I guess, that depends on the legislative of your country, maybe they see all interactions with usenet providers as illegal, and if you are not using a VPN they see what IP you talk to. But in the other hand, in such countries, using (foreign) VPNs may also be illegal🤔
Your ISP sees the connection to news.usenetserver.com and if they cared could get a court order to get your data from them. They can compel you to release your username and password.
You also need to protect yourself against future law and enforcement
You can keep secrets from the future. Future decryption won’t help government see what you did in the now, the logs don’t store the encrypted payload, only the end points and the user/ip
I know that government prosecutions for fraud against government use IP addresses
The IP address identifies the company or home the fraud was done from, the account the money went to identifies the individual
If breaking the law and able to afford to make it difficult for prosecutors, it’s probably best to make it difficult for the prosecutors, we may have an activist pro copyright holder government in future and logs are forever (or 5 years)
I have had like 14 while I was still in school here in canada. if things haven’t changed you just ignore them because they can’t do jack if you don’t respond. Someone I worked with was blown away when I told him this because back home he was banned from all but the slowest ISP.
Hah I wish we could ignore them. It seems to just vary from ISP to ISP in the US but our small town ISP turns off your connection and puts you behind a captive portal forcing you to click through and accept what you did wrong before your connection is turned back on.
That is supposedly the case in Australia as well but I haven’t got a letter from telstra since around 2004 and I have never used a VPN and watch all my shows and movies via torrents so either I’m extremely lucky or they stopped bothering.
Though recently I started paying the $4 / month for Real Debrid for better streaming performance, which is just as good as a VPN for torrent anonymity. I used to be fundamentally against the idea of paying anything to pirate but honestly this is worth it, I’ve even been able to watch a few shows that had 0 seeders because they were previously cached.
That says their error was trying American threats “we got you dead to rights, tell us your income and we’ll tell you how much to pay our we’ll sue for punitive damages”
Which isn’t legal in Australia. They would have been ok if they had asked to send a letter saying “stop it or pay us a reasonable amount for one person viewing the film once” but of course actual damages aren’t enough for film companies
Yeah basically. But part of why no one has tried again is because the judge made it very clear he wasn’t going to just roll over and let them pull their BS. Including setting a bond of $600k for them to even try litigating it. Another part of it is that ISPs used to hand out IP addresses and PII in response to requests from media companies. This was found to be in breach of privacy laws and now those companies would have to apply for court orders, proving malfeasance, to get that information.
IP law firms tried to get their cases into my country and they only got a 50% success rate on court so they stopped trying (cost benefit thing I suppose).
Also private trackers in my country do not allow the use of VPN (why do they care IDK, they say it is to have more control on who join), so there’s little point on getting a VPN for piracy here.
Also private trackers in my country do not allow the use of VPN (why do they care IDK, they say it is to have more control on who join), so there’s little point on getting a VPN for piracy here.
it’s probably for IP banning or something. Whitelist authorization, something silly like that.
importantly it’s (hopefully) an ISP that operates from a less copyright-happy country and isn’t tied down to tons of expensive infrastructure and long-term contracts
yeah, and? What are they going to do? Send the DEA after you for growing GMO titties? Gonna hit you with the ATF because you grew hormonally altered facial hair?
They’ve got shit like fentanyl to be worrying about. I think this is probably the least of concerns, especially considering this is less “drug addiction” and more “illegal prescription drugs” instead. Besides, they don’t get drug money from trans people.
It’s certainly a potential risk for procurement of the drug legally. But that’s already a problem.
Title is probably true, but also it’s less likely for the NSA to leak your info than say an ISP that openly sells your info. I highly doubt that the NSA sees someone pirating Photoshop as a priority. VPNs can help with preventing a random ad from logging your real loose location, have built in DNS ad block, open up region locked content plus a list of other benefits.
VPNs absolutely help with general privacy, like not putting your personal phone number on a public registry. They are not intended to perfectly hide you from a super power’s intelligence agency lol
As he said, paid with crypto and managed with his own keys. I don’t see how the seedbox provider can trace you if you do that, so there’s not that much to worry about
You’re going to connect to the seedbox at some point, which ties your IP to the traffic. If you are worried about a VPN attaching your IP to traffic, this is no different, no?
