Edit :
i was ignorant when i posted this however i think it is still safe to say that internet in most 3rd countries is bad or expensive in comparison to their income
Before the war in Ukraine I had stable 1 Gbit/s for 5$/month with two dedicated IPs
Here in Ireland you get 100 Kbits/s sometimes because they can't pull you a fiber connection and 4G towers are overloaded to hell, and it costs 20-40€/month
It's funny how out of touch with reality Americans are.
Here in Brazil I'm paying around 20 USD for fiber optic 1000mbps down and 500mbps up without data caps. Brazilian law also only considers piracy a crime if there's profit (i.e. trying to sell a movie I've downloaded), so there's no need to hide anything.
Editing for more information:
My home internet speeds almost never drop below 90%, there's also a law that requires ISPs to deliver at least 80% of what was paid for. You can easily port forward, there are no blocks or anything. We also have dynamic IPs, but you can easily get around that by using a DDNS.
My mobile plan is around $15, I get 45GB monthly with 5G at no extra cost (5G gets around 300-600mbps down depending on the time of the day), unlimited calling to any number in the country, unlimited SMS (nobody uses SMS though), and for roaming I get 1GB daily internet and 1 hour daily calling with no extra cost.
All of this is cheap and very accessible to everyone.
I mean, I’m not going to defend our internet in the US which can be absolutely shit, but salaries are quite a bit different in Brazil. I also don’t recall internet options being all that glamorous an hour outside of Porto Alegre.
While the salaries and economic power in Brazil are a lot lower than the US, our internet and phone plans are a lot cheaper, accessible and provide a better service than most of the US, that still stuck in data caps, feature blocking and low speeds.
American internet is garbage, as others have already pointed out.
The term "third world country" is outdated, inaccurate, and usually offensive. It often comes off as racist, even if that's not intentional. Try to avoid using it unless you're sure it's appropriate (it almost never is).
What that designation OFFICIALLY meant is that the country remained neutral during the Cold War. That's all! The "First World" countries were NATO allies and the "Second World" countries were the other side led by the Soviet Union. The implication is that the countries that didn't pick a side in the Cold War were underdeveloped (which is a flawed assumption, but it was partially correct AT THE TIME).
More recently, the term has become synonymous with "poor" countries, usually those filled with non-white people. Which is dumb, because plenty of the first- and second-world countries WERE and ARE very poor. And some countries that WERE under-developed during the Cold War have since become more developed. India is the most obvious example, it's surpassing China in a lot of population+economic metrics now.
tl;dr "third world country" is a designation that's not only offensive; it's outdated, inaccurate, and dumb.
✅ No VPN needed
✅ Some of the fastest internet speeds in the world
✅ $10/month for FTTH 1Gbps
❌ No money to build a PC that can play the games you downloaded
In Vietnam ISPs are pushing gigabit plans, we paid around 10.5$/month (⬇️1Gbps/⬆️150Mbps) or 14.5$/month for 1Gbps up and down. The speed is not guaranteed though, but reached gigabit most of the time, minimum is 300Mbps.
Of course no data cap and relaxed piracy policies, no vpn needed.
Just curious... Why would VPN make easier to download/seed? I live in one of the shitty countries where most people who download pirated stuff don't even understand its not legal lol. VPN cant speed up your connection, but I got it anyway for safety (aka nerd behavior 😂). Speed is the same, only wallet is lighter
That’s not what the pic is implying. The pic is implying that yes, while third world countries don’t need vpn as their isps don’t care what they download, the downside of being in a third world country is the god awful internet speeds. It’s not saying a vpn would improve the experience.
The meme is a good case of correlation doesn't imply causation. In countries where vpns are a must they might have better overall download/seed because of generally better internet. (Which also isn't always the case, plenty of places in the USA have just as shitty down/up
most of us pirates get our media by using torrents, in Europe and north America piracy is illegal ( downloading copyrighted material without permission is a better term ) and it is punished by law some countries gives huge fines and other can even jail you for it ( like USA ) but it is not the government who is in the lookout for these people but "copyright trolls" an independent companies pied by the copyright owner to extract settlement money from people ( essentially they go to people saying :"you have infringed our copyright so if you don't want us to sue you, you can give us i don't know .....50K $ to forgive you )
how they catch these people in the first place is by going to torrent trackers and logging IP address then figure out whose those IP address belong to,in some case they would go to the IP owners directly but mostly they go to the ISP and send them a letter saying "this IP address did a no no downloading our song that we want to go triple diamond💎💎💎" witch the ISP to avoid trouble forward it to you, and depending on the ISP they may do nothing afterward or ban your account after multiple infringements which if they are the only ISP in town sucks.
what VPNs do is that they mask your real IP address so they can't know who you are to sue you and if the VPN have a no logs policy they wouldn't know your real address even if they try to sue the VPN for it.
note that this does not apply to DLL (direct downloads from websites) as it does not count as evidence that you visited the website even if it hosts copyrighted material in most countries
i tried to explain this as simple as i could , also note that i omitted some details for the sake of simplicity
I live in Canada. I torrented without a VPN for years, only got one scare tactic email. I also had up to* 25 Mb/s with a data cap for $100/month. Guess Canada is a third world country.
You can download whatever you want without a VPN, seeding is another subject, all the ISPs here offers CGNATED only networks, the only way to bypass this is effectively with a VPN, a commercial one that offers opening the ports you want or using a personal one hosted in a VPS.
I have an IPv6, but last time I have checked that is virtually useless for seeding purposes.