What VPN services do you use?

I know this is a basic question, but discussions around public VPNs are so astroturfed that it's impossible to find actual discussion around it. I currently use Mullvad for when I'm away from home, but it's been a bit unstable recently so I was curious what other people used. I'm also looking into properly setting up Wireguard on my home server to tunnel to a public VPN or a remote box, so if anyone has a approach they recommend please share. In terms of specifically remote access, I've also also heard good things about Tailscale and its Mullvad integration, but having to pay double to use Mullvad inside and outside Tailscale is a shame.

mullvads the best cryptostorm as second. thanks for killing a thread for this

Me doesn't trust VPNs, me use Tor and I2P

>>76411 Mullvad is the only one that seems trustworthy to me, but even then its always good to be careful.

>>76425 Agreed, vpns are a scam, you have to be naive to use one, but the point of the thread is to discuss vpn providers not to talk about how they're soykaf. Truthfully you might as well use a vps instead, that way you don't have to place faith into your vpn's bullshit "no logs" policy, though it is still inferior to an onion network. incognet and privex are two providers I know of.

>>76441 >Agreed, vpns are a scam, you have to be naive to use one, While no pne can be sure that a VPN provider isn't keeping logs, they still provide useful services like an encrypted connection at least as far as their exit server, and access to location-blocked content. That doesn't really add up to a scam as long as you aren't expecting more. > Truthfully you might as well use a vps instead, that way you don't have to place faith into your vpn's bullshit "no logs" policy, Now *that* is naivety. A VPS provider has even more ability to snoop and log your activity than a VPN provider. ALso, if you get an anonymous Mullvad account using a burner email, pay via cash or monero, use the VPN service from IP addresses other than your own, and always use TLS, then Mullvad can keep all the logs they want. They will have zero knowledge of your identity or traffic content, and nothing to turn over to anyone with a warrant.

>>76425 Tor has been cracked a long time ago. The FBI owns most of the nodes, and they collaborate with foreign countries to sit on them. Now it's not that it's easy for them to do it, but you should probably have at least some other protection as well, like a vpn.

>>76446 >Tor has been cracked Source?

>>76446 > Tor has been cracked a long time ago. Utter horsecrap. > The FBI owns most of the nodes, Utter horsecrap. > you should probably have at least some other protection as well, like a vpn. > a vpn Lol Where do you dingdongs get this delusional bullsquat?

>>76445 How would it be easier for a vps to track your activities, you can literally control the logging of your own server, as opposed to with a vpn. At best there's no difference between the control over logging between a vps and vpn, but I'd wager there to be marginally more control favoring the vps, since like I said you digitally control your server, and can change logging policies on it. I'm not saying they're the best thing in the world, but I would absolutely take one over a vpn if I had to. I wouldn't though, I only use Tor. Afaik mullvad is the only provider that even accepts monero for payment. Then people always speak of using a vpn before Tor, and I wonder how many people have done this in a secure manner, I figure they probably have never even tried, pretty much the only VPN protocol that works with Tor is OpenVPN, and most VPN providers I have seen don't provide it, save for Mullvad, and most vpn providers do not accept monero, leaving you with no options for a semi-untraceable payment save for making a long distance trip to buy a prepaid card several states away, then waiting ~3 months before using it so cctv overwrites itself, which is not going to be a reasonable practice long term, and guess what, a lot of providers don't even accept prepaid cards, mullvad included (speaking from my own experience and experience of others years ago, maybe things changed).

>>76452 >you can literally control the logging of your own server They have physical control over the hardware, so what's stopping them from monitoring what happens on it?

>>76453 I never once denied that, same applies to vpns, part of why they are both inferior to Tor, but with a vps you still have some level of control, granted it is digital, and of course there is nothing you can do if the provider wants to survey you, not even encryption will work since they can dump ram for the ek. You need to use a trustless network, something that doesn't require your trust in order to provide you with nanonymity.

