EU is making a new law which makes your IP the same as (something similar to) your social security number and they say piracy is going to receive a huge blow. Obviously I have no intention of stopping but now I’ll have to start using a VPN, if I want to continue my way. However, I do not trust VPNs a lot and I do not like the idea of paying for them (I could just pay for the movie in the first place)
I looked into using Tor network to torrent but it seems like it’d be a hindrance to the network itself, which is going to be a huge inconvenience for other users. Additionally I know that even if I found a way to throttle my bandwidth to remove this problem, Tor isn’t exactly made for this sort of thing anyways.
Now, obviously it doesn’t have to be torrenting, but I would gladly hear any suggestions on how to avoid paying and getting movies and shows without being caught doing it. Truthfully I was only streaming from websites for many years, so I do not know a lot about torrenting vs direct downloading either. Thanks in advance for any responses.
Yo, 2 things:
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I too heard that about Greece, but I couldnt find any article about it, only stuff I heard from others which they probably read them on FB. Do you have any (reputable) article coverthing this? I just considered those roumors it as fearmongering and moved on.
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Yo, since I haven’t seen you around, just to know, we have a sonewhat active greek community at https://fedia.io/m/Greece
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It’s a lifestyle, not a way to save money. I pay for piracy related tech more than a netflix subscription costs.
This. I don’t do much but I have spent $1,200 on HDDs alone. Then there’s the true saviors of the internet with hundreds of TB, even PB of backed up, virus-free content
I don’t do much but I have spent $1,200 on HDDs alone.
this might interest you when its ready in a couple months. this is exactly the issue its working toward resolving.
EU is making a new law which makes your IP the same as (something similar to) your social security number
no they’re not.
the EU ruled that IP addresses are personally identifiable information (PII) for the purposes of GDPR compliance EIGHT YEARS AGO. this means that internet services cannot store your IP address without your consent and explicitly telling you why they need it, they have to delete it when they’re done with it, and if they are to be stored in any way for aggregate data then it needs to be anonymised so that it can no longer be associated with you.
any change to associate IPs with you would break the GDPR.
Greece did it anyway and EU made us, actually. https://bernitsaslaw.com/2025/03/27/law-51792025-on-digital-piracy the “dynamic blocking measures targeting end-users” are connection of the IP with the equivalent of a social security number of the people inside the house where the infringement occurs.
your link has nothing about the EU forcing the issue, in fact this seems to blatantly fly in the face of eu law.
Yes, I have failed to find an english article that covers this issue properly, not much I can do if there isn’t coverage. Maybe EU didn’t force it and I was misinformed but the government passed it anyway as you can see.
Something similar happened in Sweden, the politicians said that the EU is forcing Sweden to store data about users. Like, “we don’t want this… but we have no choice!” And then it turned out that what they did was actually against EU laws and Sweden was fined for doing what they did and ordered to stop.
Hope people don’t re-elect such dumb bricks…
That’s crazy, maybe its the same thing over here.
i can indeed see, and if the things the greek ad-article are saying but are not in the text of the law are true then it is very troubling and will probably result in sanctions from the EU, because the union have been on the asses of the greek government for years now to get them to curb corruption. it is also even more reason to get a vpn.
To be honest our country is run by a Mafia that has been committing literal crimes for a while now, this would be a drop in the bucket. Ironically, one previous offense involved the use of software to spy on the personal electronic devices of politicians and influential people, both in the ruling party and outside of it. Another was a criminal neglect of the train system that ended up in a train crash with 57 people dead. Not to mention the subsequent cover-up which involved editing audio records of the incident before their release to shift the blame and many other false records, the politicians literally disguising themselves as random civilians that one time and appearing on TV saying how safe they feel travelling after the incident and other things that don’t really come to mind right now.
If I may say, no, I don’t think EU is coming to save us. They barely gave them a slap on the wrist for all these offenses combined.
