I have a friend in an abusive situation who uses movies as an escape. How can I set them up to watch pirated movies without anyone in their house knowing?
I have a friend in an abusive situation who uses movies as an escape. How can I set them up to watch pirated movies without anyone in their house knowing?
First, child services has been called on multiple occasions and has done nothing. The police don't care either. They're disabled so they can't just leave.
They have a laptop that they can use whenever they want but their patent is extremely opposed to piracy and won't pay for my friend to buy movies or a streaming service. They watch DVDs from the library on their laptop.
They're also not tech savvy so I need a plug and play solution that will allow them to pirate media without anyone else in the household being aware of it.
In days of yore people would just pass around USB drives. But I guess that's too low tech for the fancy kids these days
They still do in many parts of the world.
Plex is easy. You can self-host, and your friend can watch on a web browser.
Big plus 1 for Plex, it’s super easy to set up and share out.
Alternatively to Plex, Stremio + a debrid account, you can set it up for them remotely and it is pretty easy to use, and you immediately get more content than all the streaming services combined lol.
Search for "fmhy" (Free Media, Heck Yeah!) - they keep a regularly updated wiki with all sorts of piracy options, including streaming sites that can be visited in a browser via incognito mode. It's extremely comprehensive with how-to's & all that.
First off damn that's a sad situation. wishing them the best <3
2nd off, could you get a USB stick of MP4s then use the good ol' "teenager hiding porn in a really obscure file path" trick? Give it like 10 mins to transfer then give the stick back to you?
Watch in web browser at
No downloads to track. Clear the cache or watch in "private" browser.
Mostly football but also has streams of movie channels from cable tv...
To add to this: https://www.bestfreestreaming.org
This one has an updated list in case any of the sites get taken down and pops up with a new name.
Won't the ISP notice that?
Yes, it would be rare to get a warning for this. But usually visiting a website is not a crime, just when you watch something copyrighted thats whats criminal. As long as there is HTTPS on the connection, they can't check what data is being transferred.
So only the DNS entry gets leaked (ie the domain name). But then you can set up dns over tlp or dns over https then even the domain will be hidden.
If you use a proper vpn, they will automatically set up all this for you anyways.
In theory they could, but that would mean constantly snooping on customer traffic and checking their requests against constantly updated lists of pirate related sites, and ISPs almost universally rely on external complaints which is only possible with P2P piracy.
Combined with the fact that it's in ISPs best interests to keep you on as a paying customer means they all look the other way until someone complains instead of actively looking for reasons to lose customers.
The actual main risk with those streaming sites is that some have crypto miners that run in the background, so make sure to close those tabs when you're done, and use an ad blocker to reduce the risk of malware and you're fine.
Probably, but only the website address at most.
Nothing they can or want to do with that.
Plex. If they set up a free Plex account and you setup a plex server, you can share whatevr pirated goodies you have with them. This requires an old laptop or pc (ideally dedicated to mostly just this purpose) being on all the time on your end. Anytime they visit plex they can tab over to your or whomever’s server and browse movies in a netflix type interface. A Plex server is pretty damn easy to setup, basically just download, install, and point plex to whatever folder has shows or movies. Also, Tubi, Pluto, and Plex have a surprisingly good amount of content that doesn’t require any piracy.
*if you wanna get fancy you can add a couple of apps that automate dling and adding stuff to your plex library, like sonarr for shows and radarr for movies, and then use overseerr so that your friend can request to add or automatically add things to your server without having to do any pirating themselves.
I would also recommend tailscale to make setting up the server connection easier. Just send your friend a link Tailscale gives you and she can connect her computer to yours without any port forwarding or what have you.
Whatever you do, be careful not to fuck it up.
I once got me a VPN, set up my bittorrent, and started downloading through the VPN.
...Or so I thought.
It wasn't until I got a warning letter from my ISP that I figured out I'd fucked up my VPN configuration and I had been torrenting over an open internet connection.
Are you set up to pirate content yourself at your own house? If it were me, I'd set up a VPN on your own network (with OpenVPN or something) and have your friend set up a VPN client and connect to your network. From there, you just allow the VPN to access your own Plex (or whatever).
If your friend wants to see anything in particular, either you have your Plex set up to download what they want on request or just have them ask you to download it and make it available in the usual way.
Under those circumstances, if something went wrong, the wrongest it could go is that your friend failed to gain access to the content. The chances their household might receive a warning letter or whatever are about as close to zero as they can possibly get.
This is why you configure your torrent client to only connect on the tunnel adapter. No tunnel, no interface, no ISP flags.
And then double check it all using ipleak.net
That's what I'm getting at, though. I thought I had.
A VPN and strem.io would probably work. Nice thing about stremio is that it has basically the same ui as Netflix