OK, so, I have a couple of questions:
- What’s the worst that can happen if I don’t use a VPN while pirating?
- Are free tier VPNs (like Proton VPN) good enough?
- I don’t want to pay much or anything for a VPN, is a way I can get a good free one, or set one myself somehow (I have experience with selfhosting) ?
- If not, which cheap one do you recommend?
EDIT: I pirate mostly movies, and rarely some TV series.
Torrents yes, always VPN. If you’re doing the debrid route, not required but personally I still do.
I am a big fan of mullvad VPN as they take no info from you to create an account. Can pay with crypto. No name, email or anything tied to their service. Used proton, nord and pia in the past.
Depends on how hard your country cracks down on individual piracy. If you’ve heard a friend of yours in the same country being served a copyright notice for pirating; you absolutely need a VPN. If you’ve never heard of this and the idea sounds impossible, you typically won’t need it.
If you will need a VPN; I would heavily recommend Proton VPN for convenience. If you want to selfhost you’re going to need a server in a different country which will still cost you money. Assuming you’ll pay for a typical sbc + gigabit internet + electricity costs + remote maintenance costs and you’ll be looking at a way bigger cost than just 60 euros a year. That’s how much ProtonVPN costs.
- they sue you for a portion of your future savings, because you single-handedly responsible for their imaginary loss of profits, judge agrees.
- free tier vpns are good enough. But the competition amongst “no log” vpns is pretty fierce. People say you can only trust 3 specific vpns who would rather shut down than spy for a government, but if you’re just downloading movies then you can expand your choices.
- the point of the vpn is to hide your ip address. Self hosting in your home defeats purpose. The best free option is using I2P for torrenting.
- Wait till December for all the Christmas discounts. An annual bundle works out to $2-4 a month.
If you are doing any downloads (especially torrents) you should be using a VPN.
- Your ISP will usually send a letter telling you to stop, in some cases they’ve been known to cut peoples service.
- Free vpns sell your data and usually have caps, but would probably prevent you from getting letters in the mail.
- What is cheaper? A vpn account or paying for 2-3 streaming services?
- I use a nordvpn account I bought from a reseller. Back when I got it nordvpn was still pretty good, but idk how people feel about it nowadays.
You could use i2p for torrent it is free and secure, but slow