>>76447 >>76449 i cant find the court docs again but after that famous cp site got taken down people who visited it have been getting raided years later because their connections were decrypted. the court docs all say it was due to the help of a "foreign collaborator" or "foreign" something like that. one guy had his lawyer motion to have the fbi reveal how they actually knew it was him connecting to the site and they refused, opting to instead drop the case. they care so much about protecting their secret that they would rather have criminals walk free https://www.wired.com/2017/03/feds-rather-drop-child-porn-case-give-exploit/ https://www.techtimes.com/amp/articles/200592/20170307/fbi-drops-child-pornography-case-to-avoid-disclosing-tor-vulnerability.htm if youre just using Tor and nothing else you are an idiot. if theyre to the point of decrypting connections to prosecute random pedophiles then it was probably cracked a long time ago

>>76471 Sure, and if you read about Tor's history with their updating, and advancement of the software, you can see how the encryption of the past was undoubtedly flawed in ways, and weaker than it is now, so it's only reasonable that the US Gov could intercept traffic headed to a hidden service, and hold onto it until it can be broken, breaking it would certainly be aided by taking over a hidden service like they did. Anyway I'd be interested in these supposed court documents, I wonder if you even read them, from my experience this kind of downtrodding of Tor can be categorized by people who lack knowledge on the network and barely use it, usually operating off of what others have told them. There's a few irrational points in their rants on Tor being a honeypot. >Tor is backdoored/cracked Despite Tor being one of the most scuritinized pieces of privacy/security/anonymity software, nobody has ever reported any kind of backdoor in it. I myself have sought out discussion online of a Tor backdoor, in hopes of discovering someone who found a backdoor, never found it, nor do I know anyone who has seen evidence of a backdoor. The encryption algorithms Tor uses and their procedure for encrypting traffic is also quite solid as well, and it's not as though people aren't scrutinizing this either, all of Tor's machinations are public knowledge. That isn't to say there could not be a backdoor, there's just more evidence for there not being a backdoor, than there being a backdoor. >Tor was made by the US Gov, so it is a honeypot The US Gov wanted Tor to be created so they could have a large scale low latency onion network for intelligence communications and cyber warfare that provided its users a large amount of nanonymity (privacy+security+anonymity). This itself only proves that they wanted to create a highly secure network, that could be deemed trustworthy by having its source code publicly available, and have a low latency so that normal people could use it thus growing a large userbase once legitimate uses of the network were formed by common people. The US Gov can provide people with some meager digital freedom, in a world of dying freedom, this provides a sort of release valve, and can serve to keep people docile, while at the same time assisting the US Gov in securing its global hegemony. Either way, this onlys say that Tor is secure, good enough to be used by the US Gov, namely the NSA, and that it is a tool to keep the masses docile which I myself believe, but I don't wanna go on a whole tirade. Someone can go on to say that the US Gov has their own safe version of Tor, but I doubt they would be able to have their own version that uses alternative methods of encrypting connections to Tor nodes, that would likely be something that could be discovered by Tor node operators and would be visible in Tor's source code, so the US Gov probably wouldn't have created intentional flaws in Tor's encryption like they did with ssh's ec a while back, and then have their own secretive secure encryption. >Tor can be compromised by the US Gov so there is no point in using it Everything is vulnerable to compromise, and Tor is far less vulnerable to compromise than any of the alternatives. In the case of VPNs, a VPN company based in a country belonging to the 14 eyes (Mullvad is in Sweden which belongs to the 14 eyes btw), said companies are legally obligated to keep logs on their users, retaining the logs for a time that is long enough to allow the authorities to retrieve them. And even if you use a VPN, or proxy, or any service for that matter like email, that does not keep logs, nor is legally obligated to do so, that same service can be issued an order to begin keeping logs on its users, in addition to a gag order. The users of these VPNs, proxies, and VPSes, don't have any way of accessing the servers, and so cannot know what is being done with them, they cannot know if the people providing the anonymizing service are affiliated in some way with the government, and provide logs to them. All of the supposed security, privacy, and anonymity of VPNs is derived from blind trust, which is called faith, and faith will not bring you to nanonymity. To expect someone to go to prison on your behalf over shielding you from the government is irrational, truthfully it is insane, you cannot trust anybody to do that for you, especially when the people are businessmen running a highly profitable business that risks getting shut down by protecting you. To be nanonymous you cannot just place blind trust into the services you use, you need to be using something in such a way that even if the operators of your services decide to become government informants you won't be instantly compromised. Tor itself is a trustless network, so long as the actual machinations of the network can be deemed secure, the network will not require the trust of its user to fulfill its intended purpose. Not to say that Tor is perfect or anything, but these kinds of discussions never lead anywhere. I personally think people should try to form alternative onion networks, better yet, mix networks, because nym seems soykafty. Using a VPN, proxy, or (most likely even a) VPS before Tor is just going to put your communications in jeopardy, you will be sending them through a body that is definitively compromised/vulnerable to compromise by the US Gov, and if the US Gov really can deanonymize people through Tor, they're going to come right back to the VPN through Tor, which leads directly back to you, there's simply no utility in the VPN whatsoever, unless you chain VPNs but this is convoluted and ineffective, and I've gone on long enough. Using a directional antenna to steal WiFi is another more appealing idea.

