XD

All they knew is I’m playing a game boy game called Pokémon and that this is a movie of that game. So… XD

Noice. Flawless T480 experience with Arch Linux here. Also one of the last real modular ThinkPads - I swapped the storage, memory and WiFi card. It feels like a piece of hardware from 2026.

What I did, what I do and why I do it

At the beginning of the 2000’s, piracy either wasn’t as prevalent as it is today or it wasn’t as persecuted, or a combination thereof. Which is to say, I started with DC++, Kazaa and direct downloads. No security or privacy measures. This is also when I proudly downloaded the first Pokémon movie Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), sat down with my parents to watch it and then immediately having to explain to them why Pokémon are having sex. Suffice it to say, it was some Pokémon themed hentai.

As my understanding of computers, networking and capitalism evolved - this being around the early 2010’s - and especially as I had learned about the improved, albeit not perfect, anonymity of torrenting in a society with otherwise increasingly oppressive demeanor towards online integrity and piracy -, I decided to only pirate using torrent clients thenceforth. I also took a brief pause from piracy for about six years, as I moved to a jurisdiction whose laws and attitude towards privacy were not known to me. I was doing my Master’s degree and thus couldn’t spare the time and effort it would’ve taken to safely engage in piracy.

As we arrive to present day - present time (any fans here?) -, nation states’ attitude towards piracy - or, rather the lobbyists’ relentless pursuit to reap legal fees - but really just the overall cyber climate with all the data brokers indiscriminately collecting, profiling and selling our data to the highest bidder, I simply don’t dare to be on the clearnet/internet without using a VPN, an adblocker and DNS/hosts file based filtering anymore. I would argue that the risks to the integrity of the individual is great enough to warrant these countermeasures regardless of jurisdiction, but I digress. Sure, if your jurisdiction does not criminalize piracy, be my guest, torrent without a VPN.

My current setup

• VPN: Mullvad VPN, €5 per month https://mullvad.net/en/pricing
• Adblocker (in browser): uBlock Origin https://ublockorigin.com/
• DNS: Mullvad (comes “automatically” with the above services)
• Torrent client: qBittorrent https://www.qbittorrent.org/

A few notes on Mullvad:

• I am using Mullvad VPN on a router so that all my traffic is encrypted, but their desktop app is also good - better in regards to customizability -, just make sure to bind your torrent client to the network interface created by the VPN app.
• You cannot make applications reachable from the internet (aka forward ports) with Mullvad. You can still download, but you are a passive seeder, only reachable by peers that do have port forwarding enabled. (Note: a great majority of the bigger seeders/public seeding groups use so called seeding boxes whose ports are forwarded and I seed in average 8TBs per month with steady share ratios of around 8.0, so don’t let this discourage you, unless maximizing your seeding contributions is what is most important to you.)

Paying nothing

As others have already pointed out, double check what laws apply in your specific jurisdiction before pirating unprotected. I haven’t tried it myself, except for running two of their routers to contribute bandwidth, but file sharing in the closed network i2p is supposedly popular. However, I can neither confirm nor deny this and it is a somewhat more technical approach. All your traffic is encrypted many times over and what you do inside i2p is not visible from the clearnet. https://geti2p.net/en/

Are you not making the next Avatar movie? I came here to help because I thought… I believed… Oh, well.

Well, now I just have to try it!

I have no idea how to tell specific processes or shells to use a specific interface, while also forbidding others to use the same interface… Which is why I thought, “but I can force a container to use a specific interface! Gotcha!”

I’m almost there, I think. I managed to get my phone and my nspawn-ed wireguard interface to shake hands. I just need to tweak the forwarding and nat-ing rules in my firewall. After I touch grass. Oh, my back…

Thanks! What a sweet little handbook for getting started! :D

Thank you for the suggestion on Podman! The thing is, since the VPN is running on one of my routers (connected to eth0), and since I want the public facing interfaces (1 and 2) not to use that router, I’m going to make use of one of those two extra interfaces anyway. Either way, good advice in adding multiple addresses to the same interface!

I’d absolutely do that if I didn’t already have two extra physical interfaces. :)

Sweet! I’ll start reading up on Docker, especially as it sounds like it has become an integral part of your self-hosting. :)

Thanks for the warning!

Thanks for the tutorial! For now, I’m looking into connecting to my instance with a simple wireguard tunnel, if I decide to just have a private instance.

I already read Invidious’ documentation. 👍

The reason I’m asking about a public instance is because I want to share my bandwidth with y’all with more than torrenting, an I2P router and Tor bridges. 🙈

Thanks!

One could cool down system memory before power is cut to a point where it retains in-use plaintext encryption keys. One basically renders the otherwise volatile system memory temporarily nonvolatile. And if one manages to keep the temperatures low for long enough, one could swap those memory modules into one’s own computer/motherboard and print the keys. As you can imagine, the resources needed for this type of attack makes the proposition of it infeasible. Then again, if your adversary is a nation state… Fingers crossed?

Quantum partner.

Thanks for sharing! I’m running a Tor bridge on a Pi 5 with DietPi. It’s great! Easy to use, feels really optimized.

10 years?! Wow! What’s that, like a Pi… 3?

I see. Thanks for the heads up! How much RAM do you have on that Pi 4? On my gaming rig torrenting alone can occasionally eat up 2Gb of RAM, but I haven’t limited anything there (if anything, I’ve increased various limits following the git readme of qBittorrent).

That fan/lid is to die for. Sic setup! Thanks for sharing! :)

Thanks! I’ll look into NFS!

No problem, that’s why I want to attach four 4TB SSDs :D

Thanks! Nah, I use bare bone sshfs to stream media (call me a lunatic) to a separate media player turned Lenovo T480 (which plays 4K just fine with a little indiscernible fan noise).