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[–] 41 points 8 months ago

"It's okay baby, we don't need a VPN. I'll just stop the torrent right when it's done downloading!"

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  • [–] 34 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    It's always interesting when I load up a download, I get seeded at like 20MB/s, but then... There's nobody to seed to. It's weird to see a torrent that so many people are seeding, but there's like no downloads for it nowadays. Usually once it's no longer popular, seeders disappear, too. Even weirder: it was season 2 of a show (that aired 15 years ago), but season 1 had.... One guy. Only online for about 6 hours a day in the middle of the night.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    do you have port forwarding enabled?

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Most VPNs don't allow that, and those that do look shady as fuck.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago*

    I use torguard, I port forward for soulseek. they setup exactly as you want, you just fill out the request. Been with them 7+ years. I share 0.5 to 1.0 Tb/day on soulseek/torrents. Upload speeds are capped at 5MB/user, 5 uploads at a time on soulseek. 30MB upload cap on utorrent, bound to VPN IP.

    I took this screenshot after an update and reboot, so it's not maxed out on speed yet.

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  • [–] 61 points 8 months ago* (19 children)

    I have qbittorrent set to quit when the DL is done. I tried to seed but spectrum is on that shit, they shut off Internet access. I can't afford a VPN right now, my wife and I both work and we are struggling. Thank you, seeders.

    I'm a leecher, and I truly am sorry. I dl TV shows that are off the air and aren't available on dvd

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  • [–] 45 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    I don’t care if you seed or not, but if you’re torrenting then you’re seeding a little bit while downloading. Quitting quickly doesn’t mask you completely. It might pay to look into your options more.

    There might be a way to shut off uploads entirely, though iirc torrents are designed to stop if you do that.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    It seems to work, I haven't received an email in months. If I leave it to seed for a day I get an email.

    One day internet providers will block ports and IPs to kill torrents, it's just a matter of time. Can't have people downloading I Love Lucy episodes

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I'm not trying to give unsolicited advice but you can get a VPN subscription for 1$/month and put it on your router to get your whole house covered. Seems like a small price to pay for extra privacy and less ISP related headaches. ProtonVPN offers an unlimited bandwidth free tier too.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago

    I do this, and it's lovely. Whole house VPN FTW - guest network for any "sus" devices.

    Can't personally argue in favor of ProtonVPN, I'd say avoid that. Mullvad for me, for now, permanently open to even better solutions.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Did you mean to add a zero to that monthly amount?? Because a VPN sub for just a dollar a month is SUPER sus.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    https://vpn.simplifiedprivacy.com/ has a $1/month sub and you can pair it with their https://hydraveil.net/ tool for compartmentalization. Some of their servers are run by known members of the monero community like trusted vendors or market admins. You can also get shared/resold accounts for big vpn companies on https://xmrbazaar.com/ (for example 2 years of PIA for $15 from a trusted vendor https://xmrbazaar.com/listing/xEM5/) or rent a DMCA ignored VPS with monero and set up your own VPN for $7-12/year, you won't exactly hide in the crowd that way but it's better than nothing and should thwart ISP related annoyances.

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  • [–] 22 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I have qbittorrent set to quit when the DL is done.

    Which won’t stop someone from detecting that you torrented it. Without a VPN, your IP is openly visible to anyone else is joins the torrent. And since there’s no way to fully throttle seeding, (at least not without actively wrecking your leeching speeds), closing the client after the torrent completes won’t make a difference. They’ll already have your IP logged, and will be able to send angry letters to your ISP.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    If you're going to leach, why even bother with a torrent client? Let Real-Debrid do the leeching for you and then grab the file directly from their servers. It's much faster, especially since all it takes one person to upload the torrent to their database and then everyone can directly download the file at gigabit speeds. It also doesn't require a VPN to protect you from your ISP, saving you some money over a torrent client.

    Honestly there is no better, more convenient option for you in your situation. Ditch the torrent client for Debrid.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 24 points 8 months ago (17 children)
  • [–] 27 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (14 children)

    This was one of my biggest motivations for moving to usenet. I don't like exposing myself by seeding. I have a giant folder full of copyright notices forwarded by my ISP because of it, and I don't want to pay for a vpn as it's far more expensive than usenet and just moves the problem/target to the vpn provider.

    But an ssl connection to a usenet server goes unnoticed... Plus WAY faster download speeds, far more consistency in available files, and less spam/garbage content (at least in my experience, anecdotal).


    Torrents took anywhere from an hour to multiple days before either completing or giving up and trying a different torrent. And then there's the seeding process ontop.

    NZBs (usenet) take at the very most, 5min to finish or fail, at which point a new one can be tried automatically by sonarr/radarr if it had failed. Requests for media are now pretty much always ready to watch within 25min of requesting, and most of that is waiting for the library scan to trigger (I'm using SAMBA so filesystem updates can't trigger scans automatically, they're on a timer instead)

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago (13 children)

    How do I get started with Usenet? I'm on a private tracker right now which has excellent speeds (maxes out my 500 Mbit connection usually, so I can't tell what speeds I might achieve if fully utilized), but it would of course be nice not having to seed.