SFTP over TOR. This should be a requirement at this point.
If you’re not doing that, then yes you’re technically right in that seedbox companies can be subpoenaed too. I usually use TOR to copy over what little I torrent.
The existence of the NSA and their activities is not proof that they have backdoors in VPNs. That’s bogeyman conspiracy theory shit—“they could be anywhere, therefore they’re everywhere!”
You still haven’t answered the question, and I’m beginning to think you are making shit up based on paranoia.
Is your home machine, your phone, better protected than the VPN servers? I bet you’re not as good at IT security as the IT security staff VPN companies hire
If your threat model includes nation state actors, you’re best off not using networked computers
I am all about good tinfoil but some of these people acting as if they are SNOWDEN lol
Yes if feds wanted to catch you shitposting, watching big titied asian porn and downloading coldplay… I think there raised ways than compromising a VPN provider.
Unless it is a honey pot, then use a different VPN provider. Gonna need trust at the end of the day.
That’s an interesting point, but I think the “if it’s high profile enough” is key. People torrenting files is probably low on their priorities. On the other hand, somebody organizing a terrorist cell is probably much higher.
Companies might have an interest in finding pirates, but it would not be as easy for them to get other companies to comply with their subpoenas.
yeah if ur just a dude pirating, it probably doesn’t matter, but if they find you’ve done a large crime, you can bet your ass that shits getting yoinked from you.
companies might, but that’s almost entirely through legal processes. ceast and desists, required reporting, etc…
Technically speaking, VPN logs tend to include the IP address of clients connecting to them, after which the good VPN providers like Mullvad, IVPN and maybe PIA tend to purge them somewhere in their process. Now, if the VPN is running in a RAM-only node, then these logs probably don’t touch storage, which means there’s not much need to shred information from hard drives for the VPN provider.
With that said, an ISP can technically log your traffic and see that you’re connecting to the IP range associated with a VPN. That and perhaps some more covert side-channel/correlation attacks can, in theory, compromise your identity.
Of course, this is going deep into OPSEC and forensics, and I don’t think the NSA is that interested in the average Billy torrenting “The Office” to go through that many logs, even if the studios sue in court. Hence, technically your privacy is somewhat maintained with the good VPN providers, but you’re definitely not anonymous
That’s kind of my thought as well. It’s certainly possible someone might go through the effort to find a single pirate downloading The Lion King, but that’s a lot of effort (read: money) to find just one person.
There’s certainly the possibility that an ISP could note that you connected to a VPN, but given that it’s not a remarkable event, since people connect to VPNs for all kinds of legal reasons, they aren’t likely to track your particular IP’s connection to a VPN apart from a court ordering them to care. They get paid their monthly internet plan price whether someone pirates or checks their email.
If someone was running the Pirate Bay from their home servers, however, more parties would likely be interested in finding that person, and that person’s threat model probably exceeds just using a logless VPN.
Everyone knows it’s impossible for the NSA to buy rack space in Bulgaria, where they literally don’t have to deal with any US legal process.
It’s also impossible for the NSA to market such a service via pop-privacy blogs and social media profiles.
The funny part about this is that the Snowden leaks showed that the NSA actually put a lot of effort into doing shit like this specifically to avoid all the paperwork which came with accidentally collecting data from US citizens. Keeping the data and analysis off shore means no pesky FISA paperwork.
Because if the government wants that data then they are gonna get it. If it’s in another country its a lot more work than just serving them a warrant like it is if they are USbased
At least that’s a more reasonable answer than trying to imply the NSA has backdoors everywhere.
My position is that it all depends on your threat model. The government isn’t likely to go after someone who torrents files and is hidden by a VPN. The government might go after someone running a streaming site, on the other hand.
And even that might wind up with a dead end. AirVPN (for example) is Canada-based, has no logs, and accepts both crypto and anonymous cash payments.
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It’s important to note that a VPN is simply somebody else’s network in another location.
