Oh, I have a question to all of the people who pirate but live in a country where that’s illegal and punished (with huge fines, I assume). I’m very interested in listening to some stories of how it’s technically done (vpn, a seedbox, or you just keep things simple and don’t care). E.g. I’ve been trying sophisticated backlists of IPs, but I have no idea whether they work. But even more I am interested in a legal aspect, meaning how serious these copyright claims are. Do you know anyone personally, who was punished for downloading a TV show? Which country? Personally, I know many folks who do, but none who was fined.
With torrents you'll want a VPN. Usenet is generally safe just thanks to TLS unless you're uploading content. For that I'd use a VPN. But unlike torrent, Usenet isn't P2P so I can just download at my full internet bandwidth and don't need to hope there are enough seeders out there maintaining it or that I maintain some magic upload / download ratio.
What about torrents and Tor? Moral aspects aside. (Personally, I’d not do it, out of respect for the network.) Just curious about it theoretically, how this technology and its ‘moderation’ (let’s call it that) works.
Torrents and Tor aren't related. BitTorrent (the protocol) is about peer to peer file sharing and the metadata that enables it. Tor is a network overlay that helps prevent an actor from seeing both where a connection is coming from and where it is going to at the same time. If you're using Tor your ISP can see that you're using it, but not what sites you visit. Other agencies could see that Tor traffic is going to website XXX, but not which individual Tor users are making the connection. Just that they come from a Tor relay. It's not perfect and there are ways to compromise the safety Tor and onion routing is trying to provide.
Generally I don't associate Tor with pirating content. It's more about accessing published content or publishing content anonymously.
Yeah, I know, and that’s why I mentioned that personally I won’t use tor network for downloading huge amounts of data, out of the respect for the network. It’s meaningful for countries where Internet is censored, and wasn’t invented for piracy, rather for censoring circumvention. But theoretically it’s possible to move your traffic through the network, that way nobody can tell you are torrenting, I assume. (Or at least what you’re torrenting.)
Personally, I know just one person who does that. We’re not close for me to ask him anything, though (a friend of a friend of a friend). For the context, he lives in Germany.
I don't even know what the law says in my own country, instead I use a country where is it not illegal to download (but is to upload) and has excellent global connectivity and got a VPS there. I installed Transmission, disabled uploads, and a few other tools and now I just click the magnet link on a torrent site and the media shows up in my download folder after a few minutes or sometimes hours. For anything a bit popular I get 300Mbps downloads on average.
The country in question is left as an exercise for the reader.
Argentina. Have been using BitTorrent directly from my home connection for close to 20 years now without issue, no VPN or anything. Never heard of anyone getting a fine, a warning, or anything like that. Never ran into transfer cap issues either; despite my ISP having a stated monthly cap of 250 GB down (although that was years ago; it may have changed), I handily exceed it every month, and some months I've passed 1 TiB without getting throttled at all. The record according to pfSense is 2.2 TiB in a single month.
I wonder why law enforcements in these countries do not fine people of torrents. It’s effectively a free money for them, it seems. Yet, more often I hear stories like these, especially from the not too first world countries. But not third world ones either, second world, maybe.
