this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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A VPN company can easily give up your details to the police who are now actively going after citizens. VPNs are not enough anymore.
Is there a problem with I2P adoption? I'm sensing a massive lack of interest from this thread
If there are no logs, there is nothing to give up. There is no law that they have to keep logs as far as I know.
Don't get me wrong, I'm interested in i2p. Thanks for posting.
The point is that logs are generated and then deleted but companies who do not wish to keep such logs (e.g. IP address of client who connects to the VPN). I2P sure to it's design, doesn't even generate such incriminating logs (it might generate other kinds of logs which is a different discussion).
Thanks
You have to trust that the VPN provider doesn't store logs. I2P is pretty much trustless besides where the binary comes from, but you can even compile it yourself.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Mullvad is trustworthy (imho, and because of audits).
Anyway, you can have both, and run purple i2p with blackjack and torrents!
Mullvad is great. I unfortunately had to switch because they removed port forwarding, but I highly wish they didn't.
What do you use now? AirVPN? Proton?
I switched to AirVPN right after I used mullvad but I was not that happy with their speeds (max speeds were around 500-600 Mbit/s), so I now use Proton. Proton is nice except that the port changes with every connection. Fortunately I found a fork of the VPN app that has support for automatically changing the port in qbittorrent. Other than that I'm pretty happy with Proton. :)
I use PIA, cheap and they've been involved in at least 2 court cases where their no logging policies were proven.
No logs policy are not trustworthy
I admit that I’m skeptical since everyone is a node. It probably is fine, but I don’t know the risks that I take by volunteering as a node. I thought that VPNs can be fine as long as they don’t store logs, but I could be mistaken.
as a node
VPNs usually do store your IP when you connect to them, even if they delete it later (it is technically impossible to not know the IP address of whoever is connecting to the VPN). And the likes of Mullvad and IVPN do not allow port-forwarding.
I will repeat what I said to the other commenter: please read the documentation. Being a router doesn't mean that traffic and its contents can be linked to your identity. Data is broken down into chunks and encrypted along with metadata being scrambled. Unless there's a zero day I'm unaware of, you are perfectly safe.
Being a node isn't an issue. The traffic is encrypted, the destinations are unknown to the nodes themselves, and the traffic does not leave the overlay network (I2P). In TOR, you also have something similar, but the traffic can exit the overlay network but to do so, your node must be an exit node. I2P nodes are internal by default and it's not that easy to make it an exit node.
You are very safe being a node in I2P.
Anti Commercial-AI license
A good VPN won't have any details to hand over that will convict you, even if they wanted to (e.g. mullvad), so they most definitely are enough.
And police are not going after citizens, rights holders are (like they always have been) by suing ISPs in hopes of getting your info.
What in don't like about I2P, is being a node for other peoples traffic.
VPNs log your IP. And Mullvad doesn't allow port-forwarding, which means you can't seed.
Being a node for traffic doesn't mean it can be linked to your identity, because everything is encrypted and metadata is scrambled. TOR node operators take much greater risks because depending on how they have set it up, it can lead to their identity being compromised. It's a small chance but it can happen.
I can't convince you. I only hope that people start seeing the need for it and begin reading the documentation to see its strengths
I use Mulvad, and seeding seems to work for me. Am I missing something?
You can only seed to people who have ports open. At least one side of the connection needs to be reachable.
It's people like me who keep ports available that are able to seed to you.
That shouldn't be possible in theory unless I don't know it well enough. Care to provide a screenshot?
But they don't log the data going through. The IP alone will not be enough for a conviction at all. They also need to prove that you acquired/shared copyrighted content. Any proper VPN isn't going to log that.
No, I'm not at all interested in that either. I don't want to risk any nefarious traffic that I have no control over running through my network.
I get the appeal of I2P for torrenting and I can absolutely see the value it can bring. But as long as I will have to be a node for other random peoples traffic, I'll pass.
I feel as though this take is fully fud. It sounds like a take that came from seeing tons of advertisements for vpns without really understanding how they work. Maybe I'm wrong about you. That said, in general, a VPN is not a great cloak for piracy.
If there was a completely zero percent risk that I would be used as a node for something truly horrible, I also wouldn't mind. But I'd rather torrent with a slightly elevated risk rather than enabling things that should not be enabled. By torrenting with a VPN, at least I have the control over what happens on my network and exactly what data I'm part of sharing.
there is 0% risk until your country makes a law that prohibits any and all P2P communication. That would not only break torrents, but would thwart signal/telegram/whatsapp calls too, Jitsi meetings, probably google meet and zoom too, as all those use P2P traffic for performance.
So far there are only such laws in far east countries, and the official java I2P router is smart enough to not participate in routing when you are in such a place.
Also, I think for routing to work you need to open a port, without it that won't be done.