I honestly don’t believe I will have any legal trouble because I don’t do anything like cp or worse, I just pirate media I like, not even porn. But across users of communities, or on public trackers, is IP exposure something to be concerned about?

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      Self hosted VPNs are not suitable for sailing the seas. Self-hosting a VPN server only provides remote access to your local network. It does not provide any sort of privacy benefits, because the tunnel exit is an IP address traceable to you.

      If they are paying for it, it’s either not self-hosted, or they are paving a licensing fee for the VPN software they are running locally.

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      2·
      5 months ago

      The majority of VPNs are self-hosted. The most common use cases for a VPN are things like connecting to an employer’s network when working from home, or connecting to your home server when away from home.

      Commercial VPNs that route all your traffic through them aren’t the usual VPN use case. They’ve become common mostly because people don’t know how to use proxies, and they make it easy to ensure everything is routed via the VPN. A lot of use cases that people use VPNs for could really be solved with proxies.

      • N0x0n@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        You still need someone else’s computer. Making a cloudflare proxie or other cloud platform is useless and not secure, specially if you’re torrenting or trying to hide your IP.

        I’m pratically sure they even block the torrent protocol and do not allow port forwarding on most cloud VPS.

        Yeah proxies are great, but only if you have somewhere to route your traffic.

        • dan@upvote.auEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          A proxy is no less secure than a VPN, assuming it’s using encryption like TLS. It’s not as good for torrents since you can’t port forward, but fundamentally people that use commercial VPNs are using then just like a proxy. Some providers like NordVPN do offer HTTPS proxies in addition to their VPN service.