At this point the only thing holding me back from switching to Jellyfin is Plex’s transcoded download function.

Piracy is a service problem

I’m glad people are pushing back against this. All the unnecessary account creating has gotten out of hand.

Can’t wait till all the genealogy companies like 23 & me start selling our genetic information to insurance companies.

I believe that information and knowledge should be free anyways (at least in a perfect world), because that leads to the betterment of society. Also if you are able to use the knowledge you learn from the things you pirate I think you’ll be able to come back and support those things that got you to where you are.

I’ll always have a soft spot for Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga, and the Lego Marvel games. So many hours were spent playing with my brothers.

Proton VPN, Airvpn, and Mullvad are all reputable. Proton and Air have port forwarding if that's a requirement for you.

Well I feel better about making the switch to Firefox now, and doing a custom user.js

You should be so proud of yourself! That's a major accomplishment doing the research and figuring it out yourself.

Fair lol

I'm pretty new to torrenting as well. To answer your questions based on the personal research I've done.

1. You absolutely require a VPN. Definitely a paid one. The free ones are not of good quality and a lot of them are more than likely to be detrimental to your privacy. Also P2P is not a requirement for torrenting. All it does is it enables you to make more connections in the swarm and making the torrent download faster. Some good recommendations of VPN's with port forwarding I've seen thrown around are Proton VPN, Airvpn. Options without port forwarding are Mullvad, or IVPN.

2. I've been using 1337x for movies and TV shows and it's been great. I've also heard Torrent Galaxy is good as well. As always though be really careful with what you download no matter what. Always run a scan on files you download.

3. Qbittorrent is the best.

The dystopia is coming. If it's not already here.