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Beginner questions: VPN safe enough? How to use all these tools? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, I'd like to set the sails due to being frustrated with streaming services, but I have some questions beforehand. I hope, you can help me with that, since lurking and reading the Megathread/Wiki didn't really answer my questions. Thanks for your help.

Is just using a fitting VPN (I've read about Mullvad and ProtonVPN in this community) safe enough to not get caught? I'm located in germany, so sharing even as much as a few kB of pirated content can cost me thousands of euros. I want to be really sure, that I won't get letters from some lawyer soon. All, that I've read so far is basically: Setup VPN and your Torrent software, including kill switch and maybe get into private trackers. Thats it. Is this really enough? Can I do more to be safe? What exactly is the risk with public trackers (as they are often mentioned as the "low hanging fruit" for copyright lawyers)?
I've read the post The complete guide to building your personal self hosted server for streaming and ad-blocking, which mentions many tools to setup. I'm sure these help me find and view content. But are there good resources explaining the functionalities of this software? I'm familiar with Docker and I know about Jellyfin, but it is really unclear to me, what exactly all the other tools do.

Big thanks from a long time lurker!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A VPN is a great start, but there's a few things you can do to make yourself a bit safer.

I like Mullvad for it's client that allows me be in a lockdown mode where access to the internet can only go through a VPN. It's a killswitch and you're going to want one no matter who provides your VPN. The reason you want a kill switch is because your computer may otherwise connect to your home or office network and leak your IP address.

If you torrent you'll want a torrent client like qBitTorrent because under advanced settings in that program you can set it to only work on your VPN's network interface. This adds a second wall of protection to make sure you don't leak your IP address.

At this point your ISP isn't going to know any much more than you're using a VPN and torrenting, but that's all. And you're probably good right here, but there's more you can do if you're really worried.

By tweaking some wireguard settings in the Mullvad client you can even obscure your torrenting traffic altogether. At that point your ISP won't have much more to report than that you're using a VPN.

You'll then want to test your VPN is working well with your torrent client by using Torrent Tracker IP Checker or something similar. Verify that your IP is what it should be.

And if you're feeling extra motivated, doing all of this on a separate computer running linux would be ideal so that you can ensure no software running on your rig deanonymizes you, and can keep it locked when not in use.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Thanks, that are some good tips, I will make sure to follow. I'm planing to set up a VM in my homelab for this.