We have something similar in France for more than a decade. As you are torrenting, you are obviously sharing your ip with other torrent clients and this is where they get you. The agency (used to be called Hadopi but they change their name and can’t recall the new one) is following some torrents, gets your ip from torrent clients and then ask internet provider to give name/address. You then received a warning letter, upon 3 letters received, you can get a fine or go to court.
sweden also had this but they stopped sending out fines because they were a company masquerading as a government agency which is basically fraud. there is an explicit carve-out in the law for making private copies of things, and we already pay a “copying fee” when buying media that can be copied to so they had no way of proving whether you were pirating or doing backups.
We also have the right to copy media we bought here. Nonetheless, you need to prove that you have bought media you have downloaded.
Edit: Sharing copyright media is strictly forbidden here, so even if you prove that you buy media, you are not allowed to torrent it.
Try Tailscale.
EU is making a new law which makes your IP the same as (something similar to) your social security number and they say piracy is going to receive a huge blow.
Sounds like an April Fools joke.
Unfortunately needing a VPN is not.
I torrent without VPN in the EU. I’ve been doing so for years. Still no letters as of writing this comment.
It massively depends on the country - it’s probably fine in Southern and Eastern Europe but not for example in Germany were if I’m not mistaken copyright violation is even part of Criminal Law rather than Civil Law as in pretty much the rest of the World.
Personally ever since I lived in the UK - which has the most insane levels of civil society surveillance in Europe, including of Internet usage - I got into the habit of doing pretty much everything behind a VPN, which also helps with peace of mind for the whole torreting thing no matter which country I’m living in at the moment, plus I pay 5 euros a month for the VPN which is less than a single streaming service, so in a way it pays itself (it’s funny how piracy compensates for the costs of protecting myself from dragnet surveillance).
Unfortunately the law already passed a few days ago it seems…
You need to pay for a VPN. It’s like a condom for the internet. Frankly, stop trying to avoid something that you should already be using.
Mullvad is a good start. Go purchase it.
Didn’t mullvad stop port forwarding? That ain’t great for seeding.
Yes, Proton VPN is a better option if you require that feature.
Or AirVPN.
I believe Private Internet Access also offers this feature if people need a cheaper alternative, although it comes with tradeoffs regarding trust and ethics.
What tradeoffs? I can confirm PIA works fine with torrenting.
As the other person said, the owners of PIA also own several other VPNs and their history prior to this was pretty bad. One of the biggest selling points for PIA, the “no logging tested in court” claim, also occured before these new owners took over so it’s questionable whether that is as believable today. A big part of trust in privacy-related software comes from financial incentives and motivations driven by the business model, and the parent company does not have a good track record in terms of prioritising security and privacy above financial gain.
The parent company is Israeli-owned (and by an especially genocidal Israeli, and that’s saying something), they have had several data loss/breach/sales controversies, injected malware through customers’ browsers on purpose, and much more. Look up Kape Technologies.
Oh shit.
I would simply use something a little less fishy and cheaper AirVpn you can pair over there also with montero and some other crypto
The majority of their servers support port forwarding. “Only available on paid tiers” is a completely meaningless crticism, because a) you wouldn’t use a free VPN for torrenting unless you were an absolute moron and b) very few VPNs support torrenting in the first place because it requires so many resources. If you want a good VPN with port forwarding, you need to pay for it. Nothing about this makes Proton VPN “fishy”.
You can keep on seeding after downloading and your torrenting program will still manage to upload to any member of the swarm for that torrent that it connected to (even if only to check their status) during the download phase.
This should be enough to get you consistently above a 1:1 upload to download ratio for any popular public torrents, though for those with very few leechers you might never get there.
The lack of port forwarding is only a problem for remote machines your program has not connected to during the current session for a torrent (i.e. not yet seen machines that try to connect to your client), which means you can’t seed at all in a purely for seeding session or upload to machines that joined the swarm after your download was done in a mixed session.
If your pattern of usage is that of mainly a downloader of public torrents who tries to give back to the communy at least as much as they took and whose not mainly into obscure stuff, it works fine.
