this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Hey fellow german :D
Yeah, trusting the VPN provider to not log is a decision I was hesitant to make. Do you take precautions when paying for the VPN service, like paying with crypto or similar? I guess easiest would be paying via paypal or similar, but is that OK for opsec?
I guess I have to do a bit more research about trackers, which and how to use them. Thats for sharing your setup.
I might start sounding like a shill, but Mullvad has a great track record so far. They've been raided by police and they've walked away with nothing. They also fairly recently migrated fully to a diskless RAM only infrastructure also.
The previous poster kind of hinted on this, but Mullvad removed port forwarding from their services, so keep that in mind.
Also for payment, Mullvad will accept cash over mail so you can't be traced digitally by payment.
XD cash over mail, ok. But I guess for only a couple of euros that is worth a try. They seem to be located in Gothenburg, Sweden. Might try that. Honestly their website is really based. Thats for the suggestion with cash over mail.
For what would I need port forwarding?
Makes you connectable. If you don't forward ports for your torrent client you can only connect to peers who are port forwarding, meaning you will download and upload more slowly in most cases.
You'll need port forwarding for private torrent sites so people can download from you better.
Mullvad is no longer good for torrenting as they removed port forwarding meaning you can't open a port for others to connect to for seeding. This might get you by on public trackers alone where it's common to just download a file and never seed it back, but you'll quickly get banned from any private trackers.
Your isp can most likely tell which VPN you're using (unless you also use tor, and even then there's the theories that a lot of it is ran by law enforcement.. depends on how paranoid you are), they will still see the quantity of traffic coming from your home to the VPN and vice versa. All they need to do is to check the IP and they'll likely find it's in use by ... VPN service.
As long as using a VPN is not illegal in your country you can pay for it however you want really (in some places paying with crypto may make it more suspicious than if you just paid for it through PayPal), if law enforcement really wanted to find out the VPN service you use they probably could, the payment would only make it a tiny bit easier.
The key point as mentioned multiple times is to use one you trust, there's no objectively best one, but you'll find a lot of objectively bad ones (for privacy) if you research them. As a start just never use any which are sponsoring YouTube videos or blog articles, pretty much all of those are crap.
Crypto or cash VPNs being more suspicious for law enforcement is also a good point
Mullvad also sells scratch-off voucher cards on Amazon. Amazon would know you are using mullvad but the voucher number is unknown, so the payment/Amazon account can't be connected to the mullvad account. They only offer 6 and 12 months vouchers, though.
I’m also in Germany. I use PIA which has been proven in court to be no-log. The setup is not as smooth as others (Port Forwarding requieres some scripting) but it is also one of the cheapest.
You can pay with crypto.