And please don’t use anime girls to refer to every fucking thing in the world
I mean this is Persona 5 and this is 100% what Futaba would say and do
I thought you don’t need a VPN for things like usenet
If your provider supports SSL and you actually turn it on then no technically don’t need a VPN for Usenet.
I guess, that depends on the legislative of your country, maybe they see all interactions with usenet providers as illegal, and if you are not using a VPN they see what IP you talk to. But in the other hand, in such countries, using (foreign) VPNs may also be illegal🤔
this is dangerous advice. courts can still subpoena the usenet provider for your information.
Meh my Usenet provider also partners with a VPN provider. Still costs me £5 a month for the VPN but I may as well use it, I like having a VPN
Your ISP sees the connection to news.usenetserver.com and if they cared could get a court order to get your data from them. They can compel you to release your username and password.
You also need to protect yourself against future law and enforcement
You can’t keep secrets from the future.
Heard that once in a song about how all encryption is doomed to break against future math/computing power. Great eery phrase.
You can keep secrets from the future. Future decryption won’t help government see what you did in the now, the logs don’t store the encrypted payload, only the end points and the user/ip
i never hav to use one lmao
Please explain…
ukraine, poland, no-one cares abt it here :p
Or pirat through a public library proxy :)
Explain this to me more thoroughly? Does this mean physically going to the library and using their Wi-Fi? Or are you talking about something else?
I have a proxy host on a library terminal Server and a VPN through/to their firewall (its actually a network of Libraries
I don’t use a VPN because my government has acknowledged that an IP address cannot identify what individual was using it.
wouldn’t trust that tbh
I know that government prosecutions for fraud against government use IP addresses
The IP address identifies the company or home the fraud was done from, the account the money went to identifies the individual
If breaking the law and able to afford to make it difficult for prosecutors, it’s probably best to make it difficult for the prosecutors, we may have an activist pro copyright holder government in future and logs are forever (or 5 years)
If your country persecutes individual piracy. Mine doesn’t.
Yep, my govt only cares about porn, manga, hentai, online gambling sites, reddit and duckduckgo.
Why DDG?
racist against ducks
Oh Yea Kiwi people
Woah where do you live?
Our ISP sends 3 strike letters :(
I have had like 14 while I was still in school here in canada. if things haven’t changed you just ignore them because they can’t do jack if you don’t respond. Someone I worked with was blown away when I told him this because back home he was banned from all but the slowest ISP.
Hah I wish we could ignore them. It seems to just vary from ISP to ISP in the US but our small town ISP turns off your connection and puts you behind a captive portal forcing you to click through and accept what you did wrong before your connection is turned back on.
That is supposedly the case in Australia as well but I haven’t got a letter from telstra since around 2004 and I have never used a VPN and watch all my shows and movies via torrents so either I’m extremely lucky or they stopped bothering.
Though recently I started paying the $4 / month for Real Debrid for better streaming performance, which is just as good as a VPN for torrent anonymity. I used to be fundamentally against the idea of paying anything to pirate but honestly this is worth it, I’ve even been able to watch a few shows that had 0 seeders because they were previously cached.
Scroll down and there’s a section about Australia on here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Buyers_Club
Basically, they fucked it up so bad in Aus no one’s ever tried again.
That says their error was trying American threats “we got you dead to rights, tell us your income and we’ll tell you how much to pay our we’ll sue for punitive damages”
Which isn’t legal in Australia. They would have been ok if they had asked to send a letter saying “stop it or pay us a reasonable amount for one person viewing the film once” but of course actual damages aren’t enough for film companies
They were too greedy.
Yeah basically. But part of why no one has tried again is because the judge made it very clear he wasn’t going to just roll over and let them pull their BS. Including setting a bond of $600k for them to even try litigating it. Another part of it is that ISPs used to hand out IP addresses and PII in response to requests from media companies. This was found to be in breach of privacy laws and now those companies would have to apply for court orders, proving malfeasance, to get that information.
Our ISPs are too cheap and lazy to even try looking. I still use I2P, but only because I need to justify my tin foil hats collection.
