I hope you'll find an easier way to do it, but if it was me in your shoes, I'd probably drive out to them. You driving the U-Haul with them driving your car home sounds like a good idea. It's the safest option to make sure they don't run into even MORE trouble.

1337x.to and The Pirate Bay are the popular options, if you want your torrent easily accessible then put it on both of those.

NP. I used this guide: https://youtu.be/LD8-Qr3B2-o?si=xneR6WNoEb5ND6xm

It’s definitely not necessary, but damn it’s convenient and easy now that it’s set up. And my setup is relatively simple. Sonarr is for TV, Bazaar automates subtitles, there’s Lidarr for music, and Readarr for books… The list of 'arrs is long.

Tailscale isn’t necessary, it’s just what I use for remote access. And you can use Jellyfin/Emby/Kodi with Radarr too, it’s not specific to Plex.

SOCKS5 proxy keeps the letters away (I live in NYC). I’ve read that it’s because ISP’s don’t bother actually monitoring torrent traffic. They only act when a copyright holder reports your IP for piracy. So if you hide your IP then they can’t see you.

A proxy is not encrypted, to be clear. But it turns out encryption isn’t actually necessary if you just want your ISP to stop bugging you. If laws change and torrenting becomes more dangerous, I’ll probably switch to a proper VPN. But a proxy is faster and easier.

I have Plex, Radarr, Prowlarr, and Qbittorrent all installed on the same dedicated server. I’m using a SOCKS5 proxy instead of a VPN, it works great because I set up Qbittorrent to use the proxy and I just leave it running 24/7. I also have Tailscale installed for remote access, setup for that is dead simple.

Here’s my workflow if I’m away from home:

1. Turn on Tailscale on my phone.
2. Open my radar app (it’s called LunaSea).
3. Search for and add the movie I want.

That’s it. If I’m already at home, step 1 is not necessary.

Prowlarr and Radarr find the movie on my registered indexers, at the desired quality, and send the torrent to Qbittorrent. Then when the download is finished they automatically rename the files and move them to my Plex library (and they could do the same with Jellyfin). Roughly 10 minutes after I finish step 3 (more or less depending on seeds), the movie magically appears in my Plex library. I don’t have to turn a VPN on or off.

Adobe is a bloated garbage company that hasn’t truly innovated in a decade, they’re just hoarding their proprietary tools and formats to squeeze as much money out of customers as possible.

You could just limit the speed of Qbittorrent permanently, enough that it wouldn’t mess with your Plex traffic.

Sounds like this is for any loyalty cards with a barcode that you scan in a store. So if you’re in the US, a lot of grocery stores have these, and some other businesses like Starbucks. Similar to Stocard: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.stocard.stocard

SIM cards do sometimes malfunction, so if that happens and you glued it in you’re kinda screwed.

This is utter nonsense. First, let me point out that this is an ad for Surfshark, a VPN company. They’re trying to sell you their service by scaring you.

Second, their methodology is absolutely useless, it’s an easy and very common way to come up with a clickbait article like this. They’re just looking at app store permissions, and assuming the app with the most permissions is bad and the one with the least permissions is good. Which is utter nonsense, it might be that the apps with more permissions NEED those permissions because they have more FEATURES.

I could make a “language learning” app that ONLY asks for the audio recording permission, and then sell audio recordings of my users to the highest bidder. But Surfshark would praise my literal spyware as “privacy-focused” because it only needs one privacy permission!

The way to ACTUALLY do this properly would be to fully audit each app, find out WHY it’s asking for additional permissions, go over the full privacy policy, and do some packet captures to figure out when the app is phoning home to send data, and what servers it’s connecting to. Contact the app owners, ask them why exactly their app needs each permission. Consult some experts.

But that’s too hard for Surfshark, they just want to write a scary article so that they can sell you a VPN that doesn’t really make you safer on the internet.

EDIT: You know why I dropped Surfshark? They started bundling a “virus scanner” in with their “privacy-focused” VPN client. So my “privacy” tool wanted to scan all my files all of a sudden? GTFO.

Yeah a lot of these little VPN companies are getting bought up by larger companies with unknown investors, it’s kinda worrying. There’s one company that owns ExpressVPN, PIA, and CyberGhost now: https://www.kape.com/our-brands/

Kape Technologies (previously named CrossRider) has a pretty sketchy history of making adware: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/06/09/from-israel-unit-8200-to-ad-men/?sh=7c46d70e26e2

You can do a lot better by buying your own modem and router, but that can be expensive. The thing you’re doing right now is a good idea if you don’t want to spend a lot of money, whine at your internet provider and get them to send you a better router.

You don’t use Mullvad for their performance, you use them for their insanely paranoid security and privacy practices.

And for the record, I was never impressed with Surfshark speeds. I dropped them when they bundled a virus scanner into their VPN client, that’s sketchy as hell. I don’t want my VPN provider scanning my files.

You are incorrect. Look through their blog archive (scroll to the bottom): https://mullvad.net/en/blog/

They’ve been posting steadily for over a decade, maybe the posts just got more popular this year on whatever sites you browse

You’re not wrong, BUT that’s why Mullvad offers other forms of anonymous payment, the flexibility lets you be as paranoid as YOU want to be. You can pay in Bitcoin, or you can literally mail them an envelope of cash with no return address. Amazon scratch cards are just the most convenient option, and as always, you trade security for convenience.

No. There have been many attempts at this, and just as many failures. Centralization is not the answer.

It also runs like crap, even on decent hardware. I don’t get why people love it so much…

They said they were looking for privacy-focused, open source options. So get a Unifi AP and flash OpenWRT on it, and that fits the bill.

There are a lot of APs that can be reflashed to run OpenWRT in AP mode.