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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 17th, 2024

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  • So, there are other peers, some of which gave me all of the data that I have so far, a small number of them. They can connect just fine to me, so their ports are open.

    There are other peers with only a small percentage of the total torrent that are permanently connected, which might mean that they only wanted to download some of the files, but looking at the file list availability when they were the only connected peers, they had scattered chunks of data and not one continuous folder.

    Now the convoluted part that I feel needs its own post:

    In my quest to get the data, I’ve done some digging on BTdig, and added a few torrents with what seemed to be almost identical content. Most of these were completely inactive, but it seems like my client figured out that there’s overlap with this torrent, somehow. It now shows one of these inactive torrents as having a small % completion, despite also showing that 0 bytes were downloaded. I suspect it was able to match some of the data.

    I wish I better understood that part of torrenting, a lot of what I want is relatively obscure and I love nothing more than seeding files that took months to complete. Being able to stitch together torrents and make rarities a bit less rare is exactly what I want to do.




  • Unfortunately, just referring to Covid still acts like an activation phrase for some people, sending them into a locust frenzy and shutting off their critical thinking or empathy.

    You can’t get a word in edgewise that one of the reasons Covid is so bad for you is that it fucks with your immune system in a way that wasn’t expected of similar diseases and can have horrible combined effects with other pre-existing diseases. No, you must be insisting that someone got a coma from what basically felt like the common cold to them, and you must be a gullible moron.

    Lemmy is growing, and like any large enough user base, you will get these people.

    Also, good on you for posting this, I didn’t know there were any updates over the past year.




  • Everything I learn about this project is so cool. I can’t go through the docs right now, but I’m assuming it can prioritize things like emergency communication over sensor data.

    There’s no public nodes in a 200+ km radius around me on that site someone linked, so something tells me I’ll have to do a lot of guerilla solar panel installation if I want to anonymously set up something.

    I’ve thought about it on and off over the past two years, more of a private network for family and friends than anything, for emergencies and so on. The real, big problem is that I could be accused of espionage and thrown into jail forever if I do this. So I don’t think I’ll see anyone putting any nodes up for the foreseeable future. At least not public nodes.




  • I do feel like that’s a precarious state to leave this in, especially if they’re developing the backend for it.

    Is there even enough momentum for a SKG-style wave of coverage? It would need to be justified properly by citing things like the Tea app data leak, to make a strong case (to political pencil pushers) for the danger of tying personal information to profiles or even to platforms. Otherwise the only thing they’ll see is “gamers want to make porn accessible to children”.

    I don’t know. This whole situation boils my blood because I really care about online anonymity, and this is kind of nightmare scenario shit for me. I’m not even in the UK or EU.



  • I’ve been routing all of my traffic through UK-located VPN servers specifically to avoid shenanigans like this and the UK goes and fucks it up.

    I can’t wait to arm wrestle all my accounts into allowing me to use Swiss servers. Mullvad doesn’t have enough Irish servers for me to reliably exit from there, that would be my top choice (English + GDPR). But then again, GDPR means a fraction of American sites don’t work.

    I just really don’t like having my government or the governments of the places I travel to looking at my traffic. And now this ID shit is here. Just let me use the Internet goddamn it, I already pay out the ass for it.




  • This post doesn’t display properly on Voyager for whatever reason. For those of you who can’t see it, I’ve crossposted my previous post, and quoted it (collapsing part of that quote for brevity), and appended this:


    Collapsed it into a spoiler

    While most of the technical solutions suggested by the replies in my original thread are probably good for different use cases, I’m just chasing the original high of the anonymous internet of my childhood, I just want to blanket route all my traffic through one place and not have to think much about it. Too naive? I’m sure. But I have no big threat to worry about in my scenario, at least now. This is just basic I-want-to-network-out-of-view-of-ISPs.

    My main exit nodes have been in the UK, since that was a good compromise between the US’s wild west privacy/surveillance and not being blocked by US stuff that wasn’t GDPR compliant. I know the UK was never the bastion of internet freedom, but it was a practical option. Especially getting English-as-default for everything, which is something I missed. When the internet went hyper-mainstream in the 2010s, I was no longer getting a standardized English internet like everyone else, I got a localized badly-Arabic-translated version that assumed I want the strictest filtering on everything. Moving over to always-on VPN has made me feel like I got something back. Especially now that ISPs around me are no longer as careless as they once were.

