The Kids' Guide to Piracy | Hacker News Reader

The Kids' Guide to Piracy

friendo.monster

29 pointsspeckx15 comments

Open articleView on HN

> The kids' guide to piracy

> It is only my intent that the advice offered here be used to download media that is in the public domain.

Then call it the guide to torrenting?

And yes, a VPN is a requirement. It's reckless to present a guide without a stronger emphasis on this.

There's two major ways to torrent, and they're a bit different.

1. Torrenting from big open trackers like PirateBay. The main skill here is that you need to be critical of what you download and wrap your traffic up tight in a VPN. Adding at least some info on getting started with Proton's Free VPN service would be valuable, as well as pointers to some that are known to be good for torrenting (for example, Proton has NAT options).

2. Torrenting from private trackers. The main skill here is self control, building ratio, figuring out how to find someone who knows someone who'll send you an invite because the last thing you want to do is wind up on IRC being interviewed by a person for whom audio codec and CD rip validation is their special interest who will use you as a punching bag because of whatever they're mad about in their personal life. One big note here is that they often allow VPN torrent downloads but ban VPN usage on their website.

There are also some places that are a good middle ground. Places like IPTorrents are generally safe enough to download from (with or without VPN in my experience, but Proton Free VPN is so easy and good that why not?) but generous enough with freeleech that you can build ratio if you try.

Seedboxes are also a good topic to cover for both because they alleviate some of the security concerns as well as letting you leave things to seed 24/7 easily.

Step 0 - install an adblocker and use a text only browser. Most iso trackers are filthy otherwise.

Kids guide to getting in hefty legal trouble and fines.

I got shut off for seeding Wrestlemania. No warnings or letters. Just a disconnect. AT&T fiber, I believe.

I reached support who told me the reasoning. I fed that tech a line saying I let a house-sitter use my computer while out of town and they reinstatated me.

I got kind of disproportionately agitated decided to learn networking/security, so I can figure out just how much they (the ISP) knows, are able to know, and how I can mitigate it. Now, here we are.

I feel like there's a responsibility to go into VPNs a bit more. My parents got a mean sounding legal letter from our ISP when I was younger for seeding Scooby Doo. It was both terrifying for me and my parents thought it was much more serious than it was, so I got in quite a bit of trouble.

This. VPNs are an absolute necessity for torrenting pirate content from public trackers, otherwise you're sure to get a Cease & Desist letter mailed to the house and risk getting your parents' internet disconnected. I know it's a "kids guide," but more emphasis should be made on VPN basics, such as binding the VPN port to torrent client.

> my parents thought it was much more serious than it was

How'd it end up? I'm wondering why it ended up actually less serious

It basically ended up with me learning that what is mostly pursued is the sharing part of piracy, and not doing that.

I got in a bit of trouble by my parents at the time and probably just stopped pirating stuff for a bit. No more issues from the ISP as we complied with the C&D and I stopped seeding stuff or uploading to shared FTPs (I can't really recall which was the issue at the time)

I can imagine an updated Pirates of the Carribean with pirates sitting at computers running bittorrent clients.

A slightly plump johnny depp wearing a pr8bay T-shirt while sipping mountain dew would cheer it on.

vpns are basically a requirement, at least in the us and canada, to prevent the scary legal letters from isps threatening to destroy your (parents, i guess?) lives

Or a seedbox on another continent.

I was hoping this would have more of a focus on risks / dangers too.

No mention of I2P? What a shame.

its not 2005 any more - we should be teaching WEB-DL instead of showing people how to do torrenting - no VPN needed because no ISP risk, and they can actually learn something instead of just continuing to be consumers which is all torrenting is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com