Russia and India Order VPNs

[DQ]

VPN is for security and privacy reasons, as well as an AV and a firewall.
As an alternative to Cloud Services, torrents are an excellent complement.
Just beacuse VPN, CS and torrents can be used for shady things it doesn't mean its bad.
It's a cat & mouse game, as it always have been since the Internet was available to the common man.

Couple of comments on this. Please keep in mind I am just stating my thoughts, not trying to start an argument.

All VPN generally does is obfuscate your IP and possibly your DNS queries (yes it encrypts your traffic to the provider but that's of little consequence unless on public wifi). There are many ways to track you that don't care about either of those things. And that's assuming your VPN provider is not tracking you as clearly they are somewhat of a honeypot since they aggregate traffic.

Torrents can be used for good but let's be honest, most of the time they aren't.

In summary, I agree with RF1. I steer clear of torrents and while I dabble with VPN for the things it provides you have to understand what it does not to keep yourself safe.

 

[autodidact]

If VPNs are tracking and logging your torrents, you may have an issue, if you want to take that chance go ahead, but anyone with any amount of brains would stay away from torrents.

That was a completely unnecessary comment!
Here's how I do it and been doing for years:
Use a torrent client, create a private, unique IP adress, portforwarding, torrent with a unique key,
save and share the torrent file, in a compressed encrypted file, with family and friends, with or without VPN.
Put it on a USB stick, bring it with you when you travel, etc.
Fire up the torrent and, there you go, you have access to whatever it is that you want to share.
Big files, small files, photo albums, videos and what whatnot.
Now tell me how and why someone should/could/would be able to mess that up for me?
And yes, I have a brain that works really well, thank you very much!

 

[autodidact]

Couple of comments on this. Please keep in mind I am just stating my thoughts, not trying to start an argument.

All VPN generally does is obfuscate your IP and possibly your DNS queries (yes it encrypts your traffic to the provider but that's of little consequence unless on public wifi). There are many ways to track you that don't care about either of those things. And that's assuming your VPN provider is not tracking you as clearly they are somewhat of a honeypot since they aggregate traffic.

Torrents can be used for good but let's be honest, most of the time they aren't.

In summary, I agree with RF1. I steer clear of torrents and while I dabble with VPN for the things it provides you have to understand what it does not to keep yourself safe.

That's fine with me, to each his own, I'm perfectly safe with how I use the World Wide Web...

 

[DQ]

That's fine with me, to each his own, I'm perfectly safe with how I use the World Wide Web...

It really wasn't about questioning you as much as just throwing out some general VPN facts because there is a lot of incorrect assumption with it. But I think you picked up on that so.

 

[RedFox 1]

It really wasn't about questioning you as much as just throwing out some general VPN facts because there is a lot of incorrect assumption with it. But I think you picked up on that so.

DNS and IP leaks are a particular blight of many VPN services, I just don't trust them. That said I hide behind a Linux program called Kodachi, I run 2 computers here one has W11. Kodachi is better than Tails, although for beginners Tails is fine.

 

[George++]

If VPNs are tracking and logging your torrents, you may have an issue, if you want to take that chance go ahead, but anyone with any amount of brains would stay away from torrents.

The content I get via torrent, Star Trek Continues for instance, is only available via torrent. With the (nominal) copyright owners' permission, of course.

 

[autodidact]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#:~:text=Adoption[edit,103][105]

 

[DQ]

DNS and IP leaks are a particular blight of many VPN services, I just don't trust them. That said I hide behind a Linux program called Kodachi, I run 2 computers here one has W11. Kodachi is better than Tails, although for beginners Tails is fine.

Well that's the thing about VPN. It's really meant to just get traffic from point A to B securely via an encrypted tunnel. It's primary purpose is not to hide anyone from anything. It just so happens it can be used for that as well due to available services. And while it does hide your traffic from your ISP, it does not fully hide it from the VPN services ISP. Yes your IP is obfuscated and that can be a good thing but nowadays you can be "fingerprinted" in multiple ways that do not require knowing your IP.

My longwinded point is, it can be used as a privacy tool but it is not the panacea of privacy they try to tell you it is so you buy a service.