Using OpenVPN for sailing the sees

Kühe sind toll@feddit.de to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 11 points –

I thought about using OpenVPN for piracy, since it's open source and can be easily set up on Arch Linux. Does anyone know about the quality of it or if I should use another VPN?

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Openvpn is a protocol that other vpns can use, the speed and quality would still depend on what provider you use. A provider would provide a config file that would include all the info required by openvpn to create the connection, as long as they include that then you could use openvpn.

With most VPN providers you can use OpenVPN clients to connect to them. But if you are asking can i host an OpenVPN server for free and use it for piracy the answer is no. The entire point of a VPN is to conceal yourself and you are not accomplishing that if ypu are hosting it yourself. You need a VPN service.

Seconded here, at the bare minimum you need a VPS or similar. Quick detail here, if you say you are using it to "sail the seas". and you are talking about self hosting.

Point of a VPN for piracy purposes is best explained. In short, You connect to the VPN host, the VPN host connects to the tracker or whatever pages you are going to. Should an anti-piracy bot connect to the tracker and follow the leads, it will find the VPN instead of you, and hopefully the VPN isn't keeping logs and has enough people connecting to it that they can't keep a specific link to someone.

Problem with self hosting, is it kind of misses that value. If the same happens but instead of finding your computer, it leads them to... a computer in your living room. Well obviously the same is going to happen as if they found just you.

And even if you get a VPS, there is a money trail coming right back at you unless you pay with cryptocurrencies (and even with cryptocurrencies, it's not impossible to trace it back).

And there's nothing stopping the VPS provider from cancelling your service if they get too many inquiries from anti-piracy groups about traffic coming from your VPS and keeping the balance of the money you spent.

Most providers offer both openVPN and wireguard where latter is better afaik. What you want for safe sailing is kill switch. When something goes wrong you dont want your home IP to leak, and kill switch will make sure you are disconnected instead of using home IP.

So if you get AirVPN for example, download their client called Eddie and look for kill switch option (called network lock). Other clients might have different name, some might not have that feature at all and some might have crappy kill switch.

What I use is qbittorrent in docker container hidden behind VPN in gluetun container (most recommended setup afaik)

That is needlessly complicated. Just force qbittorrent to only use your VPN network interface and you don't need any of that: https://lifehacker.com/you-should-really-bind-your-vpn-to-your-torrent-client-1849779407

This has the advantage of giving you the "kill switch" feature without having to download your VPN's proprietary app. It works with Wireguard, OpenVPN, whatever. Qbittorrent is actually one of the few clients that has this feature, one of the reasons it's so widely recommended.

Qbittorrent is actually one of the few clients that has this feature, one of the reasons it’s so widely recommended.

Deluge can also do this.

Make sense what you said my fellow pirate. Never used it and didnt want to recommend