Piracy advice

moe90@feddit.nl to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 538 points –
117

If your country persecutes individual piracy. Mine doesn't.

Our ISP sends 3 strike letters :(

Our ISPs are too cheap and lazy to even try looking. I still use I2P, but only because I need to justify my tin foil hats collection.

I'm pretty sure our ISPs would advertise piracy if they could

I have had like 14 while I was still in school here in canada. if things haven't changed you just ignore them because they can't do jack if you don't respond. Someone I worked with was blown away when I told him this because back home he was banned from all but the slowest ISP.

Hah I wish we could ignore them. It seems to just vary from ISP to ISP in the US but our small town ISP turns off your connection and puts you behind a captive portal forcing you to click through and accept what you did wrong before your connection is turned back on.

That is supposedly the case in Australia as well but I haven't got a letter from telstra since around 2004 and I have never used a VPN and watch all my shows and movies via torrents so either I'm extremely lucky or they stopped bothering.

Though recently I started paying the $4 / month for Real Debrid for better streaming performance, which is just as good as a VPN for torrent anonymity. I used to be fundamentally against the idea of paying anything to pirate but honestly this is worth it, I've even been able to watch a few shows that had 0 seeders because they were previously cached.

Scroll down and there's a section about Australia on here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Buyers_Club

Basically, they fucked it up so bad in Aus no one's ever tried again.

That says their error was trying American threats "we got you dead to rights, tell us your income and we'll tell you how much to pay our we'll sue for punitive damages"

Which isn't legal in Australia. They would have been ok if they had asked to send a letter saying "stop it or pay us a reasonable amount for one person viewing the film once" but of course actual damages aren't enough for film companies

They were too greedy.

Yeah basically. But part of why no one has tried again is because the judge made it very clear he wasn't going to just roll over and let them pull their BS. Including setting a bond of $600k for them to even try litigating it. Another part of it is that ISPs used to hand out IP addresses and PII in response to requests from media companies. This was found to be in breach of privacy laws and now those companies would have to apply for court orders, proving malfeasance, to get that information.

I don’t use a VPN because my government has acknowledged that an IP address cannot identify what individual was using it.

I know that government prosecutions for fraud against government use IP addresses

The IP address identifies the company or home the fraud was done from, the account the money went to identifies the individual

If breaking the law and able to afford to make it difficult for prosecutors, it's probably best to make it difficult for the prosecutors, we may have an activist pro copyright holder government in future and logs are forever (or 5 years)

I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P

Yeah, if you don't mind it possibly taking a week to download something... Really like the idea, but in practice it's very slow for something like that, unless you got a lot of seeders for something maybe.

I2P

wait, so this would route my traffic through others' internet connections and theirs through mine? seems like a great way to get implicated for actually illegal activity, like, say, other people running I2P to download and/or upload certain types of porn.

it's all encrypted, and a darknet, so unless you're routing through exit nodes, or you host an exit node, that information isn't publicly accessible.

the other problem here is the "illegal contents" problem, if UPS accidentally ships a human head in the mail, is that the fault of the UPS? If someone mails a bomb to someone else, is that also the fault of UPS?

Ultimately, there is little to no reasoning as to why you should be capable of getting into trouble, unless you're storing it, and it's a very very strict law. But it's a router, so it shouldn't be storing anything.

There are no exit nodes on i2p.

there can be clear net proxies iirc, which are essentially exit nodes, but they aren't recommended for fairly obvious reasons.

It's called an outproxy

The i2p outproxy is simply a user-specified proxy that i2p uses when you try to fetch someting outside the i2p network. I2p does not implement that proxy itself, therefore it is not part of i2p / it can't be called an i2p exit node.

It seems trivial for the US government to tie data into TOR to data out. If you're hiding things that government is willing to spend effort seeking, it's not safe.

im not sure to which scale this is true, but TOR specifically is highly centralized, and by design I2P is extremely decentralized, with most nodes running network routing of other nodes. Not that it's impossible to do, it's just a lot harder, and not nearly as valuable.

A lot of the ways in which people are got over shit like TOR is just skill issuing. Don't run a drug empire on the darknet and you'll probably be fine. If you do run a drug empire on the darknet, you better be damn fucking good at opsec, and pretty fucking good at laundering money. And even then you'll probably still end up fucking it up.

