Hey everyone! One of my main issues with piracy in general are VPNs, because I absolutely HATE subscription services.
As far as i’m concerned, we need VPNs so that when torrenting, people cant see our IP adress and other information that can be potentially used againt us. I’ve heard that there’s people who log those IP adresses so that they can like “report” people doing piracy or sth like that. Correct me if i’m wrong.
So, with this purpose in mind, I understand that VPN services are useful because they can help hide our real information. But as I said, I dont like subscription services and I saw that there’s the option to selfhost a VPN.
But I thought a bit about it, and, if I’m using a selfhosted VPN using, for example, a raspberry pi or a laptop, isn’t the imformation of that laptop ALSO potentially dangerous? Because it is connected to your own ISP and it has the same location as you have (if you set it up at yout home).
I know this may sound dumb, but I don’t know much about this. And I can’t find information about this.
Because it is connected to your own ISP and it has the same location as you have (if you set it up at yout home). And sharing your own IP to internet.
Basically using self hosted VPN in same location is same as not using VPN as you are exposing same IP to the internet.
VPN doesn’t hide IP, it just routes your traffic to internet via VPN server (and exposes that IP to the internet).
If you are going to selfhost your vpn then you are going to “hide” behind your vpns ip, which probably leads to you anyway. VPN services are often contacted by authorities and why they work is because they refuse to disclose the information.
Precisely this. If the authorities suspect you of digital piracy, they’re going to go to your VPN provider and demand the information of the user involved. If that provider is you, you might as well not have used one in the first place.
Everyone here is correct that what your thinking wont work and let me clarify why. When you torrent something the IP address used to download content is shared with everyone in the pool. You get caught when companies or 3rd parties trying to enforce copyright are in that pool and record every IP. So however you download the content, the front facing IP needs to be with an ISP that doesn’t give a fuck about copyright, usually another jurisdiction with lacks copyright infringement laws. If you host a VPN at your house your still using the same ISP which will still bring either a letter or shutdown of service.
If you’re on the same network it does literally nothing.
If you mean on a VPS, you might have to pay for the high bandwidth and they might monitor your traffic and blacklist you.
Your self-hosted VPN has to be plugged into the internet somewhere. If that IP address is associated with you, the VPN hasn’t done anything.
The number of people who are using the VPN server also lends plausible deniability.
“No I wasn’t pirating anything! That was someone else! I was just using it because I like my privacy and don’t trust my government to not snoop on it!”Especially when there are thousands of people using same vpn and shared ip. Plausible deniability sky rockets 1,000%+ This is why it is a good idea to use well established vpn with many users than hosting your own vpn on own server.
It is not, since your home IP address will show up just like you were using QBittorrent on your computer. VPN by itself just allows you to access a network somewhere else.
The main point of paying for a VPN service is that it is not located in your home network. If you don’t want to use subscription services you could look for a lifetime deal on the internet (got one for Windscribe myself).
A better option might be pirating over i2p but I have not tried that yet.
Vuze is a torrent client with an optional I2P plugin called I2PHelper. I2PHelper has a built-in I2P client, meaning that you don’t need to bother with the rather clunky I2P interface.
You can set up a “self hosted” VPN on a cloud service like Linode but you still would have to pay for their service which is $5 US a month for 1TB of traffic. the advantage is that you can make sure there are no logs and once it’s setup it’s fairly maintenance free. This guide is a bit older but i used back then which worked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxpX_mubz2A&t=685s. PS i don’t use it anymore but would if my situation changes.
edited to add “self hosted”
But the linode ip is directly linked to you! Be careful
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If you’re self hosting a VPN and using it from within the same network there’s not really much point because externally it’s going to be the same thing.
It’s handy for cases where you want to access your home network from outside but pointless if you’re seafaring.
You can think of a VPN as something where you take your traffic from one spot and spit it out in another spot before it takes the normal trip over the Internet to its final destination and back.
If you use a self-hosted VPN, then you’re taking the traffic that comes from your ISP…and sending it out to your ISP.
Now, if you have a cool ISP, this can work. You could for example tunnel from somewhere that doesn’t want you using their internet connection that way back to your houses. If you’ve got a standard ISP that’s going to turn you in to the ESA, MPAA, and RIAA, then it isn’t going to help you out at all because you’re picking up your traffic and spitting it out in exactly the same spot it was going to go anyway.
Given what VPNs do, you also need to be careful because advertisers tend to overstate the benefits. “I got my email password taken over in a phishing scam! Good thing I had BoredVPN!” – A VPN isn’t going to help with that. “I clicked on a dodgy link and my computer got taken over! Good thing I had BoredVPN!” – Nope, not gonna help. “Someone called me on the phone and said my windows was broken and then I followed their instructions to fix it! Good thing I had BoredVPN!” – Definitely not going to help.
VPNs will help if you don’t want your traffic leaving your ISP directly and you think there’s a better place for the traffic to come from.
Yes, but you have to keep in mind part of the point of the VPN is so that it’s not running on your home network and exposing your home IP. Having an RPI or laptop running OpenVPN server from your home isn’t going to help you in terms of privacy when you’re just exposing your home IP. Also, running your own VPN means you will have a dedicated IP which will be tied to you versus running a commercial VPN which would have shared IPs (but likely wouldn’t offer port-forwarding so it would be worthless for seedboxes).
What I do on mine is rent a cheap VPS with unlimited bandwidth, I run OpenVPN server on that VPS using Nyr’s openvpn-install script and then on my local seedbox server I connect to my OpenVPN server. I have qbittorrent-nox listening on the tun0 interface on my local seedbox, and then on my OpenVPN server VPS I have an iptables prerouting rule to route traffic from the inbound torrent port to my local seedbox server.
It works very well for me, even though I only use private trackers so it’s overkill in my case.