I’m pretty sure our ISPs would advertise piracy if they could
They pirate and sell the service locally 🤣🤣
My country doesn’t care, so it’s not necessary
Let me guess India?
You missed by a looooong shot, it’s Slovenia.
Maybe? But basically 90% of the countries in Asia continent doesn’t really care about digital piracy
Instructions unclear, VPN’d into my own home network.
I use Comcast VPN cheaper than mullvad /s
Nah, Verizon VPN is better
IP law firms tried to get their cases into my country and they only got a 50% success rate on court so they stopped trying (cost benefit thing I suppose).
Also private trackers in my country do not allow the use of VPN (why do they care IDK, they say it is to have more control on who join), so there’s little point on getting a VPN for piracy here.
it’s probably for IP banning or something. Whitelist authorization, something silly like that.
Haru asking Futaba where she has to type in her dad’s credit card number
do i want to be her or date her?
A VPN is just essentially a change in ISP.
importantly it’s (hopefully) an ISP that operates from a less copyright-happy country and isn’t tied down to tons of expensive infrastructure and long-term contracts
Isn’t torrenting legal in the Netherlands?
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let’s say that VPNs are compromised and “they” know that you’re downloading “illegally”
in order to prosecute, “they” have to prove you’re a pirate and show how they know
would they compromise their backDoor to go after a tiny pirate?
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nothing because it’s fucking hormones. It’s not meth.
Estrogen, yes. Trans guys are fucked if we’ve got to order testosterone off the internet.
yeah, and? What are they going to do? Send the DEA after you for growing GMO titties? Gonna hit you with the ATF because you grew hormonally altered facial hair?
They’ve got shit like fentanyl to be worrying about. I think this is probably the least of concerns, especially considering this is less “drug addiction” and more “illegal prescription drugs” instead. Besides, they don’t get drug money from trans people.
It’s certainly a potential risk for procurement of the drug legally. But that’s already a problem.
this information isn’t likely to be public after the fact.
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This is why I compose all my messages on an air gapped computer and send them out from my compound with couriers.
Who controls the couriers though
I personally just use a VPN that connects to NSA servers so they think it’s themselves doing the torrenting.
Unless you PGP-encrypt everything by hand you’ve just lost the fight
And that’s why the only thing I use my VPN for is piracy. Don’t really have a good reason to push anything else through it.
Bro I’m downloading Final Fantasy, not running a pedo marketplace. I will be fine.
Title is probably true, but also it’s less likely for the NSA to leak your info than say an ISP that openly sells your info. I highly doubt that the NSA sees someone pirating Photoshop as a priority. VPNs can help with preventing a random ad from logging your real loose location, have built in DNS ad block, open up region locked content plus a list of other benefits.
VPNs absolutely help with general privacy, like not putting your personal phone number on a public registry. They are not intended to perfectly hide you from a super power’s intelligence agency lol
Are you suggesting that it’s pointless to use a VPN?
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If you are worried about VPN’s, why are you not worried about seedbox providers?
As he said, paid with crypto and managed with his own keys. I don’t see how the seedbox provider can trace you if you do that, so there’s not that much to worry about
You’re going to connect to the seedbox at some point, which ties your IP to the traffic. If you are worried about a VPN attaching your IP to traffic, this is no different, no?
SFTP over TOR. This should be a requirement at this point.
If you’re not doing that, then yes you’re technically right in that seedbox companies can be subpoenaed too. I usually use TOR to copy over what little I torrent.
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if you can’t connect to a vpn using only open source software, that’s a crappy vpn
What evidence do you have that no-log VPNs are compromised by the NSA? What about VPNs based in other countries like Canada?
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The existence of the NSA and their activities is not proof that they have backdoors in VPNs. That’s bogeyman conspiracy theory shit—“they could be anywhere, therefore they’re everywhere!”
You still haven’t answered the question, and I’m beginning to think you are making shit up based on paranoia.
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Is there literally any evidence that the US government managed to extract useful information from no-log vpn providers in the US?
You didn’t answer the question. Your behavior is toxic.
