We really need to push for the use of i2p for torrenting. Given that the the offer of VPNs with port forwarding that are decent is little and decreasing every year.
This is for the Netherlands, but it’s about the anti-piracy group not allowing defeats in court on the basis of GDPR and ISP refusal get in the way of a good harassment.
And most seedboxes are unlikely to be matched to a specific identity unless the box provider cooperates, which looking at their reason for circumventing ISPs I’d guess won’t really happen unless ordered to by court.
Depends on how much you are willing to pay for size vs speed vs bandwidth.
Can become more costly than simply a VPN and a HDD very quick if you want to get into the long term seeding but also getting new stuff.
Depends on which plan and provider you go thru. I’ve been with mine for quite a few years, pay $7.62/month. I get 2TB of storage, 4TB of traffic (if you use ftp/sftp to download/stream your files, it doesn’t count against that, so mine goes all to seeding). Download speed is unlimited, upload speed is 50000 Mbps.
It’s not hard at all, you have a control panel where you can one-click install your choice of torrent app and web client, then you just use web client (which looks identical to the desktop app, at least in my situation with rtorrent/rutorrent). Other apps available on my plan for one-click install are: Airsonic Advanced, Audiobookshelf, Autobrr, Bazarr, Deluge, Doplarr, Filebrowser, FlareSolverr, Jackett, JDownloader2, Jellyseerr, LazyLibrarian, Lidarr, MariaDB, Medusa, Mylar3, Nextcloud, NZBGet, NZBHydra2, Ombi, Overseerr, Prowlarr, pyLoad-ng, qBittorrent, Radarr, Radarr2, Readarr, Resilio Sync, SABnzbd, SickChill, Sonarr, Sonarr2, Syncthing, Tautulli, The Lounge, Transmission, WireGuard, ZNC. If you want to run Plex, Jellyfin or Emby on the seedbox you’ll have to get one of the higher tier plans. I used to download movies/tv shows over sftp and used to run plex on my home network, but now I just point VLC to SFTP path of the movie/tv show I wanna watch and it streams flawlessly (home connection is 300/10).
Feel free to DM me if you’d like more details about who I use.
Ohh, I had no idea those come with easy installs of the *arr stack. Too bad about jellyfin being locked to higher tiers but manual streaming doesn’t seem that complicated either.
I have a vpn through a proton mail plan but it was giving some p2p errors last time I tried it, maybe setting that up properly would be a better first step if it’s possible.
Thanks for a detailed answer!
edit: Ahh, proton vpn p2p support is locked behind a higher tier, but at ~$7 per month for a seedbox upgrading the proton package might be a better deal in the end
On a seedbox you (usually) have a heavily shared ip. As in shared with dozens of other people. So the rights holder cannot identify who of these dozens of users pirated their content and therefore can’t sue.
And that is why I don’t torrent, living in Germany. Even just leeching will put you on the radar of, at best scam law firms, at worst motivated rights-holders.
qbt only ever sees the VPN as its network. It is logically isolated from my main gateway.
there are healthchecks running, so if the VPN fails qbt enters in a restart loop until the VPN is back to a healthy status.
I use private trackers for 99% of my torrents.
You also have to know that these scummy law firms use honey pot attacks, where they advertise themselves as leechers and record your IP if you upload to them. Technically a proxy to another country would just be enough here, but hey, this works too and I sleep better.
Since you use a torrent container and a vpn container I am interested in how you manage to communicate with the torrent container.
Do you utilize the *arr stack? Also with a docker?
If the answer is yes, how did you achieve the communication between the containers?
Reason I am asking is, that I want to connect to my other container but when I bind my container to the service I am unable to let it communicate directly with it.
By that logic, I’d need to access the container through the vpn container, right? (*arr <-> vpn container <-> downloader container)
It’s really easy for a law firm in Germany to find out who the IP belonged to, if they have proof that the IP infringed on their copyrighted media.
The law firm looks at torrents and downloads a bit. With the IP, time and media name they can send a cease and desist letter with a fine of hundreds to thousands of euro. Ignoring the letters is not possible.
This is possible because the law firm has contracts with many big copyright holders (Disney, …).
But most of the time the fine is too high, so it’s possible to pay half by getting a lawyer. Basically the copyright holder overestimate how much damages they can get for the distribution of copyrighted material. If I understand it correctly. IANAL.
It’s simple to avoid by binding the torrent client to the network interface of a VPN, but not everyone knows that.