>>76473 My point was never not to use Tor at all, it was just that Tor alone is not enough. All 3 of your greentext arguments are strawmen. The only thing I claimed is that Tor has been "cracked" and you go on to ignore that point and rant about backdoors, which nobody ITT brought up. The thing that drives me crazy about VPN naysayers is that using Mullvad on top of Tor can't hurt you, it can only help you. How are you going to sit there and tell me that your ISP has your privacy in mind moreso than the VPN company? Even if the difference is negligible, and you're only 0.01% more safe with a VPN than not, wouldn't you rather have that extra layer of protection between you and your ISP? >Using a VPN, proxy, or (most likely even a) VPS before Tor is just going to put your communications in jeopardy It's posts like these that really make me think there is a grassroots effort to de-anonymize people through misinformation. Who said anything about a VPN before Tor? The obvious way would be a VPN after Tor, such as Whonix in Virtualbox then Mullvad on the host OS. >unless you chain VPNs but this is convoluted and ineffective And why is this convoluted and ineffective? You really are a government wage slave, aren't you? Do you know how fast internet speeds are these days? Services like Mullvad and AirVPN aren't even noticeable when you have them on. Why can't you just use iptables to route something like AirVPN through Mullvad? Oh wait, you can, and I found an exact reddit post detailing how to do this: https://www.reddit.com/r/VPNTorrents/comments/13yl4aq/tutorial_how_to_run_airvpn_on_top_of_mullvad_linux/ That's the beauty of it. You don't need "blind faith". Tell me how exactly you need to trust AirVPN when you sign up for their service already connected to Mullvad, and you give your payment in Monero? You don't, but you didn't want to hear that, did you? But don't listen to me guys, get caught with your pants around your ankles like an idiot because you believed anons when they told you Tor alone is enough

