I turned on windscribe first and foremost and downloaded a file. Today I got the copywrite infringement warning from my isp. I understand the risk with downloading but i’m wondering how the ip was traced back to me. I live on the west coast but used a nod from the east coast. Did I not set something up that I may have missed?
There’s not really a way for your ISP to know that you’re torrenting if you’re connected to Windscribe. The most common mistake is torrenting with Windscribe connected and the Firewall ON and everything’s good, they downloaded the file, press the close button on the Torrent client and then disconnect from Windscribe.
Here’s the problem though: Most torrent clients don’t shut down when you press the X to close them. They simply get minimized to the tray or something like that, so it’s still running in the background. But the download is already done though so what’s the issue? Well, the download is complete but there is still the seeding portion. Seeding is when you are uploading the file to other users who want to download that same file. This is the essence of Peer-to-Peer traffic, you act as a node to upload the file to other users as well. It’s a very common occurrence where a user disconnects from Windscribe while the file continues to seed. Since the VPN is no longer active, the seeding occurs over your regular IP at which point you expose your torrenting to your ISP and soon after might get a DMCA notice.
From our perspective, we give users as much as we possibly can to secure the connection. When connected to the VPN, all your traffic is encrypted so your ISP is only seeing a garbled mess being transmitted to and from Windscribe. That’s it, unless they have cracked the highest level of encryption somehow, they won’t know what you are doing. Along with that there is also the Always On Firewall which essentially forces you to use the VPN or else you won’t have internet.
Combining the two, your connection is as secure and anonymous as it can be. If there is still a DMCA notice sent out, it’s almost always due to improper torrenting practices.
The best way is to enable Always On Firewall, connect to a VPN location, THEN open your torrent client and download the file. Once downloaded, remove the torrent from the torrent client (right-click torrent > Delete/Remove) so that you are no longer acting as an upload node for that particular file and finally completely shut down the torrent client, usually by going to File > Exit or something similar to that. Finally, once all that is complete, you can disconnect from the Windscribe VPN and disable the Always On Firewall.
This is as bulletproof as it gets. At no point is the torrent traffic ever exposed to your ISP as the Firewall ONLY lets all the traffic go to Windscribe.