It’s also very easy to avoid this little problem by not being the only adult in the household. Unless one of the at least two adults snitches they can’t sue because there is reasonable doubt about the actual infringer (not legal advice, better option is to just get a VPN)
Not if you use a VPN though.
Also, modifying the letter, so it doesn’t include you admitting to the crime has proven effective for me (I was young once and didn’t use a VPN)
NordVPN being trash xD
Not only because of that. Complying with the law is a ok. I just hate their whole vpn and security propaganda. Like, you will be hacked without us…
And they have been hacked, if I remember correctly it was twice…
There are better commercial VPN providers.
Sadly ovpn.to went down some time ago. Cheap, secure and Mr. Nice was really nice and helpful. He probably died -.-
A company admitting they comply with the law when ordered to by the court is a positive to me as it means that they don’t do it unless they don’t do it on a whim and they are complying with the law, which would most likely also include privacy laws. Any company that would refuse a court order is going to be shut down and probably have all of their records turned over instead of the narrow subset that would be ordered by a court.
You do you but it also means that if they suspect you of illegal downloads or streams and get that court order, that they’ll log that shit and then you’ll receive those lovely letters eventually, making the whole point of the VPN pointless.
“From day one of our operations, we have never provided any customer data to law enforcement, nor have we ever received a binding court order to log user data. We never, for a second, logged user VPN traffic, and the results of multiple audits prove that we are true to our policies,” the company said.
What you want is for them to demonstrate incapacity to comply. “We’d love to help your honor, but as we sell a privacy service we don’t log user activity”
“From day one of our operations, we have never provided any customer data to law enforcement, nor have we ever received a binding court order to log user data. We never, for a second, logged user VPN traffic, and the results of multiple audits prove that we are true to our policies,” the company said.
In the event the company does receive information requests from a law enforcement agency, NordVPN says it “would do everything to legally challenge them.”
“However, if a court order were issued according to laws and regulations, if it were legally binding under the jurisdiction that we operate in, and if the court were to reject our appeal, then there would be no other option but to comply. The same applies to all existing VPN companies if they operate legally. In fact, the same applies to all companies in the world,” NordVPN said.
So they don’t log and are just admitting that they might need to if they were forced to. That is extremely reasonable.
Freaking slow, exactly like Tor imo.
The last torified torrenting test was many years ago. Speeds were at 100kb/s. Nope. With double VPN I’m at ~150 Mbit/s during torrent downloading.
If more people would torrent over i2p with great internet connections the experience would get better, since all i2p users are part of the network of servers. The slowest connection in the multiple hops decides the connection speed.
Because all traffic is encrypted and doesn’t leave the i2p network, forwarding traffic from unknown systems is not an issue, similar to Tor middle nodes (Tor Exit nodes shouldn’t be hosted at home).
Even if they do make it to court; how do they plan on translating an IP address into the ID of the actual infringer? (not the ISP subscriber, they can’t be assumed to be the same, particularly in court)
Just because I pay for my families internet connection doesn’t make me responsible, culpable, or even aware of their activities. Even less so now that I’m not going to receive any notice of potentially illicit activity.
If they could haul people into court based on just an IP and get somewhere useful, they’d have done it hundreds of thousands of times over already.
They will skip the notice via proxy (your ISP passing a notice to you without identifying you to the claimant) and go straight to court to have the ISP forced to provide the ID of the subscriber for a specific IP observed to be active torrenting copyrighted materials.
Then they’ll attempt to recover those court costs from that subscriber as well as sue them for the original copyright infringement.
I think they’ll have quite an uphill battle with that approach, particularly when trying to prove the subscriber to an internet connection is also responsible for, let alone aware of, the alleged infringement. If it was that easy, they wouldn’t have bothered with notices to begin with.
Yeah this happened during the Napster era and it was so incredibly unpopular and unsympathetic with the general public that it didn’t continue after a while. Suing a single mom on food stamps for thousands of dollars because her teenage son downloaded a game one time is a truly abominable look for a company.
What I don’t understand is how an IP address used as an identity? If you have CG-NAT there’s a good chance you share your IP with 5-6 other people (even more possibly). Alternatively you can say I keep my WiFi open for guests so anyone can walk by my house and torrent on my IP (idk NL law but maybe the court will consider this negligence)
People behind cgnat is probably less likely to seed and thus less likely to get their IP address logged by these outfits. That’s just my pet theory though, not sure how to confirm it. Anyone ever heard of someone behind cgnat and still got the love letter?
