When your country don't give a sH1t about piracy

If your IPS and the local authorities will not do anything if you download, upload and publish anything, what is the bare minimum of security measures you can do? Context: I live in Southamericas, here we have worse thing to deal with.

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I'd say say at least use a VPN. Most of the suggested security practices are easy enough there's really no reason not to...
- Why would you use a VPN? What's the advantage, aside from not letting my ISP know what I'm doing?
  
  Not just ISPs, the end user and other peers in the case of torrenting also will not know who or where you are.
  Getting to regions blocked content is a bonus that most VPN services will provide.

I just don't care about any of that at all. I have around 100TB of seeding accumulated over the years, no VPN, zero security measures, nothing ever happened at all.
- Meanwhile I went to school one day as a teen and had left the torrent up by accident seeding and 4 days later my isp called my parents saying that there was a huge fine coming my way if I didn't cut it out. The isp was super small so the company they were the end user and they were nice enough to give us a heads up. The notice said something like 25,000 on it.
  
  They probably cared because of the traffic, not the content.
- Same. I keep reading “Use a von” everywhere but I just assume that’s a US thing. In Western Europe I never heard of a single country giving a shit about this
- Me too, I have running a tor snowflake and i2pd instance on the same server I am seeding.
  
  Those are low risk because the traffic doesn't go to the internet.
- Legend ^

I've personally been doing this for many years, seeding all sorts of nasty stuff and no one that I know has ever gotten so much as an email.
Feel free to use no privacy measures, but at least setup an alert so you know if your country's police decides to start persecuting pirates.
I recommend u setup a Google alert with a query like "YOUR-COUNTRY-HERE arrestan pirateria". So if a news article that matches that query ever gets posted online, you'll instantly get an email
- How tf did I never heard of this Google feature ? thanks
  
  Don't worry, it's probably going to be killed soon like all good Google products

In Chile I recall Microsoft sending a notification to my former worplace because someone used torrent to download a game from inside the company network. That person didn't notice that all traffic was being routed to company's VPN hosted in MS Azure.
ISPs don't give a shit. The goverment has laws against piracy that are never applied (you know: Southamerica, the lawlessness). But gringo companies do care.
My advice is to avoid Google, MS and the big tech to follow your pirates activities. They may suspend services to you, or notifiy some local authority.
Use a different browser or machine for your big tech interactions, and you'll be fine.
Edit: typos.

Be ware of using VPN if you want spanish content and wanna join a private tracker; all spanish private tracker ban the use of VPNs
My advice is to check if your ISP is blocking you from access to the sites you plan to use and pick one that doesn’t. If you plan to use torrent check if your ISP is outside CG-NAT (or let’s you leave it) to enable port forwarding
If your country doesn’t care about piracy do not complicate your life further till they care, just stay up to date. As for measures I always use independantly of context, I just recommend using
Firefox with uBlock Origin and NoScript
Bitwarden or other password manager
A email relay services such as iCloud private relay or Duck email proxy
Flee of companies that sell your data, such as Google, Meta, Tiktok, etc
- Be ware of using VPN if you want spanish content and wanna join a private tracker; all spanish private tracker ban the use of VPNs
  What's the rationale for that?
  
  No idea for their specific case, but usually because VPNs makes it easier to circumvent bans as far as I am aware that is the main reason.
  Not like it helps much tough as most people have dynamic IPs anyway... Any IP you have a suspicious of being of a banned person could just be of another ISP customer... Or the banned guy could have now another ip... so a user could circumvent a ban without a VPN anyway. That's I guess why most Trackers stopped caring about the VPN.
  Another reason could be to avoid crawling the content... That again would be related with banning the user anyway and nowadays with Jackett and company that is either expected or there is an API for it.
  
  Lal zz
- I've been pirating behind a cgnat for years. I get slightly fewer peers when I'm seeding (not that i seed all that much with my 8mbps upload), but apart from that there are no issues.
- What spanish private tracker would you recommend? All i found is dessert...
  
  HD-Olimpo, redbits, xbytes, torrenteros if you want latin content

I'm in the UK and while they make big talk of punishing cyber criminals I've never received as much as a cease and desist from an ISP despite running what is essentially a 24/7 seedbox from my home server for watching stuff via Plex

what is the bare minimum of security measures you can do?
I guess just the normal things with p2p stuff: make sure no ports are exposed except for the essentials, update software, use SSL wherever possible.
When you don't use VPN, people will see your actual IP adress and will launch the same kind of attacks, they also launch on servers [1] to try to hijack your system and add them to their bot net.
[1] port scans, login-attemps, applying known exploits. If this doesn't sound scary, you should try operating a server that is exposed on the internet and then look at the number of login attemps.

If they don't care, you don't need security.

Custom DNS and VPN, more secure would be Tor but its not everyday use fast.
- Torrenting with TOR is bad mkay https://tor.stackexchange.com/a/68
  
  Oberread the torrenting part, was just thinking about privacy

37 comments