Our ISPs are too cheap and lazy to even try looking. I still use I2P, but only because I need to justify my tin foil hats collection.
Yeah there is no way Surfshark, NordVPN and other services are compromised and or straight up run by the NSA
In fairness I doubt the NSA give a single solitary fuck about piracy and aren't about to give themselves up over a telesync rip of Beetlejuice 2.
But probably best to plan 9/11 part 2 over something a bit more secure.
Title is probably true, but also it's less likely for the NSA to leak your info than say an ISP that openly sells your info. I highly doubt that the NSA sees someone pirating Photoshop as a priority. VPNs can help with preventing a random ad from logging your real loose location, have built in DNS ad block, open up region locked content plus a list of other benefits.
VPNs absolutely help with general privacy, like not putting your personal phone number on a public registry. They are not intended to perfectly hide you from a super power's intelligence agency lol
For anonymity, yes. Sure you might fool Google trying to match your IP to your traffic but that's about it
Technically speaking, VPN logs tend to include the IP address of clients connecting to them, after which the good VPN providers like Mullvad, IVPN and maybe PIA tend to purge them somewhere in their process. Now, if the VPN is running in a RAM-only node, then these logs probably don't touch storage, which means there's not much need to shred information from hard drives for the VPN provider.
With that said, an ISP can technically log your traffic and see that you're connecting to the IP range associated with a VPN. That and perhaps some more covert side-channel/correlation attacks can, in theory, compromise your identity.
Of course, this is going deep into OPSEC and forensics, and I don't think the NSA is that interested in the average Billy torrenting "The Office" to go through that many logs, even if the studios sue in court. Hence, technically your privacy is somewhat maintained with the good VPN providers, but you're definitely not anonymous
That's kind of my thought as well. It's certainly possible someone might go through the effort to find a single pirate downloading The Lion King, but that's a lot of effort (read: money) to find just one person.
There's certainly the possibility that an ISP could note that you connected to a VPN, but given that it's not a remarkable event, since people connect to VPNs for all kinds of legal reasons, they aren't likely to track your particular IP's connection to a VPN apart from a court ordering them to care. They get paid their monthly internet plan price whether someone pirates or checks their email.
If someone was running the Pirate Bay from their home servers, however, more parties would likely be interested in finding that person, and that person's threat model probably exceeds just using a logless VPN.
Maybe I should have said "it's not anonymous based on your threat model"
Yes, a hosted seedbox paid with crypto and self managed keys is the way to go for torrenting
What evidence do you have that no-log VPNs are compromised by the NSA? What about VPNs based in other countries like Canada?
You might have heard about Edward Snowden? Have you looked into anything that he leaked?
The existence of the NSA and their activities is not proof that they have backdoors in VPNs. That's bogeyman conspiracy theory shit—"they could be anywhere, therefore they're everywhere!"
You still haven't answered the question, and I'm beginning to think you are making shit up based on paranoia.
Go ahead and use these services. I don't care about you, what you do or what you think. You are deeply unserious if you are not paranoid about the surveillance and I really have nothing to discuss with you.
Everyone knows it's impossible for the NSA to buy rack space in Bulgaria, where they literally don't have to deal with any US legal process.
It's also impossible for the NSA to market such a service via pop-privacy blogs and social media profiles.
The funny part about this is that the Snowden leaks showed that the NSA actually put a lot of effort into doing shit like this specifically to avoid all the paperwork which came with accidentally collecting data from US citizens. Keeping the data and analysis off shore means no pesky FISA paperwork.
Because if the government wants that data then they are gonna get it. If it's in another country its a lot more work than just serving them a warrant like it is if they are USbased
At least that's a more reasonable answer than trying to imply the NSA has backdoors everywhere.
My position is that it all depends on your threat model. The government isn't likely to go after someone who torrents files and is hidden by a VPN. The government might go after someone running a streaming site, on the other hand.
And even that might wind up with a dead end. AirVPN (for example) is Canada-based, has no logs, and accepts both crypto and anonymous cash payments.
And please don't use anime girls to refer to every fucking thing in the world
I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P I2P
I2P
wait, so this would route my traffic through others' internet connections and theirs through mine? seems like a great way to get implicated for actually illegal activity, like, say, other people running I2P to download and/or upload certain types of porn.
Man, why is everyone like this? Please read the documentation, the traffic is encrypted and metadata cannot identify you. Unless the NSA has an active hack for I2P lying around, NO-ONE IN THIS WORLD can find out what chunks of traffic just went flying by your internet connection
sure, but I2P’s end-to-end encryption is for connecting to I2P addresses, not the general internet. I’m unclear on whether every node serves as an anonymized connection to the internet, though.
EDIT: read a little deeper! so no, not every computer connected to I2P is an internet-connected node, but, due to the limited number of internet-connected nodes, I2P does not offer the same level of anonymity that a VPN does, and may struggle from bandwidth issues.
I can understand the argument against bandwidth, but how do you conclude that it is not anonymous enough? Even against a VPN?
the whole purpose of a VPN is to anonymize internet traffic, so they have many servers that send traffic out to the internet, which improves both anonymity and bandwidth. I2P is more akin to Tor, with anonymizing internet traffic as a bit of an afterthought, and the limited number of internet-connecting nodes makes users' traffic more trackable.
What you're talking about is supposed anonymity in obfuscation, and that has been proven to not work.
Also, most VPN companies keep logs and can be subpoenaed. Not all, but most. I2P is meant to anonymize your traffic, so I do not see the point of your statement
What you're talking about is supposed anonymity in obfuscation, and that has been proven to not work.
if it's been proven not to work, then neither I2P nor VPN is worth using, no?
most VPN companies keep logs and can be subpoenaed.
well, sure, but that's why anybody looking into a VPN is generally advised to use specific, known-good VPN providers who don't keep logs and who, preferably, aren't headquartered in a country with strict IP law.
Haru asking Futaba where she has to type in her dad's credit card number
If your provider supports SSL and you actually turn it on then no technically don't need a VPN for Usenet.
I guess, that depends on the legislative of your country, maybe they see all interactions with usenet providers as illegal, and if you are not using a VPN they see what IP you talk to. But in the other hand, in such countries, using (foreign) VPNs may also be illegal🤔
Meh my Usenet provider also partners with a VPN provider. Still costs me £5 a month for the VPN but I may as well use it, I like having a VPN
IP law firms tried to get their cases into my country and they only got a 50% success rate on court so they stopped trying (cost benefit thing I suppose).
Also private trackers in my country do not allow the use of VPN (why do they care IDK, they say it is to have more control on who join), so there's little point on getting a VPN for piracy here.
