Accused???

Well alrighty then, I hereby accuse the operators of donaldjtrump.com of piracy! Anybody else notice any piratical activity? Foxnews.com seems pretty fishy.

So if Meta is convicted of pirating books for AI training, they lose all internet connectivity? 🧐

Protip for anyone unfamiliar: Mullvad really is the gold standard for a private VPN. If you just want to pirate shit and not get angry letters from your ISP, Nord or PIA will accomplish that. But if you REALLY want privacy, Mullvad is it.

Being accused of will lose you access to basic infrastructure? Why not cut electricity too?

They have ways to block / identify VPNs.

I love Mullvad and used them for years, but without port forwarding, they're not the service you want for torrenting. Some alternatives like AirVPN or ProtonVPN are better suited for that stuff.

Before the haters jump in and tell me "it works fine fer me!" it's only working because the user on the other end, like myself, have port forwarding set up. Since you don't have it, you'll never connect to anyone else like yourself nor will they be able to connect to you.

Of course there are alternatives like streaming and Usenet but there are tradeoffs no matter what you pick.

Don't they already do this in most of Europe?

I love Mullvad and used them for years, but without port forwarding, they're not the service you want for torrenting. Some alternatives like AirVPN or ProtonVPN are better suited for that stuff.

Before the haters jump in and tell me "it works fine fer me!" it's only working because the user on the other end, like myself, have port forwarding set up. Since you don't have it, you'll never connect to anyone else like yourself nor will they be able to connect to you.

Of course there are alternatives like streaming and Usenet but there are tradeoffs no matter what you pick.

I'm not a judge, but isn't internet essentially a utility these days? Cutting someone off because of piracy seems like cutting off electricity or water because they did something illegal with it.

I personally prefer Proton. They seem to get blocked less often.

(And yes I'm aware of the CEO controversy, he seems more like a Libertarian to me, not some right wing extremist)

And now I'm on a VPN because if they're just gonna cut people off for accusing of piracy they're gonna have to cut off everyone with a VPN.

TBH I should have been behind a VPN before

i just use mullvad on my router and port forward directly there

dint they just rule AI can legally scrape/books, but not for people who are pirating directly.

I don't think your explanation of why it seems to work is correct.

I seems to work (works in a limited way, even), because any remote machines that your bittorrent client connected to during downloading are temporarilly recorded on the Mullvad router on the other side of your VPN doing NAT translation as associated with your machine, so when those remote machines connect to that router to reach your machine, it knows from that recorded association that those connections should be forwarded to your machine.

This is quite independent of people on the other side using port-forwarding or not.

Port-forwarding on the other hand is a static association between a port in that router and your machine, so that anything hitting that specific port of the router gets forwarded the port in your machine you specified (hence the name "port" "forwarding"). With port-forwarding there is no need for there having been an earlier connection from your machine to that remote machine to allow "call back".

This is why at the end of downloading a torrent behind a Mullvad VPN will keep on uploading but if one restarts a torrent which was stopped hours or days ago (i.e. purelly seeds), it never uploads anything to anybody - in the first case that NAT translation router associated all machines your client connected to during download to your machine, so when they connect back to download stuff from you it correctly forwards those connections to your machine, but in the second case it's just getting connections from unknown remote machines hitting one of its ports and in the absence of a "port-forwarding" static rule or a record of your machine having connected to those remote machines, it doesn't know which of the machines behind it is the one that should receive those connection so nothing gets forwarded.

So it's perfectly possible to share back when behind a Mullvad VPN but you have to leave the torrent client keep on seeding immediatly after downloading and it will only ever upload to machines which were in the swarm when the client was downloading (they need not have been clients it downloaded from, merelly clients it connected to, for example to check their availability of blocks to download, which give how bittorrent works normally means pretty much the whole swarm)

It is however not at all possible to just start seeding a torrent previously downloaded unless the download wasn't that long ago (how long is "too long" depends on how long the NAT Translation Router of Mullvad keeps those recorded associations I mentioned above, since those things are temporary and get automatically cleaned if not used),

dint they just rule AI can legally scrape/books, but not for people who are pirating directly.