    Now the UK is introducing digital ID, and services have started to comply. I’m not a regular Reddit user, but I still would like to access the site without sending them a selfie (or my ID, of course). Nexus mods is enforcing this now as well, and while I haven’t used it in ages, it’s still a big public repository of stuff I’d want to go through at some point. Digital ID really goes against everything I believe about the internet, this concept of me being on the same anonymous playing field is directly under attack from laws like this, and it is fueling a lot of tech doomerism thinking inside of me. The last thing I want is for an any account of mine, regardless of how infrequently I use it, to be permanently blocked for lack of ID. I know we love our piracy here, but I am a Steam user as well, and with the amount of money I’ve put into their service (and how much I use it), I would have no choice there. But that’s the only one, I think.

    Someone in the thread suggested Singapore, I was thinking Ireland or Switzerland, as good exit node countries. Ireland has only two Mullvad servers (which is a problem). Switzerland I’d think would be very popular with scammers. And Singapore would, if nothing else, make my terrible ping even worse.

    There’s also the fact that a lot of things are now getting blocked more often from VPN servers and it is pretty annoying. Random Imgur links and so on.

    I know this is more of a meandering rant than a pointed question, but I just want to hear some of your thoughts on this.



  • Finding a unicorn country where everything works and all traffic is routed is getting increasingly difficult. For example, if a US news site didn’t want to implement GDPR, it geolocates all users outside the US and blocks them, whilst other US services start to require ID/age verification to post content for non-US users so accessing both easily requires switching location.

    You’ve hit the nail on the head, my own post is a bit meandering and this is what I was going for. I hate how many hoops one needs to jump through for basic anonymity online nowadays.

    OpenWRT has a package called mwan3 that in tandem with dnsmasq can allow you set the IP addresses associated with a DNS entry to a particular VPN/country.

    I think this would be infeasible outside of very narrow use cases, but I don’t know. I don’t have an advanced networking setup, but the way I see it, if I, say, route service A and B to connection 1 and service C to connection 2, I only have control over individual IP ranges/DNS entries. So if my bank IP is routed to connection 1 and one new security background service their app/site uses goes to connection 2, something can get flagged, and I could face an unpleasant with the bank/law. I’ve been trying to avoid things like this. (I have a very rudimentary understanding of networking, I’m not super comfortable doing all of this manually).

    I feel as though the most logical way about it would be to compartmentalize connections by application, but I wasn’t able to find an easy way to do this. For example, splitting off a browser window and having that exit from somewhere else. I know split tunneling exists in the basic Mullvad client, and I guess I can just throw my whole network on Connection 1 and route Connection 2 through it (meaning when I split tunnel I find myself on connection 1) but in that scenario I’m doing myself even less favors re: latency and headroom and all that good stuff.

    And that’s just the computers. I use a phone as well.




  • At the risk of coming off as too gatekeep-y, Arabic is structurally so different from English and French (the other two languages I know). It has a reputation for being difficult for a reason.

    Despite it being my native language I’ll occasionally still think of an idea phrased primarily in English, and contorting it into Arabic is very clunky (despite Arabic being much more loosey goosey with word order, in general, you can figure out how to tie up an idea as you go - this applies more to MSA, dialects usually sway more towards a small number of forms).

    While strictly more rigid, you might be better off at least grasping the basics of MSA first before jumping into a specific dialect. It is antithetical to how I think about languages (go learn the specific prescriptive form of Arabic instead of the most commonly spoken popularly developed one) but it might be easier to learn that way.

    (I’m thinking of it like learning piano (or MIDI?) as a baseline for music and more instruments vs learning guitar first and having an understanding of notes and scales that is very closely associated to the relational positioning of these notes on these strings.)

    Or maybe it might not be easier that way. I didn’t learn Arabic as an adult with a background in western languages, fuck if I know what the pedagogically optimal way to learn Arabic is. Arabic is hard, dude. Doesn’t help that half of all Arabic media is (I say this as an Arab) embarrassing mindless drivel.