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How does mullvad compare to ther VPNs? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 13 points 5 months ago (1 child)

They don’t offer port forwarding. Due to the way torrents work, at least one person (either seed or peer) needs to have port forwarding enabled for the connection to be stable. So if you don’t have port forwarding, you’ll only be able to connect to people who have forwarded theirs. So even if a seed pool shows a lot of available seeds, you may only be able to connect to a few of them. It also means your torrents will take ages to seed, which can be important for private trackers where you need to maintain a certain ratio or you’ll get banned.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Why would you even need a VPN for private trackers?

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    If you (a Joe Schmo nobody) were able to get an invite, you really think a media company with millions of dollars of funding wouldn’t be able to do the same? They could easily get moles into every single private trackers, complete with full backgrounds to pass the interview process. Private trackers aren’t preferred because they’re inherently more secure. At best, that is only security theater, the same as the TSA. They’re preferred because enforced seeding rules, verified uploaders, etc ensures their torrents are healthy and helps prevent “video.mp4.exe” types of malware uploads.

    Plus most people use a mix of public and private trackers. Private trackers are obviously preferred, but sometimes you don’t want to kill your existing ratio with a massive download that will take weeks to seed back up to 1.0.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    They could easily get moles into every single private trackers

    Maybe if they actually wanted to, but what actually happens is they hire a much smaller company that monitors public trackers and sends them thousands of "successful" takedowns. When have you seen private trackers taking down torrents due to DMCA? It pretty much never happens, even for public ones these days the best case for these companies is to get google or other search engines to remove torrent sites from results.

    You are giving these corps WAAAY too much credit, they only target the lowest of low hanging fruit (ISPs and search engines) because anything else is a waste of time and money. There's a reason you don't hear about many lawsuits against private individuals anymore, its because they know its a bad idea to go after "Joe Schmo NoBody" with a net worth of $217 in the bank, who will just declare bankruptcy after the corp spends tens or hundreds of thousands of $ on lawyers for a single case.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    I wasn’t talking about DMCA takedowns. That’s not why you’d want a VPN at all. I was talking about being able to monitor the IPs of everyone who is seeding the torrent, which the media companies can then use to get those seeders’ internet access cut off and sue them. They have done so successfully numerous times.

    A VPN hides your real IP from everyone else in the swarm. So all they see is the VPN’s IP. And with a reputable VPN, they won’t have any logs to turn over to authorities, so they won’t be capable of ratting you out when the courts start subpoenaing their shit.

    Oh, and (super dystopian) fun fact, bankruptcy doesn’t disburse punitive damages. You’d still be on the hook for losing/settling the case, even after going bankrupt.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago*

    What do law did you think they use to go after people who they monitor on torrent swams? Its the dmca (or equivalent), they notify ISP and isp is obligated to either adress the user a warning or suspension. If the isp ignores and lets users keep going then its the billion dollar ISP not the user that would get sued

    Look up the end result of Sony BMG v. Tenenbaum, sony didnt get a dime and was able to successfully discharge the debt through bankruptcy after exhausting all appeal options and costing SonyBMG a ton of money. Thats why you dont hear about lawsuits like that anymore.

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