How do you protect yourself from the legal issues? Do you route it though proxies and trust that they won't snitch on you?

private trackers, secure bittorrent.. generally you're ok. Also -- don't underestimate the power of Usenet, which the *arr's can also utilize.

Good private tracker is usually safe but you never know when it will get compromised. I have active accounts that are over a decade old but still not sure when they will be taken over and become a honey pot.

VPNs, right?

A seedbox in a country that doesn't care is usually cheaper and has a faster connection.

Living in a country that doesn't hunt down individuals for piracy helps. In many countries the law enforcement agencies look the other way when you are not profiting from piracy or using it commercially.

For everyone else vpn.

Newsgroups. They've been there since the beginning and will be there forever.

I have yet to see any high profile news service be taken down no matter how much they tout that they have "10 year binary retention" - something that's literally only useful for piracy.

seedbox + syncthing, downloads quickly to a seedbox, syncs locally encrypted, and deletes the torrent at the end

Here's my current setup, all running in docker on a mini PC I bought from ebay for $80. Everything here is managed and deployed from a series of `docker-compose.yml` files, so migrating this setup is just a matter of copying those files and a backup of my settings folder for each application.

* Radarr - Movie downloads * Sonarr - TV downloads * Bazarr - Subtitle downloads * Overseerr - Interface to discover and add new media to the above downloaders * Plex - For consuming all of this * Tautulli - Notifies me when new content is added * SABnzbd - Usenet downloader

I add a new show or movie in Overseer, it automatically gets downloaded and added to Plex, subtitles get added (if missing), and I get a notification on my phone. For TV series the above all happens automatically for new episodes once I've added the series.

No amount of paid services can offer me this level of convenience in addition to not having to worry that something I want to watch was removed over a licensing dispute. I was formerly a paying customer of streaming platforms but the enshittification drove me back to piracy, and now I don't see how they could possibly ever compete with this setup.

I'm also considering adding Lidarr for music and Readarr for audiobooks.