Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

VPNs are dirt cheap. How can you say you can't afford one? What is your budget, $0.50?

what is your budget? you say you can't afford a vpn, most vpns are roughly 71 yuan or 10 USD per month, with the option to buy at a large discount if purchased for the full year. tell your budget in your local currency... 10 dollars per month isn't very expensive, but these subscriptions do add up.

I would prioritize a VPN ahead of an ISP. Free Open/Public APs are not uncommon in my area.

It's really that important in the USA? Asking from Europe, where Ivve never even heard of anyone getting fined.

Mullvad is €5 a month for total of €60 for a year.

Save up then torrent. If you live in the US you risk way more in fines than what €60 for a year of VPN would cost.

If you can share the cost of a VPN with one or more other people (most allow multiple devices to connect at the same time), it'll be much cheaper. Or if you can't afford that either, try to find someone who will let you use theirs for free. Maybe you can even find someone who isn't tech savvy who will pay you a few bucks a month to cover the VPN in exchange for you downloading Linux ISOs for them.

Its being a while for me but windscribe and seedr had totally usable free tiers

You can afford AirVPN 💜

Use torrent over I2P. Qbittorrent can do it.

Find a friend in a less shit place you can proxy through.

Honest question, why would you need a VPN if you want to download from private trackers?

Usually, copyright owners target people on public trackers and on the DHT. Not a problem if you only get into private trackers.

Here's a reliable, free VPN: https://riseup.net/en/vpn

use tor

If you don’t have the money for a proper VPN provider, you definitely don’t have the money for a legal defense if it came to that. Save your money and only begin once you can afford reasonable protections.

Use someone else's wifi.

I used to park my car in a Home Depot parking lot when I went to work with a laptop torrenting until the battery died.

RiseUp is slow and intended for activists and the politically vulnerable. It's not for poor people who cannot afford a $5 a month VPN. You will be fucking over people with much more legitimate use cases than yours if you start using it for torrenting.

You can get into private trackers and trust them. Not recommended, but some do.

Generally speaking, the copyright trolls only target public trackers and DHT. There have been some instances of them making way into TL and others. Your ISP could also identify torrenting on private trackers if they wanted to, even with mitigations. In my experience and from what I hear, most ISPs do not go to these lengths.

So, there a risk doing the above. Whether or not it's worth it until you can afford a decent VPN is up to you.

Aside: Please do not use a free VPN for torrenting (or tor, for that matter). They are either like RiseUp and run on donations for people who really, really need them, or Proton which is commercial and specifically try to block or slow down the traffic. Either way, if ruins it for everyone else.

I would suggest don't.

For downloading, look at DDL sites.

For uploading, if you can't do it safely, don't. Stash it all, make backups, keep it until you can do it safely.

If you use private trackers, a VPN is irrelevant. All you need to do is fully encrypt your traffic in your torrent client so your ISP can't see what you're doing. It's been working just fine for me for 15 years, and I've never gotten a letter.

I2p is slow and lacks selection but could work.

I mean you can avoid all that. If you're just interested in music and retro games then just use soulseek and use the rom megathread. both of which are going to be either peer to peer or direct downloads. no torrenting.

Rom megathread (web search it) has quite literally everything. no need to search, no need to torrent, it's all right there. And soulseek with Nicotine+ just works like napster. sign up, be sure to share your music library, and then have at it.