...which is why today's sponsor is NordVPN!
(don't actually use NV there are much better options, this was for comedic effect)
What's wrong with Nord?
Overall the marketing is dishonest/over promises and there's some previous lack of transparency with data breaches along with being closed source. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordVPN#Criticism
There's just better options: https://thatoneprivacysite.xyz/
*Builds privacy site*
*Embeds Google sheet*
The Big Brother energy of that "We Can See You" eye in the middle is pretty high.
Yeah college networks are one of the biggest ones I would not trust unless I had a VPN going. Average computing? Perfectly fine. Naughty things? VPN up
If you don't use the VPN for normal things then you leave yourself open to indentification by correlation. It's the same rule for naive Tor users. The more normal and distributed it appears in traffic, the harder it is to correlate other pieces of data they they already have access to.
Friendly reminder that the panopticon we live under today was considered horrifying a hundred years ago
It's still horrifying today. We're just powerless to stop it.
Or even 25 years ago! They (and in many cases we) tried to warn them. Turns out the other "they" are happy to give it away for AI slop videos.
That's not when they gave it away. It was well and truly gone 24 years ago lest terrorists win
VPN, even for legal stuff cause "we can see you" can f off tbh
VPN's are the new essential subscription service for online content. Back in the olden times, we had to pay for minutes of using internet and long distance phone calls, today we have to pay for privacy and access to content we're "not allowed" to see. And what you're allowed to see or not is a strange, politically motivated list that is always changing.
Back in the olden days people scoffed at China fencing off the web, shutting down access to sites and whatnot. Now politicians in plenty of western countries actively talk about it like a good thing.
On top of that, the big visible VPN companies are all owned by the same one or two companies, and while they boast loudly about keeping you safe, they do fuck all for privacy. You're just paying to give your data away. There's a scarce few good private VPNs, but they also don't tend to advertise much.
More reason to use a VPN.
They're not trying to actually stop you; they're trying to keep the lawyers at bay.
You say you can tell what I'm downloading? Mullvad says otherwise.
You can still download a car
But I would never do that of course. I would however shit in a policemans helmet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg (IT Crowd)
I'm pretty sure I've downloaded more cars for free for GTA IV and Cyberpunk 2077 than I've physically been in.
Sounds like a bunch of us should put up seeds with titles like "This (1947) It's A Wonderful Life (Public Domain) is better than (2025) Fantastic Four"
They're just trying not to lose their internet service provider probably. ISP's are even starting to threaten their residential and commercial customers alike because they can't afford the lawsuits so network tech's are starting to turn in individuals about compliance and such.
Yeah, this is just a student-run association running it, providing connection from university's upstream ISP which apparently is easy to upset.
I posted this because I actually find this nice, as it doesn't fully block torrents, but just specific ones, and they also make that clear. They could just block torrents and stay safe.
Func fact: Some dorm rooms apparently actually have 2.5Gbit. I've seen the speed test. Of course, you'll need a compatible network card. Most have "only" a gigabit.
Why would anyone, anywhere block torrenting? There is nothing illegal about it.
Coming from an IT perspective, I can tell you 100% that torrenting on a network can cause a bottleneck with the amount of bandwidth that it often can take especially if it's not set up properly. Several years ago I remember working in a corporate network and we had our internet slow down to a near crawl because one person decided they wanted to torrent a movie during one of our busiest seasons. Let's just say we're able to track them down and they got fired on the spot.
Speaking of which, I gave up on torrents a couple of years ago and switched to direct downloads. Not only is it much faster due to not having to rely on seeds, turns out that ISPs don't actually care if you download pirated content. Distributing it is where they get you.
Isn't it harder to find direct downloads? Or am I just stuck in the past on the bay?
Legal game updates as torrents? Is that a thing?
Humble Bundle distributes their DRM-free games and other content via BitTorrent.
I know WoW used bittorrent for game updates, it was built in and was the "standard" download mechanism.
https://worldofwarcraft.fandom.com/et/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader
I'm sure it's far from the only game that did.
Even Windows Update has a peer-to-peer option.
Policing this crap isn't trivial and not worth the effort.
We just gave up and block 100% of all P2P traffic on both our university wireless and student wired networks.
debrid services for the win! just let someone else torrent it for you, and download it from them.
AllDebrid costs €3 a month and saves you any legal headaches.
At least it's allowed, when I was in college they didn't allow any torrent traffic at all. They had also banned pings specifically, and threatened to shut off my internet if I didn't stop trying to send pings, which apparently my torrent client was doing automatically.
At least it’s allowed
That was my point. It being allowed rather than "we received 2 not nice letters, say goodbye to that entire protocol" as usual.
If you get the torrent from a site using HTTPS and get the data only from encrypted peers is it even possible to tell what people are downloading?
Not from monitoring on the network
But if one of those peers is a snitch then you have a potential issue
me with my vpn
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
