I have heard people use reputable VPN’s like Mullvad, Proton, etc. for daily usage to obscure their traffic/IP… protect ourselves from malware (a side benefit many VPN’s).
A VPN won’t protect you from malware. The only thing it does is encrypt your traffic to/from the VPN server, and mask your WAN IP address. The encryption will help protect you from a hostile network, (like your work WiFi spying on what sites your phone is accessing) but it won’t stop you from downloading malware. The largest reason to use a reputable VPN is because you’re running all of your traffic through their servers. You want to know that they’re not just selling all of that data to the highest bidder; If you’re not the customer, you are the product. When searching for a VPN, you’ll want to find one that supports port forwarding, because a torrent can only connect if at least one of you has an open port. You don’t want to rely on random seeders to have open ports, so forwarding your own port ensures you can connect.
I have also heard uploading (seeding) is where you really get in trouble with the law in many jurisdictions, as opposed to downloading (leeching), so it’s important to know the laws that apply to you.
This part is largely correct, though it will depend on where you live. Generally speaking, uploaders are penalized more heavily than downloaders. The issue is that you can’t torrent without inevitably doing both. The torrent protocol literally doesn’t allow you to block all seeding. You can restrict it down to a tiny amount of bandwidth in your torrent client, but you can’t just outright disable it.
Killswitches are important as well whenever using a VPN. This helps prevent leaks. I have never seen a major VPN that did not have this feature baked in.
This is where things veer into the “dangerously untrue” territory. A VPN kill switch will not protect you from IP leaks. A VPN simply creates its own network interface, and tells programs to use it. But when that connection drops, there’s nothing stopping programs from just using your regular interface before the kill switch kicks in. You need to bind the torrent client to the VPN directly. This must be done directly in the torrent program, not from the VPN’s kill switch option. By binding the torrent program directly to the VPN’s network interface, the VPN won’t be able to connect unless the VPN is enabled.
You can check for IP leaks using a few different websites (Google it).
That’s because it’s garbage that was shit out by a LLM. The constant “I have heard…” for every statement is a thing deepseek does, and it’s bloody annoying.
So there’s… Uhh… Quite a bit wrong with this.
A VPN won’t protect you from malware. The only thing it does is encrypt your traffic to/from the VPN server, and mask your WAN IP address. The encryption will help protect you from a hostile network, (like your work WiFi spying on what sites your phone is accessing) but it won’t stop you from downloading malware. The largest reason to use a reputable VPN is because you’re running all of your traffic through their servers. You want to know that they’re not just selling all of that data to the highest bidder; If you’re not the customer, you are the product. When searching for a VPN, you’ll want to find one that supports port forwarding, because a torrent can only connect if at least one of you has an open port. You don’t want to rely on random seeders to have open ports, so forwarding your own port ensures you can connect.
This part is largely correct, though it will depend on where you live. Generally speaking, uploaders are penalized more heavily than downloaders. The issue is that you can’t torrent without inevitably doing both. The torrent protocol literally doesn’t allow you to block all seeding. You can restrict it down to a tiny amount of bandwidth in your torrent client, but you can’t just outright disable it.
This is where things veer into the “dangerously untrue” territory. A VPN kill switch will not protect you from IP leaks. A VPN simply creates its own network interface, and tells programs to use it. But when that connection drops, there’s nothing stopping programs from just using your regular interface before the kill switch kicks in. You need to bind the torrent client to the VPN directly. This must be done directly in the torrent program, not from the VPN’s kill switch option. By binding the torrent program directly to the VPN’s network interface, the VPN won’t be able to connect unless the VPN is enabled.
You can check for IP leaks using a few different websites (Google it).
That’s because it’s garbage that was shit out by a LLM. The constant “I have heard…” for every statement is a thing deepseek does, and it’s bloody annoying.