I wrote this post for a friend, I’m sharing it here for anybody it might help. I got asked multiple times how I download cracked music software so I figured it’d be easier to write it down once. It’s meant for people with very low technical skills who just want to start torrenting software without major risks, and it includes a bunch of safety tips that are already known in this community.
If you have feedback, let me know and I’ll update the post.
Would you like to offer alternative suggestions to the vpn selection?
I don’t know of any free vpns for torrenting, though I believe ProtonVPN (paid), Windscribe (paid) and AirVPN (paid) offer port forwarding at the moment. PIA can be used to port forward, though they are owned by kape which is kinda sketchy to me.
You can use windscribe free for torrenting, but you will quickly hit the data cap they have in place
I can confirm PIA fully works as long as you’re connected to one of the endpoints that supports port forwarding, and it works over wireguard which I prefer. My torrent client runs in a docker container that runs all traffic through it.
Whether or not you trust their claim of not saving any logs (especially after getting bought out a few years ago) is up to you, but there hasn’t been any evidence to suggest they are, and they’ve had reputable audits to suggest they don’t.
Does PIA have a free plan that works? Since the only free option was immediately debunked in these comments.
I wouldn’t recommend using any free VPN for anything, personally.
I already have a paid one, but I wrote this for people who don’t care enough to pay for one. Basically the alternative is either a free one or none. If I’m talking to a friend I’d rather they use a shady free VPN than none at all.
windscribe offers 10 GB/month free, and you can build a $3 custom monthly plan if you need more bandwidth
Yeah I’ve updated the post to have Windscribe as the recommended free one, with a warning about free VPNs
I mean fair enough, it’s better to expose your IP to one VPN provider than to blast it to thousands of peers, but the trade-off of recommending free VPNs to people who aren’t tech savvy (especially when it sounds like there aren’t any legit ones that support torrent traffic), is you’re inviting them to find a shady one somewhere thinking they’re being safer and risking getting MITMed or their login tokens stolen in transit trying to browse the internet while they’re downloading something.
I would just consider paying a few bucks for a VPN to be a hard constraint of using torrents even somewhat safely.
You’re right, I guess, but if we only recommend paid ones people will just google for free ones and use whichever shady provider is at the top of the google results. People are really averse to subscriptions.
I’ve added a warning about free VPNs and switched to recommending Windscribe, which still has a decent reputation.
There is no good free VPN. Proton is the only one with a free tier I’d trust, but again, it won’t help with stuff like this. VPNs are expensive operations to run. If it’s free to use, there’s basically no chance that they aren’t monetizing it in a shady way.
Mullvad is $5/month, you don’t have to subscribe (you can buy a single month), and they accept multiple private payment options. I would highly recommend shelling out the $5 to protect yourself over risking it with a free VPN.
I mean, PIA is like 40 bucks for an entire year. You’re not gonna find any prominent streaming service, pro-grade subscription software, or pro-grade software license that’s as cheap as that.
If the goal is to access all desired software and media safely while paying as little as possible, it’s a great choice.
Windscribe at $3 per month is slightly cheaper and less dodgy than PIA. I left PIA for Mullvad when Kape bought them. They’re very questionable based on my (then) research.