>>76474 Well if we're going to dive into the discussion of people being feds then I might as well blow it all up. I'm going to assume you are just an average person who has no idea what they're talking about so let me try and help you here. I am aware my post can be seen as strawmanning. I did acknowledge your point on Tor being cracked, I think I made it fairly clear that Tor cannot just be "cracked", because of how the encryption works, what was once cracked in the past is not cracked forever, nor can you even prove that it was cracked, nor have you shared the supposed court documents, nor have you addressed any of my actual pertinent remarks. Tor has repeatedly revised their encryption standards over the passage of time, and like I said there isn't even evidence the government has had Tor use flawed encryption, particularly presently, or backdoored Tor, these things would permit them to "crack" Tor. Anyway I'm sorry if I was vague about things, I didn't wanna blow up the thread, but it's all gone to soykaf now so whatever. >The thing that drives me crazy about VPN naysayers is that using Mullvad on top of Tor can't hurt you, it can only help you. How are you going to sit there and tell me that your ISP has your privacy in mind moreso than the VPN company? Even if the difference is negligible, and you're only 0.01% more safe with a VPN than not, wouldn't you rather have that extra layer of protection between you and your ISP? You seem to have completely ignored what I just said about VPN companies based in 14 eyed nations, legal orders for user data, and gag orders. From my perspective it makes no sense to use a VPN before Tor because if the government can crack Tor and backtrace connections, then my connection will be traced immediately back to a VPN, which will in turn sell me out to the government. At best all using the VPN does is add one more step, which is as demanding as sending an email, to the investigators looking for me. It will in no way stop anything from happening. And what is the potential risk that I take by adding at best, one more step in my investigatorses search for me? Well the downside is what I just stated, the fact that I have no way of even knowing if my provider is working directly with the government, being a government honeypot, and the fact that my provider is legally obligated to assist the authorities by logging on me. All of my traffic is jeopardized from the very beginning, at least with Tor the chances of my traffic being in the hands of the government can be calculated to some degree, and the fact that nobody has yet been de-anonymized directly through the network can put me at ease. Why is it convoluted and ineffective to chain VPNs? Well from my perspective the methods of chaining them are literally convoluted, chaining VPNs is complicated, maybe that's just my own perspective and I'm misguided or stupid, that's fine, I'm not gonna die on this hill. And it is ineffective. It is impossible to not have blind trust in a VPN, proxy, VPS, while using the anonymizer, that is, unless you have an evidentiary basis for trusting that anonymizer. This demands an audit of the people providing the anonymizer by a third party auditor. But this creates a few issues. Are the auditors trustworthy? Was the VPN/proxy/VPS able to predict the audit? They most likely were since the auditors would be invited by the VPN/proxy/VPS, it's not a food inspection by the government. How thorough was the audit, how many locations does the VPN have, did the auditors even inspect all of their facilities, what are the policies of the datacenters the VPN uses if they use datacenters? If all of these questions do not have a desirable answer, then there's no evidentiary basis for trusting that service. And even still, an audit can only prove a VPN/proxy/VPS' claims on logging prior to the audit, just because a VPN, for instance, got audited and it was revealed that it wasn't doing anything shady does not mean that it will never in the future do shady stuff, to assume that an audit forever vindicates a VPN is irrational, as the VPN company will inevitably run into legal trouble resulting from abuse, from where they will face pressures from the police to adopt logging policies, eventually the company will have no choice but to log data, or have their business closed, and maybe even face other penalties. The usage of "untraceable" payment methods for buying access to a VPN is insignificant to me. You're connecting to the VPN from your home address presumably, or maybe stolen WiFi in your general region where you live, the connection leads right back to you, or your general location. The untraceability of your payments with Monero is another can of worms, but can be guaranteed if you do things right. Anyway payment has little to do with masking your identity while using the VPN, you don't mask your identity to something you connect directly to, you can only mask your identity to something you are not connected directly to. So then, you could chain the VPNs, well now you will probably be using more than one VPN service, unless you just use a few different accounts on the same provider, putting all your eggs in one basket, so you have to ensure they're all trustworthy, and all accept Monero, and all provide the VPN protcols that you need, and don't have any kind of violatory javascript, Cloudflare, etc, on their site, and then you can chain them. And at the end of it all, your connection can be procedurally backtraced by the authorities, so it didn't matter anyway.

The only use case I can think of for using Tor with a VPN is that you might be trying to reach a site that doesn't allow connections from Tor exit nodes, and want to be anonymous, even to the VPN provider. In that case, you can (as stated previously) get an anonymous account with Mullvad (they will send an account number to a burner email address), send cash payments in an envelope (or use monero if you like), and always use TLS. Mullvad allows Tor-to-VPN connections, and they tell you how to set it up. Note that just using Tor and a VPN simultaneously does not accomplish Tor-to-VPN. And all that's good for AFAICS is hiding Tor usage from your ISP. I.e. with Tor-to-VPN, your ISP sees you using Tor, the VPN provider sees an anonymous Tor connection, and the remote destination site sees a connection from a VPN. When just running Tor and a VPN simultaneously, your ISP sees you using a VPN, the VPN sees your real IP, and the remote destination site sees a Tor connection.

