If you are a pirate VPN is an essential tool. I am trying to ascertain the popularity of various VPNs in piracy community. In this excerise, I will list several Popular VPNs in the comment if you use one of them just upvote that comment and reply the reason. If you don’t find your VPN listed add a comment with just their name. Reply the reason to it. This make it easier to understand the real life user cases.
P.S: I am only looking for paid VPNs please don’t mention “free vpn”.
So… at the risk of humiliating myself,
I’ve never once used a VPN in my entire life.
I pirated games, movies, shows, music, software… and the worst thing that happened to me was getting a letter from Telus once or twice saying “Hey. Don’t do that.”
That was 5 years ago
I know it’s bad practice. But is a VPN 100% necessary? Even a free one?
I find incredible that it’s absolutely illegal for anyone to read your letters and only the police can do that and only if a judge grant them the right to do that case by case, and a private telecommunications company can read absolutely all your digital communication with no judge involved and no one blinks an eye.
Generally CnD letters are not generated by the ISPs themselves. ISPs don’t care what you do unless legally obligated to. When you get a CnD letter, it’s usually because someone working for a copyright holder was on a torrent and snagged your IP, then sent an infringement notice to your ISP, who in turn sends a CnD to the current holder of the IP, i.e. you.
At no point does your ISP have to read your digital communications themselves. Any one of your peers on a torrent can tell what your public IP address is, it’s inherent to the BitTorrent protocol. Copyright holders take advantage of this to catch pirates.
I’m gonna google “How to bomb Telus Headquarters and assassinate their board of directors” and see how fast they respond
Well maybe. It’s one of the reasons e2e encryption is so imperative to online privacy. For instance, turning on https everywhere, then your isp can only see which servers you’re connecting to, not what’s in your traffic to them.
And to point it out up front, yeah the distant end’s servers likely have some for of that traffic captured, but now law enforcement has to dig up every company that they’re trying to pull info from. Which is significantly more difficult than just relying on a one stop shop arrangement.
And for the best privacy, like security, a multi-layered approach is better. So throw in a VPN, throw in something like a mullvad browser, throw in pseudonymous accounts, throw in different usernames + passwords across accounts, throw in…
That’s because you’re in Canada. We don’t need to worry like Americans can. It’s not really necessary for us.
While people sometimes suggest ignoring it because they say that your ISP is only sending you those notices because the laws compel them to and you downloaded something that was tracked, you may want to evaluate your risk.
Nothing has happened so far. Could something happen in the future?
Your ISP has built an entire portfolio of the things you’ve done online and which content you pirated. Who know how long your ISP retains that data, or which companies or regulatory bodies it shares this data with?
Laws may change.
Up to you on what you want to do with this information.
I think of it like having sex with or without a condom. If you don’t use a condom, there’s a chance to get an STD (or get “caught”). It’s not a guarantee to get caught, your IP address needs to end up in the pool of addresses they collect to send out DMCA notices so it won’t happen every time. But having a “condom” (VPN) reduces your chances by nearly 100%, assuming it’s properly setup which usually is a very simple process
Same here. Started with IRC, then private trackers. Always force encryption. Zero issues. VPN is a waste of money for piracy.