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Is your home machine, your phone, better protected than the VPN servers? I bet you’re not as good at IT security as the IT security staff VPN companies hire
If your threat model includes nation state actors, you’re best off not using networked computers
I am all about good tinfoil but some of these people acting as if they are SNOWDEN lol
Yes if feds wanted to catch you shitposting, watching big titied asian porn and downloading coldplay… I think there raised ways than compromising a VPN provider.
Unless it is a honey pot, then use a different VPN provider. Gonna need trust at the end of the day.
the US has so much geopolitical reach that companies in canada or elsewhere would just hand over the question if it was high enough profile.
That’s an interesting point, but I think the “if it’s high profile enough” is key. People torrenting files is probably low on their priorities. On the other hand, somebody organizing a terrorist cell is probably much higher.
Companies might have an interest in finding pirates, but it would not be as easy for them to get other companies to comply with their subpoenas.
yeah if ur just a dude pirating, it probably doesn’t matter, but if they find you’ve done a large crime, you can bet your ass that shits getting yoinked from you.
companies might, but that’s almost entirely through legal processes. ceast and desists, required reporting, etc…
For anonymity, yes. Sure you might fool Google trying to match your IP to your traffic but that’s about it
How so, specifically for logless VPNs?
Technically speaking, VPN logs tend to include the IP address of clients connecting to them, after which the good VPN providers like Mullvad, IVPN and maybe PIA tend to purge them somewhere in their process. Now, if the VPN is running in a RAM-only node, then these logs probably don’t touch storage, which means there’s not much need to shred information from hard drives for the VPN provider.
With that said, an ISP can technically log your traffic and see that you’re connecting to the IP range associated with a VPN. That and perhaps some more covert side-channel/correlation attacks can, in theory, compromise your identity.
Of course, this is going deep into OPSEC and forensics, and I don’t think the NSA is that interested in the average Billy torrenting “The Office” to go through that many logs, even if the studios sue in court. Hence, technically your privacy is somewhat maintained with the good VPN providers, but you’re definitely not anonymous
That’s kind of my thought as well. It’s certainly possible someone might go through the effort to find a single pirate downloading The Lion King, but that’s a lot of effort (read: money) to find just one person.
There’s certainly the possibility that an ISP could note that you connected to a VPN, but given that it’s not a remarkable event, since people connect to VPNs for all kinds of legal reasons, they aren’t likely to track your particular IP’s connection to a VPN apart from a court ordering them to care. They get paid their monthly internet plan price whether someone pirates or checks their email.
If someone was running the Pirate Bay from their home servers, however, more parties would likely be interested in finding that person, and that person’s threat model probably exceeds just using a logless VPN.
Maybe I should have said “it’s not anonymous based on your threat model”
At least if the company is run from the US
Everyone knows it’s impossible for the NSA to buy rack space in Bulgaria, where they literally don’t have to deal with any US legal process.
It’s also impossible for the NSA to market such a service via pop-privacy blogs and social media profiles.
The funny part about this is that the Snowden leaks showed that the NSA actually put a lot of effort into doing shit like this specifically to avoid all the paperwork which came with accidentally collecting data from US citizens. Keeping the data and analysis off shore means no pesky FISA paperwork.
Why?
Because if the government wants that data then they are gonna get it. If it’s in another country its a lot more work than just serving them a warrant like it is if they are USbased
At least that’s a more reasonable answer than trying to imply the NSA has backdoors everywhere.
My position is that it all depends on your threat model. The government isn’t likely to go after someone who torrents files and is hidden by a VPN. The government might go after someone running a streaming site, on the other hand.
And even that might wind up with a dead end. AirVPN (for example) is Canada-based, has no logs, and accepts both crypto and anonymous cash payments.
I don’t think they care about piracy.
do you have a moment to talk about our lord and saviour mullvad vpn
what about proton or mullvad?
Both are considered strong choices but again… This is 100% trust me bro.
But that’s the people the bros chose to trust
In fairness I doubt the NSA give a single solitary fuck about piracy and aren’t about to give themselves up over a telesync rip of Beetlejuice 2.
But probably best to plan 9/11 part 2 over something a bit more secure.