No.

You don’t get salty emails from your ISP for downloading torrents, you get them because (due to the nature of how torrenting works) you’re also uploading the torrent to other users at the same time.

Usenet users download from the data providers. Because it’s not crowdsourcing the hosting like torrenting, it’s generally not free (hence this post about deals). The trade-off for having to pay is that you don’t have to share that risk with the data providers. It’s more akin to watching a pirate streaming site than torrenting: you’ll never get an email about consuming it, but you might visit one day and realize the site’s been taken down or had the domain changed because the owners got the email instead.

They were bought by Kape Technologies in 2019. This drove away a lot of folks because of prior security concerns with another product of theirs. I don’t recall the specifics, but here’s a reddit thread from the time with comments that likely shed some light on the worries from then if you’re curious.

As a practical response, I’ve been with them since years prior to that and didn’t change because I renew 3 years at a time and had 2 years left when they were bought. Figured I’d give them that time to see how things changed. Best I could tell, they didn’t in any way that pisses off my ISP, so I still haven’t bothered switching.

Fair enough, but it’s a good value for the price. Mullvad’s €5/month, and while it’s fallen out of favor I know people who still use PIA and get it for close to $2/month by prepaying for a few years at a time. You could probably pay for it by turning off the laptop a few hours a day to save on electricity.

Worth the price, imo.

What’s the argument for doing this? It looks like media stack includes a vpn, so the effort level isn’t going to be all that different.

Echoing everyone else: definitely use a vpn if you’re torrenting. Strongly consider using a seedbox if you’re on starlink or anything else with poor upload speeds.

This being related to piracy feels like a stretch.