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Comment by igleria | Hacker News Reader

A little bit tangential but: I hated while living in Germany that some movies were legally available ONLY with german dubs. While making the only alternative, piracy... risky.

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Are subs or dubs best for anime? In Germany this endless debate has been finally settled by the state. Next week they will rule on vim or emacs, then they promise to end the question of tabs vs spaces.

I remember childhood in the 90s with german tv channels.

It was a bit confusing when Roseanne and Kim Basinger had the exact same voice.

Or John Dorian and Light Yagami.

When we were kids, my friend was convinced Clint Eastwood was a German.

Germany still hasn’t banned VPNs yet, so there are still non-risky options here for torrenting.

I know that technically you can configure your torrent client to disconnect if by some reason the vpn connection dropped, but I was so paranoid about f*ing it up that I just accepted defeat. I think living there for 4 and a half years really changed me (still waiting on red lights while on foot even if the street is dead at 3 AM, for example).

The proper way to do this is to use a seedbox (basically a VPS w/ lots of storage, in a pirate-friendly jurisdiction, that comes preinstalled with all the tools you'd need). It's weird that top AI labs have been caught torrenting stuff, when the solution is obvious, and doesn't leave traces (i.e. no meta IP ranges would have been leaked)...

Familiar with Seedboxes but do you really get off worry free just because the hardware exists in a different country (probably on leaseweb)? Wouldn’t it matter where the company was based itself or is the biggest hope that you’ve become too much of a pain in the ass to deal with?

You have to think from the perspective of "who has enough data to correlate this with you". Obviously, three letter agencies will know. But that's not the point.

What happens usually is that a) copyright investigators (on behalf of copyright holder associations) or b) ISPs do basic analysis and "flag" IP addresses.

The copyright investigators usually look at torrenting pools, log all the IPs, and do some sort of query on those IPs (whois, reverse dns, etc). Then they pursue the biggest targets. "Hey, look, this IP that belongs to Meta has torrented 4234234TBs worth of our clients' data. Bad Meta". And the headlines pour.

Your local ISPs do basic inspection, and can see you're torrentig, but usually (unless they take extra steps) won't know what you're torrenting. But they can send a letter saying "hey, knock it off!".

If you're using a "proxy", either via VPN or VPS (seedbox) then your primary IP address never gets caught in these logs. So they won't be able to know who it was. Sure, they can go the legal route and subpoena the VPS providers, but that's where the "friendly jurisdiction" comes into play. Unless they get raided by said 3 letter agencies, they won't care much about an angry letter from a lawyer.

Still, I’d imagine the company would still have to comply to the laws where they’re based not where the location of the hardware is.

You're talking about companies (seedboxes, not Leaseweb) whose entire business model is enabling piracy. If they got their customers in legal trouble for piracy, they'd quickly go out of business.

btw a representative of Leaseweb told me they don't do individual accounts any more - they're focusing on the European sovereign cloud transition.

Get a cheap travel router from gl.inet and set it up as a VPN client with its own wifi ssid. Turn on its leak protection (drop connection when VPN is inactive). Connect your devices to that, and delete your main wifi credentials from them so they don’t accidentally hop back on.

Torrent to your heart’s content.

I actually browse full time like this; all traffic leaving my house via my ISP is VPN (or some limited exclusions that all use TLS).

If you want a certain advanced networking program to only use a VPN, see if it has an option to force it to use a particular network adapter. A VPN shows up as a fake network adapter.

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