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago* (4 children)

    I don't have time atm, I'm literally leaving for work rn; but I'll write up some details later tonight if nobody else has.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago

    You need a download client (eg. SABnzbd) and an account with an indexer (which will cost money). To automate the process of downloading you can put things like Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr on top, but those are optional.

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (7 children)

    Things you need:

    A Usenet provider such as EasyNews or Astraweb. Usenet services host the content. Be aware that some services like GigaNews just rehost from the same pool of servers as a lot of others, also can be a tad scummy. There’s a lot to look into here for features like connection limits, retention, and download speed. You can also purchase “block accounts” which let you buy blocks of data to use on demand with no expiration. Astraweb is great for this as a secondary source since they have their own servers and can host different content than other hosts. Look for promo codes online when signing up for one as you can usually get solid rates via referrals for like $7-$15 a month. Block accounts can run like $25 for 100GB of download. You can see which servers overlap here at this link courtesy of @Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca

    A Usenet downloading client like SabNZBD for downloading NZB files (pronounced: newzbins)

    An Indexer, such as Drunken Slug, NZBGeek, NZB Finder, or OMGWTFNZBs. Indexers help you find the content you’re looking for in the giant pool of hosted content on Usenet services. Usually good to have more than 1 indexer, even if using a free account on another. Usually run about $15 a year.

    Usenet can be tied into Arrs programs like Sonarr and Radarr for automated downloading which makes things a lot easier especially when you set up your library correctly. See Trash Guides for help with this.

    Personally I recommend running this all through Docker, but it’s not necessary.

    Also even with Usenet, I’d still recommend a VPN. Can never be too safe.

    Edit: added link from @Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca’s comment below

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)

    You've done a pretty good job here, so I'll just add this:

    A map of providers and some info on their benefits.

    https://www.ngprovider.com/current-usenet-map.php

    There's also a ton of info about usenet, how it works, and what to look for, on that site. (you may have to manually go to the homepage to see the rest)

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Thanks so much for this.

    So like, I'm looking to spend at least $15/month unless I can get a discount via a promo code? Might as well start paying for Netflix at that point. Right now I'm running up $0/month with access to anything I want at top speeds for my high speed connection. I don't know if using Usenet is worth it for my situation.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (3 children)

    IIRC there’s some cheaper ones out there around $5, but it’s been a long time since I’ve shopped for a Usenet service. The way I look at it is I’m not having to pay for Netflix, Prime, Peacock, Disney +, HBO, HiDive, etc. just to watch the shows and movies I want. I do pay for Crunchyroll, but that’s mostly because I don’t want to pull and store long shows like One Piece, but that might change with their recent price increase.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    The way I look at it is I’m not having to pay for Netflix [etc]

    Right, same with my private torrent tracker but for $0/month. I don't think Usenet is for me, I guess. Maybe if my tracker gets nuked somehow, which it hasn't after like 20 years, then I'll have to consider Usenet. 😅

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    For me, Usenet isn't about availability; but speed, risk exposure, and convenience.

    Torrents take longer, even with lots of quality seeds and fast network speeds; mostly because of the seeding process. Plus, while you are seeding: you have to publicly expose yourself as a content host, even if just through a VPN. Hosts are what copyright holders target, they don't GAF about the people downloading, they try to take down the hosts to stop the spread. Finally you have to keep the content you downloaded in the format you downloaded, at least until seeding is done.

    I prefer to use Tdarr to automatically transcode downloaded content into h265 (HEVC) to reduce it's size. Most content is found in h264 (AVC); converting it, on average, reduces its size by ~30% while maintaining good quality. Overall this step has saved me at least ~7TB so far (Tdarr reports it's saved 4.8TB, but I converted a ton of stuff with Embys convert feature before implementing Tdarr). That conversion can only be done after seeding or the torrent breaks as the original files are no longer available to seed. Usenet removes the seeding step completely, so I can do whatever I want with the files as soon as they've downloaded, which in it self only takes 5min.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago*

    VPN is probably a good idea regardless of what you use, yeah. I haven't used a VPN in 20+ years of pirating. 😅 Probably a bad idea. 🫣

    Torrents I'm fine with seeding. I never stop seeding my downloads. More data for the people!

    I only download H.265 releases, so no need to reencode. I just dump all my downloaded movies in a movies/ directory, and all my shows in series/{Show Name}/{season XX boxset}/. Plex recognized everything fine, and now Jellyfin does as well after ditching Plex (because Plex don't give af about their users, as I've noticed, story for another time).

    I'm surprised Usenet content is mostly just H.264. sounds a bit behind the times.

    Anyway, filled one 4 TB recently which is like ten years old, recently been getting closer and closer to filling a 10 TB drive, and got a completely unused 24 TB drive waiting to be installed. Bought while storage was still cheap. 😅 Should be set for the coming years.

    That together with the top speeds of my tracker, and free price, hard to beat unless you're worried about your ISP cracking down on you (which I'm not really as I'm based east of the pond).

