if you torrent off of public wifi, in theory, would you not be caught?
if I went to a library or something, and torrent a file, nobody would be able to tell who it was as its a public place and the library couldn’t be held accountable. thoughts?
For the purposes of practicality, you’re probably safe so long as you don’t have to log in using credentials tied to you. They simply aren’t going to care enough, and will likely just put up some network restrictions if they get a letter from the isp.
But for the purposes of security, yes, you can absolutely be identified. For one, if your device Mac address isn’t spoofed, they can just see what device you used, and skim security footage for someone using it in the right time frame. Even without that, they can just see who was there for the amount of time you were connected, and find you that way. Especially if you do anything that would identify yourself while there (like use a library card).
They could also see your MAC address and lookup which vendor that MAC address matches to.
They could then use the cameras there to see who has a laptop that matches and possibly identify you that way.
I’d say if you are going to do it use a vpn no matter what.
They may still lock you out or block torrent traffic, or possibly block your vpn from working. So make sure the vpn kill switch is on in case it suddenly stops working.
In this day and age everyone should be using a MAC address spoofer, especially on Public Wifi, many of them track mac addresses and impose limits based on time and data usage.
If you’ve ever been using public Wifi and noticed it got slow or stops working after a time, that’s why. Some will even be up-front about it by asking you to pay for it after a time.
Mainly I just use the one built-in to settings of Gnome, I never torrented on public wifi (most public wifi I’ve used is too slow to download without chewing up all the bandwith) but the MAC address randomizer seems to work very well, even with the ones that use timed paywalls (where they let you use it for a time then lock your MAC address out and ask you to pay).
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