This is a good way to hide, actually. Port forwarding connections are easier to trace long-term. If you make the downloader port forward instead of the uploader, the one who’s easily traced is the one who’s in less trouble and the real targets stay hidden. But leechers are lazy and won’t do that. Some Scene FTPs do this.
Idk about the “less likely” demographics. My ISP had static IP until they dropped it for dynamic IP behind a CGNAT, and no longer offered the chance to buy a static IP.
come on now be nice. warner brothers entire business is hurting when you download that tv season instead of paying for it they might have to shelf another finished movie and claim the multi million dollar tax break again. /s
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BRB switching my VPN location to the fucking NETHERLANDS
Yes, they will probably be more careful next time
Dutch company sends pirates dick pics with ominous warnings as a means of fearmongering for the pirates
They’re probably right. Those letters from isps have scared people I know.
When the day comes that Brein starts sending notices to pirates, these pirates will just move to Newsgroups and VPNs.
Funny enough, on the related articles there’s one about them tracking down Usenet uploaders somehow
How sad do you have to be
It’s not really a group. More of a full commercial organization
One thing I always find curious is these “rights holders” assuming a 100% sales conversion from piracy when, in reality, it’s probably closer to 1-10%
Plus, there are studies that show piracy can actually be a positive factor for sales in some cases.
I doubt it’s even positive.
I can see that - if you’re pirating you’ll just take anything because there’s no cost, but if you’re buying something it has to be worth it.
We really need to push for the use of i2p for torrenting. Given that the the offer of VPNs with port forwarding that are decent is little and decreasing every year.
This is for the Netherlands, but it’s about the anti-piracy group not allowing defeats in court on the basis of GDPR and ISP refusal get in the way of a good harassment.
Good read if you want higher blood pressure.
Most seedboxes are in Netherlands.
And most seedboxes are unlikely to be matched to a specific identity unless the box provider cooperates, which looking at their reason for circumventing ISPs I’d guess won’t really happen unless ordered to by court.
How ironic
🤔 Why is that?
I’m honestly surprised people still don’t use a seed box…
What if your seedbox is located in the Netherlands? (Mine is…)
Mine is too, I’m not worried ;)
Asking the same question as well. What counties would be best to have a seedbox in.
Time to get a different seed box, then.
As long as the Netherlands have no extradition treaty with your country, and you have no assets in the Netherlands, you should be fine.
What are the prices of these nowadays, and how hard to setup? Got a recommendation?
Depends on how much you are willing to pay for size vs speed vs bandwidth.
Can become more costly than simply a VPN and a HDD very quick if you want to get into the long term seeding but also getting new stuff.
Depends on which plan and provider you go thru. I’ve been with mine for quite a few years, pay $7.62/month. I get 2TB of storage, 4TB of traffic (if you use ftp/sftp to download/stream your files, it doesn’t count against that, so mine goes all to seeding). Download speed is unlimited, upload speed is 50000 Mbps.
It’s not hard at all, you have a control panel where you can one-click install your choice of torrent app and web client, then you just use web client (which looks identical to the desktop app, at least in my situation with rtorrent/rutorrent). Other apps available on my plan for one-click install are: Airsonic Advanced, Audiobookshelf, Autobrr, Bazarr, Deluge, Doplarr, Filebrowser, FlareSolverr, Jackett, JDownloader2, Jellyseerr, LazyLibrarian, Lidarr, MariaDB, Medusa, Mylar3, Nextcloud, NZBGet, NZBHydra2, Ombi, Overseerr, Prowlarr, pyLoad-ng, qBittorrent, Radarr, Radarr2, Readarr, Resilio Sync, SABnzbd, SickChill, Sonarr, Sonarr2, Syncthing, Tautulli, The Lounge, Transmission, WireGuard, ZNC. If you want to run Plex, Jellyfin or Emby on the seedbox you’ll have to get one of the higher tier plans. I used to download movies/tv shows over sftp and used to run plex on my home network, but now I just point VLC to SFTP path of the movie/tv show I wanna watch and it streams flawlessly (home connection is 300/10).
Feel free to DM me if you’d like more details about who I use.
Ohh, I had no idea those come with easy installs of the *arr stack. Too bad about jellyfin being locked to higher tiers but manual streaming doesn’t seem that complicated either.
I have a vpn through a proton mail plan but it was giving some p2p errors last time I tried it, maybe setting that up properly would be a better first step if it’s possible.
Thanks for a detailed answer!
edit: Ahh, proton vpn p2p support is locked behind a higher tier, but at ~$7 per month for a seedbox upgrading the proton package might be a better deal in the end
How does a seed box protect your anonymity?
