Before I say anything further, yes I know how much the recommended VPNs cost. I can read. Please do not interrogate me about it.
I’ve been wanting to get into torrenting for a while, particularly contributing to private trackers related to music (and to a lesser extent retro games, though I don’t have much original stuff to put there as it’s harder to find rare games than rare music). FMHY recommends RiseUp if I must get a free VPN while I’m working on my financial situation, though I’m not sure whether it’s been tested in court. What are my options, if any?
Look at newsgroups - some indexers are free, others have a lifetime fee that’s reasonable. I moved to nzbs and haven’t looked back - I can’t get dinged for sharing copyrighted stuff if I’m only downloading, never uploading.
there exists a free newsgroup indexer that contains binaries?
There’s a few - but typically the free ones have limits on the number of downloads per day.
Nzbfinder and bin search used to be okay.
Which ones are okay now?
any specific lifetime fee indexers you recommend?
Nzb geek and planet are two good ones.
I’d go for usenet. Only downloading, no uploading. Torrents are shit.
Much of what I want to do is uploading though. Also IIRC Usenet isn’t any better in terms of price. The prices aren’t bad gor Usenet or VPNs, my finances are just in the shitter.
I believe there are free VPN services. Maybe Proton has a free version? I know they offer a basic free version for Vivaldi browser. Just make sure they provider doesn’t log traffic.
Now is black Friday, some VPN services are 75% off, that may be an option if you have at least something to spare. Sure, it’s money, but a fine for illegal downloading costs much more.
Otherwise public wifi spots but speeds are probably shit.
Another option is installing Tails on a bootsble USB stick and connect through tor. But then speeds are also shit.
Proton VPN’s free tier doesn’t let you forward ports and generally doesn’t like torrents. And you’re really not supposed to torrent via Tor.
Find a friend in a less shit place you can proxy through.
Mullvad is €5 a month for total of €60 for a year.
Save up then torrent. If you live in the US you risk way more in fines than what €60 for a year of VPN would cost.
You basically have 5 (?) devices there. Share the cost with 4 friends and it’s 1 Euro a month.
Borrowed WiFi is definitely your best bet. Find a place with a fast public WiFi network you can reach from your car.
I wouldn’t do this because the wifi will make sure you never do this again because of dmca strikes
Go to the small local library, they usually have free wifi, sometimes without registration and if you’re lucky they don’t filter any traffic.
There is also a map of open wifi hotspots online which work without registration also, but I’m too lazy to dig out the link.
Ask online for somebody to share their VPN. Many subscriptions explicitly allow inviting friends and family and allow multiple simultaneous connections.
Local library worker here. Can confirm we don’t track connections, we only tally how many use our wifi if we can figure it out. Basically the tally just includes whoever brings out their phone in the library.
Just be aware that the state can supply your library with free internet, and I’m not sure how that’s set up. I personally don’t like connecting to random open wifi, official or no.
In my younger years we hid an RPi with a large USB stick in our library. A seedbox of sorts, connected to wifi with semi-random schedule (public hours mostly) and random mac address to avoid detection. Worked like a charm!
Others have mentioned private trackers, it’s not a perfect defence by any means, but dm me and I can send you an invite to one (torrentleech)
Uhmm, I know that it might come off as begging, but may I also have an invite? I’ve been using RuTracker for 5 years at this point, but some stuff is just isn’t there.
Thanks in advance!
I use proton and our local laundry-mats; they have open WIFI…and you can get your laundry done while waiting for the torrent to finish
I would suggest don’t.
For downloading, look at DDL sites.
For uploading, if you can’t do it safely, don’t. Stash it all, make backups, keep it until you can do it safely.
You can get into private trackers and trust them. Not recommended, but some do.
Generally speaking, the copyright trolls only target public trackers and DHT. There have been some instances of them making way into TL and others. Your ISP could also identify torrenting on private trackers if they wanted to, even with mitigations. In my experience and from what I hear, most ISPs do not go to these lengths.
So, there a risk doing the above. Whether or not it’s worth it until you can afford a decent VPN is up to you.
Aside: Please do not use a free VPN for torrenting (or tor, for that matter). They are either like RiseUp and run on donations for people who really, really need them, or Proton which is commercial and specifically try to block or slow down the traffic. Either way, if ruins it for everyone else.
Either way, if ruins it for everyone else.
How does it ruin it for everyone else? One slow peer does not ruin the network.
I meant in the context of the VPN. It slows down the network for everyone on one which is run by donation. For commercial companies, it incentivizes them to further lock down what users can do or what speeds they get.
free proton blocks p2p connections anyway
You’re going to need to find VPNs you don’t need to pay for, such as https://spys.one/ stuff, although most of those will not work for torrenting. I leave the rest to you as being able to figure it out is the good kind of gatekeeping.
You can use torrent to direct link services like seedr.cc, however they have max size limit.
I mean you can avoid all that. If you’re just interested in music and retro games then just use soulseek and use the rom megathread. both of which are going to be either peer to peer or direct downloads. no torrenting.
Rom megathread (web search it) has quite literally everything. no need to search, no need to torrent, it’s all right there. And soulseek with Nicotine+ just works like napster. sign up, be sure to share your music library, and then have at it.
I use slsk, I’m just trying to find more places to upload the rare music I have to so it’s less likely to become lost.
right so you just keep your music folder open so people can do just that. More audiophiles are going to be on soulseek than some random torrent tracker.
I don’t understand why you insist on torrenting when you can’t safely do so. You’re going to get way more traction sharing your rare stuff on soulseek than you will torrenting it I can guarantee that.
It’s not that I’m trying to switch away from slsk, it’s that I’m trying to do more in addition to slsk.
Its not a big thing with trackers anymore unless you get into one of the exclusive private trackers dedicated to music, but this requires previous history with other trackers, good upload speeds, etc. I would just stick with slsk for now.
What’s not a big thing with trackers?
Music
I use Cloudflare Warp and make qbittorrent only able to torrent if it’s connected to Warp
Does that have port forwarding though? Because if not, seeding isn’t going to work.
Seeding works fine without port forwarding. Just won’t be connecting to as many peers.
Here’s a reliable, free VPN: https://riseup.net/en/vpn
