!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
No company, especially VPN companies, will encourage you to break the law or violate copyright.
We have to support companies like Mullvad who operate on the premis that privacy is a human right, if it's just a business equation then they will fold when it's inconvenient
Plus, if the VPN is setup right, they can't know exactly what you are downloading or what you are accessing.
Yes and no. The movie/game companies can still easily trace torrents back to the VPN server. So the VPN provider is under constant pressure to crack down on piracy.
And some have begun to give in. Lots of VPNs have dropped support for port forwarding, because it’s commonly used by Plex/Jellyfin servers.
Actually, no. Even if they trace it back to the provider, if said provider is running little to zero logs and proper encryption, there is no way for the provider to know who is doing the downloading of anything.
It's also not the movie/game companies doing anything. There are companies that monitor p2p for specific files for TV shows, movies, games, etc and then automatically send a boilerplate cease and desist to whoever owns any ip addresses for said files. Some isps like Google fiber (at one point) just ignored these requests and didn't pass it on to the end user. Every other isp including VPSs, seedboxes, etc will autoforward the dmca notice and if you rack up enough they will fire you as a customer.
I suggest you and others here check out proton, they have a ton of servers including ones that support p2p. They don't and can't tell who is transferring what. If you do a ton of downloading of pirated content, I'd also suggest setting up even a basic seedbox. The one I am currently using takes crypto and doesn't need any info aside from an email address. They will forward dmca notices and the auto delete the offending content after about 12 hours but if you restart the torrent you can download it again if needed and you can then let it seed for as long as you want.
If they keep tracing it back to the provider it doesn't matter. Eventually rightsholders will squak enough at politicians and pay them big money to pass legislation banning VPNs or some stupid shit like that. If enough countries do it, VPN providers will have major operating challenges.
That's not how that works. Torrent has been around for decades and none of that actually happens. None of that will ever happen and couldn't actually be enforced even if it did.
I'm not sure some of you here actually understand how this tech or the world at large actually functions. Plenty of files are shared p2p that aren't under copyright and it would be damn near impossible to limit people's ability to connect p2p with others without fundamentally changing how the entire internet is connected and functions.
I'd suggest you look up concepts like zero knowledge encryption. I'd also suggest you look at VPN providers that claim to not keep any logs at all along with proper encryption. I'd also suggest that you look into the number of jurisdictions around the world who don't give a flying fuck about the dmca.
Yes they will, and anyone confident in saying no doesn’t understand that laws will be changed if they need to. If VPN usage is significant enough of a factor in piracy or any other illegal activity laws will be changed to find providers responsible. They could mandate data be logged. There’s so many other more nefarious things that these VPNs could be sheltering more important that governments would like to be able to have information on that I just can’t see them shrugging their shoulders and ignoring it. That time will come.
Go for it. I have a Digital Ocean droplet in Amsterdam. Took an evening to spin up, and I can do it again. $6/mo.
You are aware that there are 1,000 uses for a VPN other than pirating? I work for a software dev, we're dependent on half a dozen for secure access. Hell, even the accounting guy needs a VPN to upload to the bank.
The powers that be depend on VPNs to do business. Mandate logging? OK. We'll roll our own. This is old, proven and simple tech.
Digital Ocean collects this data already. Some of these Vpn providers claim to collect nothing, sometimes not even payment information. If you're doing something illegal on that Digital Ocean droplet and law enforcement tracks it down to that IP, Digital Ocean will comply with any lawful order for the data they have on you.
You could theoretically set up a logless VPN server where everything resides in RAM... Unless DO can export RAM at an exact moment in time or catch you in the act and take a snapshot of the RAM at that moment.
They could theoretically sniff your outgoing connections though, but that's difficult to trace with DNS-over-HTTPS.
They know which IP address belongs to which customer at the time and anybody can download a torrent of some copyrighted content and see which IP addresses are down or uploading it at any given moment. No need to inspect RAM, no need for DO to monitor traffic. They (the copyright holders) will send a cease and desist through DO already, and could change to send a lawsuit instead.
For torrents, that is correct. For everything else, it's less concerning.
I've gotten letters from my ISP before about it lol
This is about VPN proxies, not VPN technology itself.
that server is directly tied to you. this won't make a difference at all.
deleted by creator
I've been sailing the high seas for years and never used a VPN.
Where do you live ? certainly not in Germany/Switzerland
Not who you were talking to, but I'm in Canada and don't use one.
Unless if you're in much, much deeper than simple downloading movies/albums/tv shows, we have a max financial payout for copyright infringement lawsuits which is $5,000 CAD. Makes it not worth it for companies to care as they'll pay more in legal fees and lawyers than they will actually win. ISP's still have to legally pass on the notices of infringement but they just go right in ye ol' spam folder for eventual deletion as they have for the last 20 some odd years.
Perks of living in a third world country
I think it's very likely this happens more in the future, but likewise VPN providers sell you anonymity. So if they can't operate without disclosing, they will lose their customers. I'm positive no matter what, VPN companies will find a way to avoid these situations such as operating from countries with less regulations etc.
deleted by creator
I mean I’m still out here rawdogging usenet without a vpn. I keep waiting for the great crackdown on usenet but it never comes… Surely that comes before any VPN crackdown.
Some might but if they do, others will take their place.