I’m just curious as I’ve permanently dedicated my laptop to torrenting. I’ve been too nervous to install anything but the VPN and Firefox on it. Now, I’m curious to mess around with Linux some more, which is what I use on it, but I can’t fully test out what all I can do with it without signing into accounts.
Do you use your torrent machine to do other things besides torrenting, signing into personal accounts and stuff?
I have a dedicated computer for torrents and I don’t sign into any accounts with it, I also block torrents on my router and bind my client to my VPN seems to work out okay
Security starts first with you. Most of the attacks are done though social engineering. Email phishing, dodgy webpage logins.
Normal password security behaviour should fine for you to use the pc.
More importantly, what is the distro you’re using?
Maybe consider using Flatpaks for the apps, they tend to offer more restrictions on access to the system. (Installing the torrent app as a Flatpak and only give it permissions to a specific folder)
One of things I tend to do is install chromium just to login on my Google apps, Gmail, YT. But I’m more of a non data sharing freak.
I’ve got some vservers and some block storage at hosters in a different country and I terminate a VPN tunnel there from yet another country. Storage is LUKS encrypted and VMs are configured to halt hard automatically in case of certain triggers that hint towards hypervisor side fuckery.
It’s not bullet proof, but it’s fire and forget, basically seed boxes where I’ve split knowledge further.
I used this as an exercise in provider agnostic deployment and I’m mainly hosting archive.org torrents that can use some seeding there.
I don’t pirate very often anymore, but when I do, I use whatever computer I happen to be on. I just turn on a VPN and bind the torrenting client to the VPN only. This is how I’ve torrented for years, since the late 2000s. I’ve gotten a couple strikes from my ISP several years ago, but that was before I had a commercial VPN. Otherwise, I’ve no issues.
What are the potential security upsides of doing it on a VM/container or a dedicated machine? I can imagine some performance upsides, but that’s about it.
Depends on the devices I have on hand. Both my laptop and have my VPN, so I am able to get my LibreOffice windows downloads and ahemother things that I am not gonna talk about.
if you use a dedicated device for torrents its more because its faster if you try to also open a browser when torrenting big files and its using all your bandwidth it just makes everything slower.if you seed and download a lot that can slow down everything else you do on that device.
I use a wyse terminal as a torrent downloader and samba server. I stored documents, including my CV on there until recently but started thinking that might be a bad idea. So now I sync those documents between my devices using Syncthing and will soon be installing Jellyfin on that wyse terminal.
not exactly. you use an old machine like that and run it headless… throw a bunch of containers on it…
get yourself a gluetun and maybe deluge containers… youll have a solid vpn connection, and a torrenting client that wont bleed to public. you can run all kinds of compartmentalized services fairly easily.
Yes, I torrent on the same machine where all my personal stuff is. The biggest reason for this is that I don’t have a dedicated machine to torrent 24/7, though I’d definitely like to set that up at some point. I like being able to seed niche torrents to those who need them, and a machine seeding 24/7 would definitely help with that. Also having easy simple access to the downloaded files is always a plus, but there’s a myriad of ways to do this over a local network (pretty sure some torrenting clients even have an option to torrent over LAN).
My torrent client is bound to my VPN’s network interface, and my VPN has a killswitch as well, so I’m not paranoid that things will suddenly leak. Been running this setup for months now without issues.
I built a NAS and I have the full *arr suite running on it in containers. Usenet and torrent clients organize my media, and since it’s a network share I can access everything from my devices.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
I have a dedicated computer for torrents and I don’t sign into any accounts with it, I also block torrents on my router and bind my client to my VPN seems to work out okay
Security starts first with you. Most of the attacks are done though social engineering. Email phishing, dodgy webpage logins. Normal password security behaviour should fine for you to use the pc. More importantly, what is the distro you’re using? Maybe consider using Flatpaks for the apps, they tend to offer more restrictions on access to the system. (Installing the torrent app as a Flatpak and only give it permissions to a specific folder) One of things I tend to do is install chromium just to login on my Google apps, Gmail, YT. But I’m more of a non data sharing freak.
I’ve got some vservers and some block storage at hosters in a different country and I terminate a VPN tunnel there from yet another country. Storage is LUKS encrypted and VMs are configured to halt hard automatically in case of certain triggers that hint towards hypervisor side fuckery.
It’s not bullet proof, but it’s fire and forget, basically seed boxes where I’ve split knowledge further.
I used this as an exercise in provider agnostic deployment and I’m mainly hosting archive.org torrents that can use some seeding there.
I have a dedicated machine that torrents and seeds 24/7 but for some random thing I use my main pc
Technically yes. I have all my piracy stuff running in a VM on my desktop.
I don’t pirate very often anymore, but when I do, I use whatever computer I happen to be on. I just turn on a VPN and bind the torrenting client to the VPN only. This is how I’ve torrented for years, since the late 2000s. I’ve gotten a couple strikes from my ISP several years ago, but that was before I had a commercial VPN. Otherwise, I’ve no issues.
What are the potential security upsides of doing it on a VM/container or a dedicated machine? I can imagine some performance upsides, but that’s about it.
Depends on the devices I have on hand. Both my laptop and have my VPN, so I am able to get my LibreOffice windows downloads and ahem other things that I am not gonna talk about.
This is like asking “do you own a second computer?”
if you use a dedicated device for torrents its more because its faster if you try to also open a browser when torrenting big files and its using all your bandwidth it just makes everything slower.if you seed and download a lot that can slow down everything else you do on that device.
I use a wyse terminal as a torrent downloader and samba server. I stored documents, including my CV on there until recently but started thinking that might be a bad idea. So now I sync those documents between my devices using Syncthing and will soon be installing Jellyfin on that wyse terminal.
you recommend wyse? any negative experiences with it?
Currently I’m using a crypto VPS with gluetun for torrenting I swap VPN server every 3 days.
For security reasons I can’t tell you what’s the country I live in but my VPS it’s hosted in Russia.
This guy spies.
LMAO I’m not from Russia, I just host the VPS there, less risk of getting caught for piracy…
not exactly. you use an old machine like that and run it headless… throw a bunch of containers on it…
get yourself a gluetun and maybe deluge containers… youll have a solid vpn connection, and a torrenting client that wont bleed to public. you can run all kinds of compartmentalized services fairly easily.
I don’t have a dedicated torrent machine. I sometimes use my phone. Sometimes my gaming PC. Sometimes my TV’s PC.
Yes, I torrent on the same machine where all my personal stuff is. The biggest reason for this is that I don’t have a dedicated machine to torrent 24/7, though I’d definitely like to set that up at some point. I like being able to seed niche torrents to those who need them, and a machine seeding 24/7 would definitely help with that. Also having easy simple access to the downloaded files is always a plus, but there’s a myriad of ways to do this over a local network (pretty sure some torrenting clients even have an option to torrent over LAN).
My torrent client is bound to my VPN’s network interface, and my VPN has a killswitch as well, so I’m not paranoid that things will suddenly leak. Been running this setup for months now without issues.
I built a NAS and I have the full *arr suite running on it in containers. Usenet and torrent clients organize my media, and since it’s a network share I can access everything from my devices.
Yeah, although, now that you bring it up, I might want to put it in a vm.