You are not exactly right, but going in the right direction. Not having a forwarded port means you aren’t ‘connectable’ by peers as your firewall will block incoming traffic. What this means is that only ‘connectable’ peers will be able to connect to you (your client can reach out to them as their port is forwarded). You are however invisible to peers that also aren’t ‘connectable’. You might also experience some degradation in time to connect as people can’t reach out to you.
To sum it up:
- Not connectable =X= not connectable (impossible)
- Not connectable =>= connectable (degraded time to connect when seeding)
- Connectable === connectable (perfect)
Perhaps? It works just fine for me but I’m a bit of a filthy casual who doesn’t torrent all that much
Unless this condom has a pocket dimension inside that absorbs all the “genetic information” that’s in there and gives it up to someone else to put it in your partner anyways…
Iirc Mulvad doesn’t save *any" information since they use a RAM only infrastructure. Yoy can also pay for them with either crypto or by sending them a letter with the money. There’s your pocket dimension
Well, by pocket dimension I meant some way to access and store my personal data without me knowing or consenting. There’s merit to what you say but how can you be sure that mulvad doesn’t save anything at all. Would someone be able to prove it if they did? If they randomly see one day the company is going under and decide to sell everyone out to make a quick buck before abandoning the ship for good?
Truly I may be a little paranoid but its why I’d like to find an alternative with a bit less gambling if it is possible. Especially since the fines will be pretty big if I am caught.
they have been publicly audited multiple times, their stack is open source, they require no info about you at all (paying cash is possible), their architecture is tor-like in that connections bounce around inside their network before leaving for a destination.
This is actually convincing enough! If I end up with a VPN its very worth considering, my thanks.
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So the solution is to what… ? Raw dog it?
- mutually assured destruction: if a VPN starts leaking network activity it’s suicide for their business model
- distribution of concerns: VPN services as a rule don’t give a shit about your torrent traffic the way a copyright holder might care about your IP
If you’re out here creampie-ing the whole internet you don’t have either of those barriers but you still carry all of that risk.
Even condoms very rarely break that doesn’t make them in general useless. Perfection is the enemy of progress.
My solution is currently an under-construction project lol. It isn’t like I’m not considering a VPN at all, its just that I have it more as a last resort. I need to exhaust all other options first since sure, leaks would hurt their business model but life is long and in the long run they could leak a lot of the activity of their users if they store it somewhere (something no one can guarantee they do not do). Obviously if I come to no other better options I’ll look into making this bet.
The condom analogy here works too, because I’m sure you’d agree that safe sex should be free for everyone. Same with internet security and privacy.
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Do you have some source for this IP thing in the EU? I wasn’t aware of any new privacy laws.
only sources I can find are in Greek since this is my home country where this was implemented, but basically EU forced us to do it so I thought other countries would also have this problem. https://techmaniacs.gr/episimo-syndesi-afm-me-ip-kai-prostima-se-osoys-katevazoyn-katanalonoyn-kai-diakinoyn-peratiko-periechomeno/ see if you can translate this to english, will come back with an uptade if I find something better. update: found this article in english only, but the “dynamic blocking measures targeting end-users” are connection of the IP with the equivalent of a social security number of the people inside the house where the infringement occurs.
this is an ad for a vpn.
Unfortunately there’s little coverage in English of this issue.
Uh, thanks. That really doesn’t look good. Usually copyright infringement is a civil matter. And I believe we had sufficient laws to handle that in European countries. I haven’t read the cited new law, but I guess that “shortcut” just does away with everyone’s privacy. Plus it’s going to swamp the courts with cases. I’m not sure if they’re bored or anything… But either they just hand out fines without checking properly… Or, if done properly, this is just a lot of additional work for the justice system. To the benefit of the copyright industry. And either way, it’s just bad for the people.
Edit: I believe this is the mentioned government gazette. The copyright changes are in Chapter 2: https://www.e-nomothesia.gr/kat-arxaiotites/n-5179-2025.html
I use Tor to get magnet links and feed them to my clearnet torrenting client, no issues so far and the ISP would have to breach my privacy to provide my IP.
