PIA’s service is still decent and offers all the features that other VPNs do, but they got bought out by a company that has added spyware to programs in the past. So many users jumped ship when that buyout was finalized, because it’s hard to trust their application or their service when the owning company has a known history of intentionally infecting their users.

Yup. Debrid is a superleecher service. It doesn’t actually seed anything, so it contributes nothing back to the torrents. If everyone used debrid, there would be nothing to torrent as there would be no seeders.

Between The Internet Archive, Anna’s Archive, and AudiobookBay, I’ve never struggled to find books on public trackers.

Private trackers are a false sense of security. If you’re able to get an invite to a private tracker, you really think a multi-billion dollar industry won’t also be able to get one?

At most, private trackers offer more consistent content and more accurate seed/leech counts. But they absolutely won’t protect you from the lawsuits from media companies. If anything, being on a private tracker increases your chances of getting fucked in court, because enforced seed ratios means every single user is liable. Remember that leeching isn’t a crime, but seeding is. Because distribution is what the media companies care about, and that’s only accomplished through seeding. Just like how cops won’t typically be interested in busting a drug buyer, when they can bust the dealer instead.

Your nice shiny 12.0 ratio means you’re getting fucked hard when the dildo of consequences finally arrives. And the dildo of consequences rarely arrives with lube.

Honestly, with services like Jellyfin/Plex and the Sonarr suite, pirating has never been more convenient.

I add something to my Plex watchlist, and it automatically appears on my Plex server in 1080p or 4K (whichever format I prefer, with subtitles and metadata ready to go,) in like 20 minutes. And I can stream that to as many devices as I want. Hell, I can even give friends access to my server, and I can access theirs too. All through a single UI, with no regional restrictions or “sorry you can’t watch that without signing into your home wifi, because we want to make sure you’re in the same household” BS.

Streaming services were supposed to save us from the hassle of physical media, and be better than cable TV…

Looks like something you’d see in Dixit

It’s a board game full of surrealist cards, where you come up with a phrase for your card, then competing players try to guess which card is yours.

Take the opportunity to switch to a password manager, which will allow for unique passwords.

Yup, ZippoApps just bought this one. It’s a company that basically buys apps then pumps them full of invasive (bordering on spyware) bloat to capture the data from existing users. It’s a typical corporate strategy, where they buy a popular app, extract every single cent they can from it, then discard it once it’s a shell of its former self, for the next popular app.

The most noisy devices on my network are my smart TVs. The last time I bothered to look, it wasn’t even close to comparable.

My phone is my most used device. It had something in the ballpark of 800 blocked requests in a day, after an entire day of doomscrolling and heavy use. It was the third most blocked device on my network, behind both of my smart TVs. The “better” TV had ~2400 blocked requests in that same day. The worse one had nearly 3000.

I hadn’t even used my TVs that day.

Crypto mining would be symmetrical up/down though. This is only a small amount of data downloaded, and a huge amount uploaded. That looks more like a botnet attack, where an attacker hacked the machine and pointed it at a target, then just left it to run.

No, the legit copy of the game allows you to play pirated copies of other games. It bypasses the piracy check in the console and allows you to swap discs to a pirated copy of whatever other game you want.

I mean, a lot of that is due to historical grievances that those groups have with the government and NGOs. They’ve been burned too many times. It’s the same reason a black person will be hesitant to call the cops; They have a history of causing more damage than they fix, so certain populations will be wary of them. Even if these organizations mean well, they’re fighting an uphill battle because they have to break through the mistrust first. Fool me once, and all that jazz.

Hell, look at Pakistan’s issues with Polio for a good example of how people are able to remember being harmed by an organization. Pakistan still deals with polio and other fully preventable diseases, largely because the population mistrusts vaccinations. Vaccination programs simply haven’t been effective. And why does the population distrust vaccinations? Because the CIA masqueraded as doctors on a humanitarian mission, in order to covertly collect DNA samples from the population in their hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Something blatantly against the Geneva Convention. So now lots of the population has a major distrust of modern medicine and doctors, because there are still plenty of people who remember what happened the last time they trusted western “doctors”.

But also not surprising. There are lots of people acting shocked, but none of them are indigenous. All of the indigenous women are rolling their eyes and going “well yeah, did we really need to waste money on a study to find out what we already knew?”

Oh I agree. The issue is that half of the population seems to be convinced that gay people are all pedos, because that’s the narrative that has been pushed lately. And shit like this only helps perpetuate the idea and add fuel to the fire.

Yeah, I think Poe’s Law may be in full effect here. The law basically states that without some sort of signifier that it is parody, it’s impossible to create a parody of an extremist that is so extreme that it’ll never be mistaken as genuine. It was originally applied to fundamentalist Christians, but has since been expanded to pretty much any trolling or extremist viewpoints.

I genuinely hope that it’s a troll trying to make trans people look bad. Because that’s honestly the best-case scenario. The idea of this person actually existing is more gross than the alternative. Because if they actually exist, then it means they’re not just a troll trying to make trans people look bad. It means they’re a goddamned predator who needs to be sequestered away from the rest of society, and should never be allowed near children.