On a seedbox you (usually) have a heavily shared ip. As in shared with dozens of other people. So the rights holder cannot identify who of these dozens of users pirated their content and therefore can’t sue.
Somebody correct me if I’m wrong
because most of the people only use public trackers and for public trackers you really don’t need anything besides vpn.
If you actually read the article, you see that this problem is 100% solvable if you use a VPN.
Or using i2p
Yep
That’s what I understood too, but I thought I was wrong since this group can not be that stupid.
Fuck this group with an engorged cactus. Pieces of shit.
And that is why I don’t torrent, living in Germany. Even just leeching will put you on the radar of, at best scam law firms, at worst motivated rights-holders.
I have downloaded dozens of terabytes in Germany and I’m doing fine buddy.
For now…
No need to risk your savings over Avengers Endgame 4K…
I’ve been doing it for almost 10 years. I know what I am doing. I have several layers of security.
If you however are a tech illiterate then of course you’ll get fined. I have friends who got fined too.
Would it be possible to reveal what you did to increase security?
I always (want to) try to improve mine.
I have two containers, qBittorrent and the VPN:
You also have to know that these scummy law firms use honey pot attacks, where they advertise themselves as leechers and record your IP if you upload to them. Technically a proxy to another country would just be enough here, but hey, this works too and I sleep better.
Since you use a torrent container and a vpn container I am interested in how you manage to communicate with the torrent container.
Do you utilize the *arr stack? Also with a docker?
If the answer is yes, how did you achieve the communication between the containers?
Reason I am asking is, that I want to connect to my other container but when I bind my container to the service I am unable to let it communicate directly with it.
By that logic, I’d need to access the container through the vpn container, right? (*arr <-> vpn container <-> downloader container)
You have to expose the qbt http port in your VPN container. All API communication (arrs etc) goes through here.
2 friends got sued for around 3000 each here in germany, but they “only” had to pay 1600.
You mean they got a shock letter that says “pay us, or we’ll take you to court”? Just throw that junk mail away.
If you do that in Germany, they’ll take you to court and win. You have to pay their legal fees too.
Do they actually do that in the majority of cases, or just a few to scare people? Germany is really weird on IP law…
It’s really easy for a law firm in Germany to find out who the IP belonged to, if they have proof that the IP infringed on their copyrighted media.
The law firm looks at torrents and downloads a bit. With the IP, time and media name they can send a cease and desist letter with a fine of hundreds to thousands of euro. Ignoring the letters is not possible.
This is possible because the law firm has contracts with many big copyright holders (Disney, …).
But most of the time the fine is too high, so it’s possible to pay half by getting a lawyer. Basically the copyright holder overestimate how much damages they can get for the distribution of copyrighted material. If I understand it correctly. IANAL.
It’s simple to avoid by binding the torrent client to the network interface of a VPN, but not everyone knows that.
It’s also very easy to avoid this little problem by not being the only adult in the household. Unless one of the at least two adults snitches they can’t sue because there is reasonable doubt about the actual infringer (not legal advice, better option is to just get a VPN)
Not if you use a VPN though. Also, modifying the letter, so it doesn’t include you admitting to the crime has proven effective for me (I was young once and didn’t use a VPN)
They do it with German efficiency.
Just use a VPN
Kid named vpn:
Seed box or VPN should be options.
This comment sponsored by NordVPN :)
I hear there are good ones in the Netherlands!
NordVPN will log and share your data if ordered by court. They’ve confessed as much last year.
NordVPN being trash xD Not only because of that. Complying with the law is a ok. I just hate their whole vpn and security propaganda. Like, you will be hacked without us… And they have been hacked, if I remember correctly it was twice…
There are better commercial VPN providers.
Sadly ovpn.to went down some time ago. Cheap, secure and Mr. Nice was really nice and helpful. He probably died -.-
A company admitting they comply with the law when ordered to by the court is a positive to me as it means that they don’t do it unless they don’t do it on a whim and they are complying with the law, which would most likely also include privacy laws. Any company that would refuse a court order is going to be shut down and probably have all of their records turned over instead of the narrow subset that would be ordered by a court.
You do you but it also means that if they suspect you of illegal downloads or streams and get that court order, that they’ll log that shit and then you’ll receive those lovely letters eventually, making the whole point of the VPN pointless.
You can comply with the law whilst not having anything to provide the law. Such as Mullvad does.
