Mullvad was actually "raided" by the Swedish police. They left with fuck all. It was great publicity for Mullvad.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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My respect for mullvad increased
I'm not very well educated in this topic, so I hope someone can correct me if I'm wrong here.
Torrenting as a whole, is not illegal. Look at Linux distributions for example, they offer direct downloads and torrents. What is illegal is distributing copyrighted files.
And torrents start seeding automatically so it's only legal as long as you torrent files that aren't copyrighted, right?
And torrents start seeding automatically
Not necessarily, that should be configurable from within the torrent client.
Even if you didn't seed, if it's copyrighted content, many places make it illegal to download it as well
First things first: not all VPN providers do not log. Many do. And they are happy to sell the data. So keep that in mind when choosing one. Proton is the best imo, I'm a happy user of their services for many years now. They are subject to Swiss privacy laws.
Torrenting isn't illegal but it can be used to illegally download. Just like the internet in general.
It's like a car. It's a normal form of transportation but if you want you can break the law with it. If it's your car, it's easy for them to find you. When you rented the car and the rental company doesn't log user data, it's impossible to prove who was the driver. But the rental company isn't to blame, as they didn't break the law.
Same with VPN providers. They provide a legitimate service which people could use for illegal business. But when there is no user data, there's no proof of who did it. But the VPN provider can't be blamed either, they did nothing wrong.
In most jurisdictions, with a lot of hand waving, it comes down to would a reasonable and prudent person see a non-criminal use of this service?
So for VPN providers with no logging, would a reasonable and prudent person see a utility in that service? Yes. If you have a health matter. If you're a whistleblower. If you're sensitive about people knowing what porn you like. If you want to look up medical information without getting an associated with your identity. There's a lot of non-criminal uses of the VPN
The question wasn't why VPNs are allowed but why VPNs don't just have to block all torrent traffic by law. Your answer still applies tho: torrents aren't used exclusively for piracy. They're a good way for people to share files who don't have the resources to pay for a server, especially since torrents scale automatically
They will just hide. Lots of trackers block port 6881 because ISPs blocked port 6881 and people couldn't torrent, because it was the default torrent port.
So they just changed to random ports. Random is the default now in lots of clients.
Is the port the only way to identify torrent traffic?
no but they used it
And how is a vpn protecting you from any of that? You know tracking by ip is not the ultimate form of tracking the con providers sell you on. There is cookies, list top 1000 sites and which ones you visited had an 80+% reliability for tracking and listing more sites increased it. And this is just the stuff we have found out about. Believing a VPN protects your privacy is stupid in this day. Sure if your worried about isp I guess but most sites are already encrypted. I guess it also prevents it being in the tracker for a torrent so if that is an issue in your country yes.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
A new browser, a new container in the browser, a new profile in the browser, can do quite a lot of good for you. If you use a privacy respecting browser like mullvad The fingerprint signature is become much harder to track. This is demonstrated by going to fingerprint.com when using a VPN and the mullvad browser.
For torrenting, any vpn will hide your ip from copyright trolls. Choose one with port forwarding though.
For shady shit just use tor
Torrenting stuff that is public domain or intended by its creators to be shared via BitTorrent isn't illegal. You won't get busted for sharing a Linux ISO or a copy of Moby Dick.
You would get in trouble for media made in or after 1929 (currently). A VPN would help to protect you from being caught for this, but you would most likely never get arrested for downloading, only being a major player in a scene.
And why cops don't stop them? They do. There's laws on books that prohibit them, but in (a lot) of countries, they either don't have a law that stops VPNs, only piracy sites, or simply don't have the time to care about media piracy when there's bigger fish to fry.
But why don't law enforcements force them to block specific traffic and thus hindering people from using it for pricacy?
What traffic? They have forced Mullvad and IVPN to stop offering port forwarding and deleted Mullvad guide to binding their VPN to qBittorrent. I don't think they can do anything else to hinder people from using torrent for piracy.
I thought they did that to reduce the amount of data they have on users?
where did they say that? Mullvad:
Unfortunately port forwarding also allows avenues for abuse, which in some cases can result in a far worse experience for the majority of our users. Regrettably individuals have frequently used this feature to host undesirable content and malicious services from ports that are forwarded from our VPN servers. This has led to law enforcement contacting us, our IPs getting blacklisted, and hosting providers cancelling us.
IVPN:
Since recent similar changes in the policies of another popular VPN service provider, we have seen a significant influx of new customers, and the risks posed by such activities have grown manyfold. A considerable increase in law enforcement inquiries and erosion of relationship with data centers could threaten our ability to keep serving our customers.
Let me put it this way for an easy understanding, let's suppose you are in Africa, and you are connected to a Russian VPN and you pirate an USA copyrighted stuff, do you believe someone will give a flying fuck about it?
law enforcement is exactly that.. enforcement.
If there are no laws in place to force providers to do that, it cant be done via these means.
And if you cannot enforce because the provider is outside the jurisdiction, then you cant either.
And if you start forcing blocks, the users will adapt by either changing provider or simply evading the block.
police arrest people who didn't break the law all the time, and they can steal money without even thinking you broke the law