, last I'd heard, was still the only way to directly fund development of the browser.

Which is a nice thing but you can't forward ports, and forwarding ports is a big benefit Mullvad has especially for torrents.

I'll third Mullvad and I don't think EUR5 a month is particularly expensive.

Well, you can get more shoddy VPNs for like 2 euros a month.

I used Algo to make my own, it builds a VPN server on your host. If you choose to host on digitalocean the script sets everything up via API and you're done in minutes.

https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

I reckon it is against DigitalOcean's terms of service to seed copyrighted content. They forward DMCA complaints and will threaten to deactivate your account if you disregard warnings.

Is there an easy way to run a single app through a VPN?

Or a seedbox.

PopcornTime is an app that lets you stream torrents as they're downloading, so a seedbox-like setup probably wouldn't be viable for this.

Yep you would have to set up a robosync with your seedbox over sftp or something similar.

...most IPS in most contries are just OK with piracy ...use proper VPNs for stuff that needs real security, enjoy your entertainment in peace (sure, if you're into weird kinds of pr0n). Most ppl who occasionally pirate also pay for content and have Netflix substrictions and stuff anyway (most artists do get payed - or at least some company gets paid for their work...), and those who don't would just pirate anyway, just switch ISP, so nothing gained by this.

(Side note: US seems like such a dystopian place nowaday... wasn't it "land of the free" or smth. And I'm comparing to like developed countries in Western Europe and Asia, not freakin Russia or Afganistan!)

You're just repeating the scaremongering that VPN providers use to sell their insecure s, please stop!

Do not use VPNs for things that require real security. Use Tor!

Tor + (~secure) VPN, but most things like pirating and pr0n DON'T require 'real' security!

You want privacy mainly and that's orthogonal to security.

If privacy is not enough and you need secrecy... well, just use your botnet as a VPN and from that get to Tor! (You do own a botnet in this case, that's what you need the secrecy for :P ...otherwise you'd have specialists hired for this at your disposal, or you'd be the specialist providing it to someone else).

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