>>76447 >>76471 For what it's worth, it wasn't a tor vulnerability, but rather an mpv vulnerability that would leak the ip address somehow. I remember reading about that exact case back then.

>>76445 >and always use TLS What is the easiest way to enforce that part?

>>76670 Anything vaguely like that? https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202107-46

I use proton but it's not the best on linux Also I still don't understand how VPS>VPN if they're both public servers owned by people you're just supposed to "trust". If you run the VPS from your own hardware sure but otherwise isn't a VPS overall more limited?

https://www.ivpn.net/ The argument about VPN being useless is interesting but I want to add my five cents that purpose of using VPN is by no means to protect yourself from governments, but to make identifying you harder to some degree. With a reasonable browser you should be fine. And Tor is really slow. If you don't care about your ISP knowing that you visit pornhub daily, you're in no need of VPN. The only reason I use it is "habit", or more honestly, plain compulsion I can't resist. I do not want cloudflare or other soykaf have a profile on my residential IP. I doubt governments share info with such corporations. They might, but I would assume such practices would open up huge breeches for corruption and national secret leaks, so I think it is more likely they don't. If you hide from state surveillance and you only know about VPNs as a mean to hide your IP, I advice you kill yourself and don't make yourself ridiculous.

>>76752 >proton They are the biggest fraud snake oil company, possibly even more than Nord or ExpressVPN. I would not be surprised if they were actually a honeypot. If they aren't, then they are by far the greediest, capitalistic pigs out of any VPN/"privacy"-focused company. There's that infamous reddit thread, I'm sure you can find it, where a user complained about Proton turning their emails over to the police. Then, an actual Proton employee, in typical reddit sass, literally commented on the post to let everyone know that the OP is a drug dealer and that they gladly turned their email logs over to his country's authorities since they do not condone illegal activity Now I understand drug dealing through Protonmail is retarded, but the fact that they were so happy to announce to the world that they did that, seemingly instantly and with no pushback, tells you all you need to know about the company. It wasn't even CP or anything. Just drugs. Now tell me how easy you think it would be to social-engineer Proton HQ and get the logs of a person you're targeting? I wonder how easy it would be to just say you're the police and make up any ol' reason to get a user's email logs. They're obviously happy to provide them, hence announcing it to the world on reddit, another soykaf site. You probably wouldn't even have to try that hard to trick them And that's not even the worst of it. Those fuarrrking cocksucking, motherfucking SLIME BALL weasels just announced that they're going to be shutting down free accounts for inactivity, after a period of 1 year. The problem is, I don't know what the F#CK they mean by 'activity', because in my email they said my account was considered inactive, even though I definitely signed in many times over the past year. I've also found out the hard way that Proton is one of the few email services that don't let you use SMTP/POP3/whatever protocol to sync your emails to an external client, if you're on a free account. fuarrrking cock.li let's you do this. They are such money-hungry, greedy little cocksuckers

>>76473 https://mullvad.net/en/blog/update-the-swedish-authorities-answered-our-protocol-request https://mullvad.net/en/help/the-new-electronic-communications-act-lek-sweden AFAIK they don't make VPNs obliged to data logging, so your statement that >said companies are legally obligated to keep logs on their users, retaining the logs for a time that is long enough to allow the authorities to retrieve them. is untrue. But that might change soon or not so soon, which is hardly a problem, because govs have always been very keen to establish total control. The internet has already ceased to be a private place, so your struggles into nanonymity are almost futile. Maybe rebasing a VPN in a data haven country will help, I am not sure. The point is, nobody is after you as long as you don't become part of an opposition in which case you don't rely on internet anyway. But yeah with VPNs being routinely made honeypots owned by fuarrrking Israel you might as well drop the idea of using one and resort to Tor in case you have a worm up your ass.

