Thing is, even with how bafflingly evil Google is, the one corporate service I could see myself paying for is the YouTube subscription. I use the phone app a lot, it would make sense for me.

The problem is that they’re notoriously ban-happy with paying VPN users, due to some of them using their exit countries to pay less for a service. Thing is, if I tried to pay for premium from a country I’d exit from, I’d be paying more compared to where I am. I’m perfectly content overpaying slightly for a few things online with this situation, I don’t buy much, I’m fine. I also don’t know where the line is. If I pay for my account with a card from my IRL location, using the pricing for said location, will I get my account suspended after I jump back on the VPN? It’s not like they’ll publicly announce a clear breakdown of what is and isn’t okay.

Google knowing I use a public VPN on Google services is not an issue for me. I don’t do anything sketchy, I really just want an uncensored internet out of the eye of my ISP.

Interested in knowing what they posted. I feel like I was the only Lebanese regular on Lemmy/Piefed, or at least the only vocal one, until a few months ago.

DankPods my beloved as well. He’s not very technical with software so it’s quite interesting to hear him talk about it.

I love my city (Beirut) it is full of trams (Kia Picanto 2013 base model w/ automatic transmission)

I personally think cooking will have serious staying power.

Oh I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. I wonder how this integrates into something like Jellyfin if I want to host my own personal music streaming for myself.

I didn’t know about this. That’s kind of disgusting.

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.

The interesting thing is that the flags that show during these brief connections show the peer is from DHT/PeX, not from the dozen general purpose trackers I slapped on there. If I got this from a public tracker, I’d think your explanation was the best one, but this makes it more mysterious.

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.

I saw this news and I guess it’s good that privacy is being discussed somewhat soberly over there in the wake of this investment decision.

Personally I have recently been exiting out of the UK, a much more invasive country, so Switzerland for now does seem like an improvement for me. Norway is further out geographically and has less Mullvad servers, would seem like the less favorable option for me unless the proposed laws actually pass.

Frankly I’m scrambling after the UK’s ID thing.

Huh. I’m also “moving” soon. Any reason for Norway over Switzerland?

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.

Some other commenter mentioned that this is brought up in issues tracker in the repo. Sorry, I didn’t actually check for it.

I’m not in the EU, I didn’t dig into it. FWIW I am also moving my own connections to exit from Switzerland sooner or later.

You’re not being paranoid, this is probably one of the intended uses of this technology. Being able to pretend to care about the children is just set dressing.

Any government-level “for the kids” effort that doesn’t start with paying teachers more than a pittance is a transparent push for something else.

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.

Apparently this is illegal to implement as of right now, but it’s not helping the feeling of technological doomerism I get whenever I think about this whole identity verification situation.

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.

The best/worst part is that I was worried about battery life, and then I realized that I only have so much time as an adult and it doesn’t matter as much, for most games I’d want to play on it anyway.

A power bank for the exceptions. Not perfect but it’s okay.

Yeah. Since I would want to log into personally identifying accounts, I want something that’s “known” as a VPN, but in a jurisdiction that doesn’t block off half the internet from me, if that makes sense.