Man, why is everyone like this? Please read the documentation, the traffic is encrypted and metadata cannot identify you. Unless the NSA has an active hack for I2P lying around, NO-ONE IN THIS WORLD can find out what chunks of traffic just went flying by your internet connection

sure, but I2P’s end-to-end encryption is for connecting to I2P addresses, not the general internet. I’m unclear on whether every node serves as an anonymized connection to the internet, though.

EDIT: read a little deeper! so no, not every computer connected to I2P is an internet-connected node, but, due to the limited number of internet-connected nodes, I2P does not offer the same level of anonymity that a VPN does, and may struggle from bandwidth issues.

I can understand the argument against bandwidth, but how do you conclude that it is not anonymous enough? Even against a VPN?

the whole purpose of a VPN is to anonymize internet traffic, so they have many servers that send traffic out to the internet, which improves both anonymity and bandwidth. I2P is more akin to Tor, with anonymizing internet traffic as a bit of an afterthought, and the limited number of internet-connecting nodes makes users' traffic more trackable.

What you're talking about is supposed anonymity in obfuscation, and that has been proven to not work.

Also, most VPN companies keep logs and can be subpoenaed. Not all, but most. I2P is meant to anonymize your traffic, so I do not see the point of your statement

What you're talking about is supposed anonymity in obfuscation, and that has been proven to not work.

if it's been proven not to work, then neither I2P nor VPN is worth using, no?

most VPN companies keep logs and can be subpoenaed.

well, sure, but that's why anybody looking into a VPN is generally advised to use specific, known-good VPN providers who don't keep logs and who, preferably, aren't headquartered in a country with strict IP law.

has it gotten any better since 100 years ago or whenever I was a kid?

Instructions unclear, VPN'd into my own home network.

A VPN is just essentially a change in ISP.

importantly it's (hopefully) an ISP that operates from a less copyright-happy country and isn't tied down to tons of expensive infrastructure and long-term contracts

My country doesn't care, so it's not necessary

Let me guess India?

You missed by a looooong shot, it's Slovenia.

Maybe? But basically 90% of the countries in Asia continent doesn't really care about digital piracy

And make sure it's a VPN that supports port forwarding. Sharing is caring.

or just use Usenet.

And please don't use anime girls to refer to every fucking thing in the world

IP law firms tried to get their cases into my country and they only got a 50% success rate on court so they stopped trying (cost benefit thing I suppose).

Also private trackers in my country do not allow the use of VPN (why do they care IDK, they say it is to have more control on who join), so there's little point on getting a VPN for piracy here.

Also private trackers in my country do not allow the use of VPN (why do they care IDK, they say it is to have more control on who join), so there’s little point on getting a VPN for piracy here.

it's probably for IP banning or something. Whitelist authorization, something silly like that.

I thought you don't need a VPN for things like usenet

If your provider supports SSL and you actually turn it on then no technically don't need a VPN for Usenet.

this is dangerous advice. courts can still subpoena the usenet provider for your information.

I guess, that depends on the legislative of your country, maybe they see all interactions with usenet providers as illegal, and if you are not using a VPN they see what IP you talk to. But in the other hand, in such countries, using (foreign) VPNs may also be illegal🤔

Your ISP sees the connection to news.usenetserver.com and if they cared could get a court order to get your data from them. They can compel you to release your username and password.

You also need to protect yourself against future law and enforcement

You can't keep secrets from the future.

Heard that once in a song about how all encryption is doomed to break against future math/computing power. Great eery phrase.

You can keep secrets from the future. Future decryption won't help government see what you did in the now, the logs don't store the encrypted payload, only the end points and the user/ip

Meh my Usenet provider also partners with a VPN provider. Still costs me £5 a month for the VPN but I may as well use it, I like having a VPN

Or pirat through a public library proxy :)

Explain this to me more thoroughly? Does this mean physically going to the library and using their Wi-Fi? Or are you talking about something else?

I have a proxy host on a library terminal Server and a VPN through/to their firewall (its actually a network of Libraries

It's important to note that a VPN is simply somebody else's network in another location.