ivpn and mullvad provide transparency reports, which are nice, but how do you even check they are true? mullvad seems to blogpost info on the legal process, so that "looks" trustworthy, but still. what's the point of seeing a table with abstract numbers about warrants? how is that supposed to help me?

https://www.ivpn.net/blog/your-vpn-provider-wont-go-to-jail-for-you/

>>76794 >mullvad provide transparency reports No they don't, unless you count that one time they got raided which resulted in them dropping port forwarding https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mullvad-review-solid-security-and-privacy-but-swedish-jurisdiction-is-concerning/

>>76797 >unless you count that one time they got raided which resulted in them dropping port forwarding it is a good thing that instead of turning their all users to govs they just deleted a feature that allowed bad users to negatively affect good users.

>>76799 yes, but they really dont provide transparency reports because it can potentially "jeopardize the privacy of their users", according to them. thats kind of a red flag. theyre also based in a 14 eyes country

>>76800 >theyre also based in a 14 eyes country so far jurisdiction of Sweden does not force them to keep logs, but recent LEK may or may not change that, it is not clear yet, so we just wait. >thats kind of a red flag i really wonder so I contacted ivpn support with request to explain me why they publish transparency reports and of what use are they to. btw time to check for a reply... no reply so far, maybe cock.li issues, maybe i just have to wait longer, anyway, if they ever write back and the reply is coherent i'll share summary here

apparently they took me for a glowie, so i guess we're not getting a clue about why transparency reports are a thing. with this attitude this https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29 article is pretty much correct, when it says >In short: the only safe assumption is that every VPN provider logs. as such 95% of those who use a VPN just waste their money to no purpose

so according to the ivpn support team if they are sued by police to log your traffic it is "unclear" how it transpires since they only accept legal orders from Gibraltar and all their servers are elsewhere. they do not deny the possibility. they claim to do "everything in their power" to notify you. as for transparency, they say >Some IVPN users may find value in knowing that we have never provided any details or had any details to provide. which in another words is >the bar's here just for looks so trustworthy as they seem it's all just a lottery, but probably is going to go well if you're just pirating some porn from a torrent tracker.

>notify you and that's considering they don't even know your email

>>76818 >as such 95% of those who use a VPN just waste their money to no purpose A VPN or proxy is a good option for people who need to obfuscate their real IP from the servers/peers they connect with. For example, if you live in a country which has strict laws concerning copyright, switching to an IP of a country that has no laws criminalizing the copying and sharing of files among peers a VPN is a good investment but a proxy might suffice and be cheaper.

A VPN or a proxy is a good option if you want to switch your IP, that's about it. I like how Mullvad lets you use their farm of socks5 proxies too. Sometimes I use python tools like gallery-dl to scrape websites and I'll get blocked. So I'll just go to Mullvad's proxy list and run export http_proxy=socks5://[proxy url]:[port] export https_proxy=socks5://[proxy url]:[port] and all commands in that shell will run through the new address. Pretty nice. Of course, this presupposes a lot of things like that the website owners either don't know about Mullvad or don't care, because all of their IPs are public. It'd be super easy to block you if they wanted, then you'd be soykaf out of luck. You're also subject to a lot of IP blocks and human verification tests you wouldn't be had you used your home residential IP. But I guess in that case, if I used gallery-dl enough on one site they would probably block that too, so Mullvad provides a valuable service there. And like the anon above me said, they do actually make the copyright letters stop when you torrent on public trackers, but I wonder for how long they can keep that up. Average people are already giving up torrenting anyway, so maybe forever.

>giving up on torrenting Side note: this also goes without a (obvious) replacement. I have been increasingly gaslighted by normal people that buying things is better, easier and more "right" than pirating. Appalling sight. Just look at them, happy to feed the machine that grinds them one by one. fuarrrk them.

