I know YouTube is a terrible provider of pirated content and also that it is almost impossible to pirate without a VPN, but I would like to know: if I download a movie from YouTube (directly from it, of course) without a VPN, will I receive "that type of message" from my ISP?

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[–] Alice@beehaw.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

OT but what VPN do you recommend? I hear a lot of back and forth about which ones are trustworthy.

[–] whats_all_this_then@programming.dev 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Mullvad seems to be the go-to if you want privacy (although no one thing is 100% private if you wanna go down that rabbit hole). No personal info requried, not even email. They claim no logs and they have gotten raided once and cops found nothing. I believe you can even mail them cash anonymously for a sub. Flat fee of €5/mo ($5.19/mo US) - you can pay for a single month or buy in bulk, costs the same either way.

Windscribe is another good option. More of your run of the mill VPN that seems to be well reviewed. Their free tier gives you 10GB/mo so you can see if it's right for you (although torrents may not work - I don't remember for sure). You can easily snag a whole year for $30 US as it goes on discount a lot.

Personally used both of these and haven't had much to complain about. Both have great apps for almost every platform, tons of locations to choose from, torrenting works, and Netflix works (for the most part). Speeds also seem solid but I do have crap tier internet. Reviews seem to agree though.

Of course do your own research, don't just take my word for it. ~~People also seem to like NordVPN but I can't really speak to that.~~

Edit: Nord sends data to Google apparently so that's a big no.

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I can speak for Nord's client sending requests to Google for some reason, maybe not great for privacy thus not great for piracy either.

I can speak well of Mullvad, but advise against sending hundreds of bucks in one go as paper mail is not exactly well secured. There's another VPN that happily accepts cash as payment and doesn't need your info but I can't find it atm...

[–] whats_all_this_then@programming.dev 1 points 1 hour ago

I didn't know about the whole Nord sending data to Google thing wtf. That immediately puts them on my shit list.

Yeah cash in snail mail is probably not the smartest haha. I personally use a card on Mullvad for the convenience alone - piracy isn't illegal here and their no logs policy is good enough for my use case but it being an option tells me they take that stuff seriously at the very least which is why I mentioned it.

Please reply here if you find the other one that lets you send cash. I'm loving Mullvad so far but it's always good to have options.