Before I say anything further, yes I know how much the recommended VPNs cost. I can read. Please do not interrogate me about it.
I’ve been wanting to get into torrenting for a while, particularly contributing to private trackers related to music (and to a lesser extent retro games, though I don’t have much original stuff to put there as it’s harder to find rare games than rare music). FMHY recommends RiseUp if I must get a free VPN while I’m working on my financial situation, though I’m not sure whether it’s been tested in court. What are my options, if any?
It’s really that important in the USA? Asking from Europe, where Ivve never even heard of anyone getting fined.
You can afford AirVPN 💜
i2p.
Here’s a reliable, free VPN: https://riseup.net/en/vpn
If you can share the cost of a VPN with one or more other people (most allow multiple devices to connect at the same time), it’ll be much cheaper. Or if you can’t afford that either, try to find someone who will let you use theirs for free. Maybe you can even find someone who isn’t tech savvy who will pay you a few bucks a month to cover the VPN in exchange for you downloading Linux ISOs for them.
Mullvad is €5 a month for total of €60 for a year.
Save up then torrent. If you live in the US you risk way more in fines than what €60 for a year of VPN would cost.
You basically have 5 (?) devices there. Share the cost with 4 friends and it’s 1 Euro a month.
I would prioritize a VPN ahead of an ISP. Free Open/Public APs are not uncommon in my area.
Honest question, why would you need a VPN if you want to download from private trackers?
Usually, copyright owners target people on public trackers and on the DHT. Not a problem if you only get into private trackers.
Use torrent over ipfs. Qbittorrent can do it.
I use proton and our local laundry-mats; they have open WIFI…and you can get your laundry done while waiting for the torrent to finish
I would suggest don’t.
For downloading, look at DDL sites.
For uploading, if you can’t do it safely, don’t. Stash it all, make backups, keep it until you can do it safely.
Its being a while for me but windscribe and seedr had totally usable free tiers
Find a friend in a less shit place you can proxy through.
RiseUp is slow and intended for activists and the politically vulnerable. It’s not for poor people who cannot afford a $5 a month VPN. You will be fucking over people with much more legitimate use cases than yours if you start using it for torrenting.
I see… Not sure what I’m supposed to do then.
Tribler or i2p.
Edit: there are also non-bittorrent p2p networks out there like Retroshare, but I haven’t used them, so don’t know how useful they are.
What are the adoption rates of those compared to a standard private tracker?
Dunno, I haven’t used private trackers in 10 years. You can add any magnet link to Tribler and it will go through exit nodes to hide your IP, kind of like Tor does for browsing clearnet. I haven’t used i2p in a while either; back then, I used the Postman tracker, and don’t know if that’s still what most people do or not. I personally just use a paid VPN, because there really isn’t a good way to set Tribbler up with an *arr stack.