>>76900 I don't know if "content creators" (i hate that term) are the ones grinding us but the replacement for the most part is to move to private trackers. It's not that hard and you'll be happy that you did, trust me.

>>76900 > Side note: this also goes without a (obvious) replacement. People have grown used to streaming services. I don't care for them myself but I can see how they can be rather convenient. A stepping stone of sorts to more permanent media storage could be pirate streaming services. > I have been increasingly gaslighted by normal people that buying things is better, easier and more "right" than pirating. Perhaps this is more of a regional thing? Most normal people around me seem more content to stream their media via subscription services (Think Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and so on). Generally when I tell them to pirate their media instead of "renting" access to it, it's more of a matter of 1) too much effort comparatively (Install ad blocker, go to rentry(DOT)co/FMHY, find desired media, consume) or 2) lack of knowledge. I'd like to think they normalize this because so many of their peers do so as well in order to consume their media and because the advertising for these services is so oversaturated (when was the last time you saw an advertisement for a torrent site on a mainstream social media platform?). > Appalling sight. Just look at them, happy to feed the machine that grinds them one by one. fuarrrk them. I don't disagree that the sight of people overpaying to rent low quality media via access that can be taken at any time without warning is disheartening. That said, getting angry and calling them mindless cattle (or some variation of it) will do no good. Especially among like-minded peers (I assume most people on LainChan are more lenient towards piracy). If you want to de incentivise people to buy things, you point to instances in which the companies they buy from use their funding to to morally reprehensible things, and ask if they feel comfortable taking part in such practices, even indirectly. If or when they ask what the alternative is, you can bring up the benefits of piracy (ownership of media, archival of data, freedom to use your hardware and data however you please, etc). Point them to the Free Media Heck Yeah wiki (rentry(DOT)co/FMHY) or your preferred piracy guide, and let them discover their own reasons to pirate. >>76901 > I don't know if "content creators" (i hate that term) are the ones grinding us The majority of them rarely help. There are some exceptions, though. Emulation YouTubers encourage piracy on some level, in order to acquire ROMS (how many people have an original NES, game cartridge, and supporting hardware to rip a "legal" copy of Super Mario Bros.?). Louis Rossmann makes semi consistent videos about instances in which companies revoke access to media that people paid for, and notes that "if buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing" or something to that effect. Ssethtzeentach often jokes about pirating media, and has had VPN sponsorships that read more like arguments in favor of piracy. There are others, but these creators are in the minority that try to resist And of course, there's XKCD 488 (Pic rel). > [T]he replacement for the most part is to move to private trackers. It's not that hard and you'll be happy that you did, trust me. How comparatively easy is it to move to and maintain access to private trackers? If you don't mind, could you give a brief tutorial on how to get into them and best practices?

>>76913 >How comparatively easy is it to move to and maintain access to private trackers? To move in? It can be kind of difficult if you're impatient, or if you don't have a passion for music. To maintain? It's very easy once you're in. I'd say you have two options: Apply for the interview for RED on irc - you basically have to just answer questions about lossy vs lossless audio, and a few on the site's uploading rules. From there, if you can build your rank by uploading, you can get invited to pretty much all the other private trackers worth joining. Don't care about music? Bookmark torrentleech.org and watch the home page for the next time they do open signups. Make sure to check around Christmas time

>>76919 private trackers are a community, and the word community implies a certain number of consequences which might be easy to put up with, when you're good, but sometimes you happen to be in such a state of life or mind, that you can't give a single soykaf about their upload rates, which might result in you loosing the access. thinking of this just makes me... never buy good earphones, so I never need to download music in good quality.

>>76947 Ok? How are you ever going to get a job or... pay for the media you'd be getting for free anyway? Life throws us curveballs all the time. It's not that hard once you get going, just rent a seedbox and you're almost guaranteed a good ratio