The risks of downloading music at home with wifi (midwest.social)

submitted 3 months ago by clark@midwest.social to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Like the stupid newbie goober I am, I forgot the first step to downloading music: do it in a public setting with a public wifi. Ended up downloading it all at home off of our private wifi. Did use a VPN but forgot to switch it from my home country. Kind of wondering how easy it is to trace me and persecute me for this. I am not the one handling the ordeal with the wifi, that would be my lovely mother.

Cheers y'all!

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[-] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 49 points 3 months ago

To add a bit: It doesn't make a difference whether you're use a cable or the wifi. It's still the same internet connection. What helps is the VPN connection. And it doesn't really matter if you're setting it to your home country or a random one. If it protects you as intended, they can't find you either way. And if it doesn't, you may be screwed either way.

[-] sub_ubi@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The country of the vpn server does matter, as does the home country. Your traffic may be encrypted and the vpn company may not keep logs, but the datacenters they're renting likely do. Always favor countries that have the strongest privacy laws. i.e. not the US.

[-] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Is there some precedent to believe that they correlate (encrypted) datacenter traffic, find the patterns and actually use that somehow?

I mean I can see how that'd theoretically work under certain circumstances and low network load on the VPN server. But that's really complicated, circumstantial, unreliable and takes lots of effort and probably can't be used in court anyways. So I wonder if that's ever been done. Maybe for some circumstancial evidence for some proper crimes to find out where to investigate? And I mean I'm pretty sure the NSA snoops everywhere. Still they're unlikely to be able to look inside with just these tools. And they're also unlikely to prosecute some swedish user for some lame copyright violation.

[-] ryannathans@aussie.zone 8 points 3 months ago

Highly dependent on how much the government wants to prosecute lol, likely not currently an issue for music

[-] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

Luckily I live in a country that doesn't really seem to give a shit. I still use a VPN, but a friend of mine didn't bother at all and used to be downloading constantly. Eventually he got a phone call from his ISP asking him to not seed so much lol

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 5 points 3 months ago

It happened many times, for example this is the latest https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/inside-the-fbi-the-911-s5-cyber-threat-061124.mp4/view

They saw the encrypted traffic between the VPN server and the botnet command server, matched with the traffic between ISP and VPN

It took years and years: this extensive investigation with the collaboration of law enforcement of multiple countries is only for big criminals

[-] just_an_average_joe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 3 months ago

What are you talking about bro? What do you think the date center will do if vpn company doesn't keep logs?

By design vpn encrypts the the traffic between you and vpn provider that means its the ip of the vpn that talks to data center. For all intents and purposes it is the vpn company talking to data center. Even if data center is malicious and decides to take action it will take this action against vpn provider which will not link back to you.

[-] Sparrow_1029@programming.dev 34 points 3 months ago

Don't know if this will help assuage your fears: https://www.techradar.com/news/mullvads-no-log-policy-proven-after-police-raid

I've used Mullvad for years, and from what I know, they store almost nothing -- only your randomly generated account number. If you are paying using an anonymous method that's even less to go on.

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 25 points 3 months ago

It's just music, not csam

There are many ai companies pirating millions of songs for their profit and they are operating without problems, what they're going to do to an individual that "stole" a couple songs?

[-] Worx@lemmynsfw.com 43 points 3 months ago

Wait until you hear about this new thing called: one set of rules for rich people & their companies, one set of rules for poor people

[-] gencha@lemm.ee 16 points 3 months ago

Now this is some horrible advice. Bravo

[-] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 16 points 3 months ago

He said he was using mullvad in Sweden, not north Korea where there's the death penalty for listening k-pop

In order to identify a no log VPN user someone without limits like the secret services would need to triangulate the logs of millions of other services and see something like "at 11:23:42.052 the ISP recorded that subscriber #4332822 sent a request to the IP address of the VPN server and at the same time a login to musicpirate@gmail.com is made from that VPN server"

It's very unlikely that is going to happen for something that's not even a real crime

[-] gencha@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago

Okay, maybe I read you wrong. I agree that nobody will try to acquire details through mullvad to prosecute this.

I read the comment like downloading music is so irrelevant, you could skip the VPN, which I would disagree with.

I once downloaded an album I had already pre-ordered, but didn't want to wait, no VPN. Got a letter from a media lawyer within the month. Felt pretty stupid.

[-] madcat@lemm.ee 24 points 3 months ago

Why do people call the internet connection "the wifi" now?

[-] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Because many many people know absolutely nothing about ethernet or the actual hardware behind their wifi connection, as quite often that was setup by a technician from their ISP. When it comes to acquiring internet; a wifi name+password is all they've ever experienced.