Seedboxes go from €2 to €100+ a month depending on how much you will torrent and how much space you need on the box alongside other factors. My personal choices are Gigarapid and Ultra but there are others
EU is making a new law which makes your IP the same as (something similar to) your social security number.
If that’s true, then even VPNs won’t help. Not sure how they will implement such a thing, but it’s obviously to protect the children !
There’s also the I2P network, which is similar to TOR but with torrenting in mind and other nice tools and utilities ! However, it’s slower, has less traffic/seeder and don’t even bother to try and find some older movies/music or hidden gems.
It’s getting better and some applications, like qbittorrent, are adding the i2p network. In the near future, when they have protected the children, I2P will be the place to be for a free and open Internet. However, you will probably be tagged as criminal…
I’m not sure what the entire EU is doing, but they did this in my country, Greece. They say it has already been implemented so I don’t know what exactly this is going to entail. Will be checking this I2p thing out soon enough though.
Free vpns sell your data. It’s why they’re free. Processor cycles and bandwidth cost money so if you want someone to use their processor cycles and their bandwidth to encrypt and route your traffic through their servers without clandestinely peeking, and using lawyers and advanced security techniques to ward off the police, you gotta pay them.
In order to seed torrents you need to have a port on your vpn endpoint that is accessible to the internet and gets passed to the computer running your BitTorrent client. This is called port forwarding. There are only so many ports, so a vpn provider that offers port forwarding will probably charge more and you might not be able to get certified hood classics like :42069 because someone is already using it.
I use airvpn for torrents but depending on your European country you might not be able to. There are other port forwarding vpns. The cost is cheap, most come out to less than $5 a month.
Most let you run multiple devices at the same time so you might have your computer at home torrenting through the vpn while you’re away at work browsing porno on the toilet connected to the vpn which lets you get past the work content blockers.
So… just pay for a port forwarding vpn.
I know about the dangers of free VPNs, its why I haven’t turned to those at all in the first place. Sure what you say could work but as far as I know no one can be entirely sure paid VPNs don’t also sell your data. I’m pretty much aware that a properly used good VPN will make my life a lot easier but I don’t like the idea of paying just for safe browsing. I want to see what other options are out there before I submit to that as a necessary evil. Thanks for the recommendations though.
I tried a lot of the alternatives before switching to a vpn for torrenting.
For a long time I only used private trackers with encryption required and dht and whatnot off. It worked pretty good, especially with traffic shaping on the router.
If you really want to avoid paying money that’s where I’d start. The problem you’re gonna run into comes from how the law is used against piracy, who does it and how.
If I were gonna go that route today I’d set up doh or dot first. Both are free if you want to use mullvads servers.
Good luck.
I’ll look into it, thanks.
Update: Hilariously, while looking into finding english articles for said law in Greece, I stumbled upon one possible answer for my problem. The SSN that connects to the IP address has no way of pinpointing a perpetrator in a place with free WiFi like an internet Cafe. This method is not really safe, for the law has only passed recently but in extremely classic Greek government fashion, the law has many gray areas and potential loopholes! Tell me what you think about this idea.
How about you don’t go saturating some poor sods public WiFi that he is kind enough to provide to his customers? Cheapskate
Torrenting in a café? Get Mullvad and stop complaining.
That’s probably a bad idea.
Not only are you going from committing a crime in private to committing a crime in public, you’re putting yourself in one of the most vulnerable positions possible when it comes to computer security (every few months there are new attacks developed specifically to target users of free public wifi).
Even if that wasnt a problem to you, businesses often have content blockers and traffic shaping to prevent you from torrenting and when they don’t you’ll be competing with everyone else actively streaming video and audio to their phones as well.
It’s also trivial to figure out who’s torrenting on public wifi and has been for years.
If you’re truly concerned about this new law then public wifi isn’t the solution.
E: and if all that doesn’t convince you and you go through with it, you’ll be causing a problem that will actively make people look for you so the wifi isn’t completely jammed up.
That’s a bunch of solid info, I definitely wasn’t planning to do anything without proper research into it anyways. I’d also never make it someone else’s problem as might be the case with public WiFi. Guess there goes that idea though.