That is also now Nord works, they just clarified that they would comply with a court order if necessary which is how legal businesses work.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-actually-we-do-comply-with-law-enforcement-data-requests
What you want is for them to demonstrate incapacity to comply. “We’d love to help your honor, but as we sell a privacy service we don’t log user activity”
https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-actually-we-do-comply-with-law-enforcement-data-requests
So they don’t log and are just admitting that they might need to if they were forced to. That is extremely reasonable.
It’s not though? The reasonable result would be to simply shut down in that jurisdiction.
Good to know. I was joking since they sponsor so many YouTubers.
I usually recommend looking at TorrentFreak’s VPN reviews.
https://torrentfreak.com/best-vpn-anonymous-no-logging/
VPN and you are fine lol. Sometimes you have to pay even for illegal stuff… Nothing’s free…
You could use i2p for bittorrent, it is free, slower but secure.
Freaking slow, exactly like Tor imo. The last torified torrenting test was many years ago. Speeds were at 100kb/s. Nope. With double VPN I’m at ~150 Mbit/s during torrent downloading.
And time is more expensive than anything else :)
If more people would torrent over i2p with great internet connections the experience would get better, since all i2p users are part of the network of servers. The slowest connection in the multiple hops decides the connection speed.
Because all traffic is encrypted and doesn’t leave the i2p network, forwarding traffic from unknown systems is not an issue, similar to Tor middle nodes (Tor Exit nodes shouldn’t be hosted at home).
what’s a motivated rights holder
is scary
BREIN
You better watch out.
You better not try
To pirate movies I’m telling you why
Motivated rights holder’s coming to town
He sees what you’ve been viewing
He knows when you’re online
He knows if you’ve been sharing movies
So use a vpn for goodness sake!
BREIN. There’s an evil villain name if I ever saw one.
If fact, I think the bad guy from Half-Life 2 had that name.
Breen
Sounds the same, i never played with subtitles. XD
Even if they do make it to court; how do they plan on translating an IP address into the ID of the actual infringer? (not the ISP subscriber, they can’t be assumed to be the same, particularly in court)
Just because I pay for my families internet connection doesn’t make me responsible, culpable, or even aware of their activities. Even less so now that I’m not going to receive any notice of potentially illicit activity.
If they could haul people into court based on just an IP and get somewhere useful, they’d have done it hundreds of thousands of times over already.
Can someone TL;DR the actual “worse” thing?
They will skip the notice via proxy (your ISP passing a notice to you without identifying you to the claimant) and go straight to court to have the ISP forced to provide the ID of the subscriber for a specific IP observed to be active torrenting copyrighted materials.
Then they’ll attempt to recover those court costs from that subscriber as well as sue them for the original copyright infringement.
I think they’ll have quite an uphill battle with that approach, particularly when trying to prove the subscriber to an internet connection is also responsible for, let alone aware of, the alleged infringement. If it was that easy, they wouldn’t have bothered with notices to begin with.
Yeah this happened during the Napster era and it was so incredibly unpopular and unsympathetic with the general public that it didn’t continue after a while. Suing a single mom on food stamps for thousands of dollars because her teenage son downloaded a game one time is a truly abominable look for a company.
What I don’t understand is how an IP address used as an identity? If you have CG-NAT there’s a good chance you share your IP with 5-6 other people (even more possibly). Alternatively you can say I keep my WiFi open for guests so anyone can walk by my house and torrent on my IP (idk NL law but maybe the court will consider this negligence)
People behind cgnat is probably less likely to seed and thus less likely to get their IP address logged by these outfits. That’s just my pet theory though, not sure how to confirm it. Anyone ever heard of someone behind cgnat and still got the love letter?
My ISP uses CGNAT but I have a public static IP from them. 10+ years of heavy usage and not a single letter.
But are you sure you’re not sharing that ip with others?
It’s a public static IP, no one else is on it except for me :)
How do you know?
https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/
This is a good way to hide, actually. Port forwarding connections are easier to trace long-term. If you make the downloader port forward instead of the uploader, the one who’s easily traced is the one who’s in less trouble and the real targets stay hidden. But leechers are lazy and won’t do that. Some Scene FTPs do this.
Idk about the “less likely” demographics. My ISP had static IP until they dropped it for dynamic IP behind a CGNAT, and no longer offered the chance to buy a static IP.
🙄🙄🙄🙄🤮
If a rights holder claims injury, I should be allowed to make it true by stealing their car.
come on now be nice. warner brothers entire business is hurting when you download that tv season instead of paying for it they might have to shelf another finished movie and claim the multi million dollar tax break again. /s