    I think I'll hold off on Usenet for the time being.

    I appreciate all the advice! 🌹

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago*

    Can I share over usenet without having to port forward? My ISP doesn't allow port forwarding. I've been able to download from usenet, but don't really want to if I can't also share.

    NVM was confusing it with soulseek

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  • [–] 92 points 8 months ago (21 children)

    Selfish, but much safer legally speaking

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  • [–] 68 points 8 months ago (20 children)

    Yep, in my country it’s illegal to provide copyrighted material, but it’s legal to download for personal use. Sorry.

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  • [–] 47 points 8 months ago (16 children)

    That's what VPNs are there for! Ze German setup: gluetun and qbittorrent via docker, qbittorrent only going over gluetuns network.

    This way we can return what we take tenfold and still come out on top!

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Once you've had a legal letter due to an accident and over eager lawyers with easily costs beginning at several thousands you might change your opinion.

    And yes, I had that. For 3 hashes of 3 files of a TV series.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    No it doesn't. Because it's not an opinion but a description on how to not get into the situation you've described - i.e. about personal security.

    What I've described prevents a link between you and your online actions - that's the whole point. It's the defense against surveillance and can be applied on situations with way higher risk than just a fine.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    Okay, I think we're on the same side here, I was just at a technicality.

    We need to fix using technical avoidance and fix the law and surveillance.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    Oh yeah! It's sad that users have to have a technical education to use the Internet if laws and what at least I perceive as "right" fundamentally differ.

    At least for the moment it's only copy right for me personally - there are countries and laws where this need is way more fundamental :(

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  • [–] -3 points 8 months ago* (6 children)

    As long as the VPN isn't a front for residential proxies and routing bot traffic over your endpoint, doing god knows what. If they've been heavily advertised at some point, they most likely are.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    What sketchy ass VPN's have you been using?

    Get something from a well known provider like Proton, iVPN, or Mullvad.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago*

    Proton and Mullvad are probably fine yeah. Nord, Surfshark and Express are definitely very sus though, Nord even has known ties to Oxylabs.

    Torrenting for personal use is legal where I live so I don't have to use any, I'm just saying be mindful if you do.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    "most of them are (if advertised heavily)" is quite a claim without data to back it up.

    At least for the one I tested none of them sent additional traffic over my connection. That's just one data point and I only looked to ones with port forwarding but still far away from your claim.

    There are a shitload of VPN tests out there and testing id your connection gets used by third parties for not traffic is even possible for a layperson.

    Please stop fear mongering without remedies or specifics.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Eh, "thing I really want, but provided for free" combined with "thing we really want you to use, for free" -

    We should maybe put fear mongering directly on that, I think. Free things, that cost real money to provide, that cost no money to use - we should maybe fear monger a little.

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago
    [–] 14 points 8 months ago

    be kind rewind

    seed after you feed

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago

    I haven't really torrented in awhile. I was lucky enough to get in a private megalinks forum site before they closed registrations!

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    God I love Kelly's comics.

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    [–] 9 points 8 months ago

    Switch to UseNet. No seedin' required!

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago

    Always seed after you feed.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago

    I have been able to convince more genz to seed than I know adults who torrent at all

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    The last time I was seeding, on my desktop, my system was set up not to go into sleep mode and also didn't have problems where my monitor wouldn't just stop displaying the screen.

    Now, under Linux Mint, under Wayland for my preferred client, I have to constantly be there to ensure the display doesn't decide to stop displaying since Wayland is still experimental in Cinnamon under LM Zena.

    Otherwise I would go back to doing it.

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  • [–] -2 points 8 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    The last drive of mine running windows is currently an offline setup right now because I ain't updating it to windows 11 and ain't connecting to the internet while not getting security updates.

    I could do it on that windows 10 drive when I allowed the OS an internet connection, but now I'm dealing with the consequences of not suggesting that my dad switch from windows 10 to MX Linux on his laptop.

    Though, I will agree windows would work just fine.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    Salt of the earth.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago

    Go forth and spread your seed and be fruitful and multiply.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    Everyone: "C'MON, SEED!"
    Bugs Bunny: "NO"

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Problem is that I have a shitty ADSL connection so I have to limit seeding to 500kB or 1mB

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)
    [–] 5 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I only seed things that are legal for me to seed. Everything else is seedn't.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    I don’t use a vpn so I can’t seed. Sorry guys

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  • [–] 25 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Uploading [160 TB of] Pirated Books via BitTorrent [for profit] Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues

    Meta also argued that the BitTorrent sharing was a necessity to get the valuable (but pirated) data. In the case of Anna’s Archive, Meta said, the datasets were only available in bulk through torrent downloads, making BitTorrent the only practical option.

    “Meta used BitTorrent because it was a more efficient and reliable means of obtaining the datasets, and in the case of Anna’s Archive, those datasets were only available in bulk through torrent downloads,” Meta’s attorney writes.

    If billionaires can massively pirate EVERYTHING in bulk for profit, why individuals can't pirate a single item for personal consumption?

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