[-] Facebones@reddthat.com 15 points 3 months ago

I know I'm a techie but I can't wrap my head around how people have ZERO idea how any of this system (internet) works and sometimes even get mad if you try to explain it. So much......everything revolves around it now.

I don't like cars, but when I had one I still learned the basics of how it runs and how to do a certain level of maintenance. I can't imagine just living some "haha car go brrr" life.

[-] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 months ago

It's honestly baffling how many people are, willfully ignorant of things they depend on.

I know far too many people that know nothing about cars beyond 'turn key, engine turns on'. I'm no mechanic either, but I can at least identify some parts and perform basic maintenance.

[-] Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 3 months ago

These are the people that complain to their ISP when their game 'lags' on their wireless connected computer several rooms away from the router.

[-] montar@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 months ago

Depends on country you happen to be in. If it's Poland or eastern Europe noone will give a damn. If it's Germany then you might be screwed. If you're on a good VPN you should be ok even in Germany.

[-] safesyrup@lemmy.hogru.ch 13 points 3 months ago

Depends on country and VPN provider

[-] clark@midwest.social 10 points 3 months ago

Sweden, Mullvad.

[-] Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 3 months ago

The only way to find out it was you, would be to ask the VPN provider. Mullvad has a perfect track record of not keeping logs tho, so it's very unlikely they're gonna get anything from them. All that work wouldn't even be worth it for someone just downloading some music like you do.

I have my torrent client running 24/7 connected to a different VPN to my home country, Germany, as well and nothing's ever happened, even though Germany is pretty strict when it comes to this stuff.

[-] clark@midwest.social 3 points 3 months ago

Thanks for the info!

Kind of irrelevant, but anyone should feel free to answer: according to Swedish law, downloading music is legal as long as the artists have authorised use of their work and it is only played privately (not distributed). However, my friend argues that artists don't consent to their music being pirated, thus making the downloading illegal.

Curious about what the people in this community think about his argument. Personally, I was taught that anything you post can be up for debate and freely used, so if artists consent to having their music posted on Spotify / YT / etc., then they subsequently consent to having their work downloaded. Am no legal expert though.

[-] Findmysec@infosec.pub 3 points 3 months ago

Do I give a shit? I'll pirate everything I can till the end of time and if I'm feeling generous I'll donate to the artists on band camp or something. Nobody but the smaller artists need my money anyway

[-] AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 3 points 3 months ago

If that is accurate to Sweden's laws (what you originally said), then your friend's opinion does not matter. Only Sweden can make it illegal, not your friend.

[-] averyminya@beehaw.org 0 points 3 months ago

No, the friend is saying

downloading music is legal as long as the artists have authorised use of their work and it is only played privately (not distributed).

Artists are opting in to allowing their music to be pirated, so it technically would be piracy under that law.

However if it's privately played it may not matter

[-] Fisch@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 months ago

If I was just downloading stuff, I wouldn't be using a VPN. Not sure if it's illegal but it's just not worth it for the police to go after people who just download. With torrents, due to the way they work, you're also uploading. That's the reason you should use a VPN when downloading with torrents.

[-] safesyrup@lemmy.hogru.ch 4 points 3 months ago

Then i dont see an issue here. Mullvad doesn‘t give out or log ip addresses. You should be fine

[-] clark@midwest.social 2 points 3 months ago

Super ^___^ Started to worry a bit but as long as a (good) VPN is in use I imagine I should be fine mostly.

[-] Jessica@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 3 months ago

Before looking at VPNs, you should be encrypting your torrent traffic in the client

Note:* Remember that the encryption torrent option only encrypts your inbound and outbound torrent traffic. Although it will not be readable, your traffic can still be intercepted and tagged as torrent traffic. If you want to increase your privacy, you’ll need to encrypt the entire layer 3 traffic (at the IP level), so it is recommended to set Deluge with VPN. To hide traffic at layer 7 (application layer), use a torrent Proxy. And finally, to hide, encrypt, and speed up your torrents, use a Seedbox.*

[-] BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 5 points 3 months ago

Ayo, just saw this and wanna say that by downloading music from deezer it's probably appearing as if you legitimately downloaded a lot of music today. Deezer even lets you download music offline. Kinda doubt anyone can tell apart legitimate use from your use. You didnt torrent music which could theoricially raise a red flag. (I have downloaded ~3k+ songs from my home netowork without vpn with Deemix in Greece.) You should probably be fine:)

[-] clark@midwest.social 3 points 3 months ago

I don't even fully understand torrenting and how to do it, so I suppose that's a relief in this case. I can be carelessly quick with stuff like this, lol.