Theoretically speaking, if one wanted to sail the seas while being not very tech savvy – is using a VPN (Mullvad) enough? I would never, of course… but theoretically?

any vpn is better than no vpn, and mullivad is well-reputed

check browserleaks.com and their webrtc leak test (or something similar) to find out! (if u get leaks u might need to disable ipv6). Also make sure to have a killswitch enabled in case ur vpn drops connection u dont want to automatically connect without it and expose urself

If you are in the US, and the risk you're concerned about is getting in trouble, yes it is enough, provided you use it correctly. The only real risk is that copyright trolls will scrape your IP while you are torrenting along with the rest of a big list and then automatically send complaints to your ISP, which may then send you a threatening email, or shut off your internet if it happens enough times. The fact that this is the only action they are taking against consumer level pirates means that if your home IP is not itself available to torrent peers, you are entirely immune from anything happening.

Just make sure to bind your torrent client to your VPN, this is the accepted way of safely ensuring your IP cannot leak due to your VPN losing connection.

Currently, I'm using Mullvad and used Proton a few months ago. Surfshark did the job many years ago.

Just make sure you pair your torrent client and vpn so if the vpn goes offline, the torrent stops down/up loading.

A VPN won’t help you much. What you want is a boat, and a GPS.

Keep in mind that each country has different piracy laws. Some don’t care much and fines won’t be pursued if you just ignore them, some poor countries don’t care at all, some don’t care about foreign content but take their own content and sports seriously, and some take all piracy seriously and hit you with tens of thousands of dollars of fines. I’d recommend looking into your local laws, and if you find out you’re in a danger zone, following the recommendations from your fellow countrypeople.

Even reputable no-logs VPNs aren’t foolproof, they can leak and the killswitch can fail. But Mullvad is currently the best, I heard their killswitch is better than Proton’s currently is.

Different methods carry different levels of risk. You’ll often hear that streaming from websites is safe since it’s not seeding (and exposing your IP address to the pool), but a lot of those sites do torrent from your browser these days (and can’t be bound to a VPN, I don’t think?). They’re also full of malware and malicious ads, so a good adblocker is necessary. The safest methods are private trackers (seeding but only to other private members) and debrid services (lowest risk but no seeding and they’re paid subscriptions. though there’s one that offers some seeding time at the highest subscription tiers). There’s also joining a trusted person’s private Jellyfin server (getting someone else to pirate for you).

Seeding is of course really important for preventing the entire system from collapsing and preventing niche or old media from being lost, so if you’re in a position to seed, you absolutely should. A good VPN bound to the torrent client (after enabling the killswitch and doing the leak tests) and the knowledge to ignore fines is enough for public trackers in many countries.

Note that even in countries where fines aren’t pursued if you just ignore them, (if they do somehow get sent due to a VPN accident or the government further eroding human rights) they’ll be sent out to your ISP and the person named on the internet bill. Your household may have their own thoughts about your viewing history, and some people are concerned about their government getting wind that they consume things like queer or non-English media.

Here’s the piracy community! You should do your research before getting started. https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy

You don't need to be so euphemistic. If you're just downloading, piracy is not really investigated rigorously anywhere. Just using a VPN is sufficient. You can talk openly about it too.

Mullvad is good, but it's not enough to make piracy safe.

An adblocker like ublock is essential, not just for blocking ads but for blocking malware.

Streaming piracy is about as safe as sketchy websites always are, which is pretty okay these days.

If you download anything, check the file type before opening and whether the type is safe. For example, .exe is extremely unsafe, .pdf is somewhat unsafe, and .mp3 is safe. Generally audio and video file formats are pretty safe because they're very locked down in what they can do, while interactive formats are dangerous. Someone might call audio by a misleading name to troll, but it shouldn't put your device at risk.

If you download .exe s, do not run them unless you are very confident the source is trustworthy. This means a trusted account posting on a trusted website claiming that a trusted person made the exe. I haven't caught this guide in a lie yet, but when it comes to exes double- and triple-check everything.

The more tech savvy solution would be to run .exes (or all pirated files if you're being paranoid) in a virtual machine so even if the virtual machine is pwned the rest of your computer wouldn't be.

One of the things I did was to run mulvad in a virtual machine and use a different web browser in the vm than I used normally. This makes tracking much harder because they rely on website fingerprinting to identify you independently of your ip address.

Mulvad is great but if you need port forwarding you'll have to look elsewhere as they no longer provide that feature.

I use Usenet instead of VPN + torrent, myself. I pay $6/mo for Usenet access and use a bunch of free indexers, plus a $2/mo paid one.

Mullvad has some advanced features like DAITA and 2 hop you can use for more security.

Yes, and Mullvad is the right choice.

I've been sailing for a good 20 years now. I run PIA VPN, which I know has concerns with their ownership, but that's what I've always had and purchased before their sale, and have never had any issues. I have received 3 letters from ISPs in my life and all were when my VPN wasn't running. No I have a kill switch in my workflow that will cut access with no VPN.

If you look into something like MEGA, all that data is http traffic. I've used that without a VPN a lot and have had no issues there, but that's now my backup for when alternatives aren't available.

VPN is almost for sure good enough, but there are other actions you can take if you want to take it further. Do a search for fmhy and follow some advice I there for detailed info.

I use a seedbox. I won't link to the one I use, but if you add dot eye oh it'll redirect you to their new site. They run the seedbox in a country that doesn't force them to give up info to anyone asking, and you download stuff via SFTP which cannot be seen by the people looking at torrents, and to your ISP, it's just a connection to a server somewhere. So it's safe.

The seedbox I have even has emby, meaning I can click a magnet link in the browser that opens with rutorrent on the seedbox, add the torrent to one of the categories I also set up in emby, and once it's downloaded to the seedbox, I can stream it on my phone or desktop. It's painless.

+1 with mullvad. Haven't heard of any issues with them. Had nothing to turn over to investigators multiple times.

You can pay them in cash if you want, so they'd have no PII on you other than your IP.

You can use ipleak.net to see if your IP is visible through your web browser AND through downloading a test torrent.

I think some ISPs still track if you use torrent and send warning emails.

mull is a very decent VPN and that will do OK to anonymize your traffic, but that's all you're doing ... you're far from safe from all threats.

There's malicious downloads, torrent hijacks, honeypots, bandwidth issues, the Number one thing you need to stay safe is COMMON SENSE ...

So educate yourself and learn about this world you're getting into. The information is out there and freely available.

If you don't want to store the media then yarrlist has a bunch of sketchy streaming sites that work well enough with an ad blocker.

Vpn is someone elses computer