Hey there, dear community, I migrated here from reddit. I wanted to dabble in piracy (Udemy and Art-Courses) for a while, but never knew how to start + a VPN is quite pricey if I don‘t use it/ use it incorrectly.
I wanted to know if there are „beginner tutorials“ for MacOS (I‘m even new in this OS).
I read the Megathread and it was kinda helpful for me not to barge in blindly, but I‘m the kind of person who needs a little handholding
Never torrent without 1)a VPN, one that 2)gives you a dedicated IP.
A VPN is great for most things, but not quite enough for torrenting.
This is because (everyone please correct me if wrong) torrenting is peer-to-peer which means that someone seeding to you can see your real isp-issued IP address. They can contact your ISP and whine about you.
If some copyright guardian sets up a honeypot, they could get your identity even if you use a VPN.
The solution is to use a VPN that gives out a substitute IP address they own (and therefore keep private) which then redirects traffic to you.
There may be better ones out there but I haven’t bothered looking ever since I signed up with privateinternetaccess and use their “Dedicated IP” setting.
Either you’re confused or I’m confused.
Every VPN is going to obfuscate your IP. That is literally how they work. You don’t need a dedicated IP setting for them to do that.
Additionally, I don’t think a copyright holder would need to set up a honeypot. They can just start downloading a torrent like anyone else and they’ll grab all the IPs of people uploading/downloading since torrenting is p2p and you’re freely sharing your IP with others.
I suspect they’re thinking about port forwarding. For another torrent to connect inbound to you, you need to have a port open for inbound connections and most VPNs don’t provide this as standard.
But you can still torrent if you don’t have ports… But you can only initiate outbound connections to other peers. And it works two way… Those peers you connected to can request data from you without problem.
However if there are too many peers without ports then it becomes a problem because no-one can successfully connect with each other.
Having a dedicated IP is not necessarily as important as having support for port forwarding. For example, Torguard has support for port forwarding, and their implementation happens to bind the port to a dedicated IP. In that case, port forwarding is the feature that matters for torrenting, as it will make you more easily connectable to peers you’re sendind / receiving data to / from.