Piracy

There was a lot of backlash a week or two ago when Mullvad announced that they would stop supporting port forwarding, as it seems like many people who were using Mullvad for torrenting were doing so because of the support for port forwarding. I'm still using Mullvad even though I don't port forward, but most of my torrenting is done through a separate seedbox.

I'd 100% suggest using a VPN as others have said if you're in the USA or any country with anti-piracy laws. Otherwise you're asking for a copyright notice in the mail. Don't chance it.

Yes if you are in a country that actually cares about you torrenting stuff (ex: USA). Generally a simple WireGuard instance will do the job very well.

If you are tech savvy and the stuff you want to torrent is somewhat mainstream, I would recommend torrenting over i2p. You should be able to find all the info you need to get started on their website: https://geti2p.net/

i2p is an anonymity network similar to tor, but the implementation allows for torrenting much better than tor. It is worth noting that i2p is not a drop-in replacement for a vpn and you will only be able to access content on the i2p network, however you can easily request that things be added and there will usually be a seeder in a day or two.

Depends, largely on how motivated people are to identify you.

If you infrequently torrent a few games and movies, using a VPN will probably be enough to deter most of the law firms specializing in churning out copyright notices. They go for the low hanging fruit first, aka the users without a VPN.

If you on the other hand were to engage in torrenting highly illegal stuff, and were therefore to become a target of state law enforcement, you'd be in a whole different kind of trouble. A VPN would likely not be sufficient.

So not sure if this is bad (in the selfish way, like not seeding torrents) but to avoid needing a VPN, I use real-debrid which will download it for me and then I can directly download the file without a torrent client.

As a bonus it let's you stream high quality TVs/movies on Kodi.

If you’re using a reputable VPN and properly compartmentalizing your activities then a VPN is great. Don’t torrent on the same VPN server that you use for daily use. They caught pompompoopi partly because he forgot to enable his vpn a couple of times and leaked his private IP as well as using the same VPN server for illegal activities and his google accounts.

The best method is definitely to have separate devices with different VPNs and different purposes for each device. It’s a lot of work though.

I feel like this article has as much fear-mongering as the adverts it's railing against! I agree with the article in that there are two big issues with using a VPN: 1) Cruddy VPN services that aren't worth the money, and 2) Users connected to a VPN don't change their behavior and give themselves away.

For #1, use a service that's been well vetted (handles DNS, IPv6 properly, doesn't keep logs, anonymous payments, killswitch, etc). ProtonVPN, Mullvad, iVPN are good choices imo. For #2, ah, see https://mullvad.net/en/help/first-steps-towards-online-privacy/