They do, but “rightsholders” suck harder. And the tech companies oppose the measures the rightsholders are pushing them to adopt.

Here, the enemy of my enemy may not be my friend, but they aren’t my enemy.

Dance halls and hotels don’t have “safe harbor” provisions as a matter of law, and their services to performers are not deemed a “human right”.

The human capacity for reason is greatly overrated. The overwhelming majority of conversation is regurgitated thought, which is exactly what LLMs are designed to do.

Plot twist: RIAA and MPAA own all the major VPN providers, and/or the data centers they rent from.

/ConapiracyTheory

the thing that’s different is that social media has demonstrative harm.

Is that actually a difference?

Rock and roll causes harm: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8580930/

TV causes harm: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/too-much-tv-might-be-bad-for-your-brain

Video games cause harm: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2000/04/video-games

Pretty much everything kids do that their parents didn’t has been “proven” to cause harm. Radio, cinema, comic books, even newspapers were “proven” to harm young people.

Authoritarianism is a far bigger threat than any of these.

Hybrid hard drive. Basically, a hard drive with a large solid state cache.

Actual shipping would vary depending on location, but sellers are padding the shipping charge so they can display a lower unit price.

Need to add shipping charges to the price…

She turned me into a newt!

What are you even on about? One person could conceivably add CSAM to a torrent that you eventually download, and you could find yourself subject to a criminal investigation.

I’ve gone my entire adult life downloading copyrighted material without using a VPN

“I’ve been fucking multiple partners weekly my entire adult life. without protection, and I haven’t gotten AIDS yet.” <— That’s you. That’s what you sound like.

You are giving your ISP every thing that a rightsholder needs to harass you, with your understanding that laws and corporate policies currently protect you from that harassment. But you ignore that those policies can be changed, and those changes can apply to data you’ve previously given to your ISP. When rightsholders start arguing “think of the children” and pointing at such torrents, that’s the kind of thing that gets laws and policies changed.

Why give them the information in the first place? Why not keep that information away from your ISP? Why trust them to do the right thing when you can easily deny them the ability to do wrong?

That level of paranoia is a waste of energy.

I know I am paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?

Identifying and evaluating vulnerabilities is a critical component of any security plan. In a good one, any vulnerabilities will be well outside the scope of feasibility.

Why would some Hollywood studio plant CSAM in a torrent?

To cast FUD on piracy in general. To inextricably link “pirate” with “pedophile” in the mind of the general public. To convince the general public to treat copyright infringement as criminal rather than a civil matter.

That would implicate them as well.

They hire or extort someone to initially seed from some third world ISPs, and the swarm takes over from there. It never gets traced back to them.

It would cost them far more in legal fees to come after me than to just leave it alone.

You aren’t the objective, just the means. The purpose is to make piracy a truly objectionable practice in the eyes of the public.

None of this is a likely threat, but is any of it completely outside the realm of feasibility?

You don’t have any justification to be that condescending. Your security practices are reliant on the law, and the law is not a factor under your direct control. It has changed without your input before, and it will change without your input in the future. Meanwhile, your ISP is building a record of your non-compliance that it can provide to rightsholders just as soon as it likes.

Good security practice minimizes reliance on factors outside your control. You can’t control whether your ISP has your personally identifiable information, but you can deny them knowledge of your data transfers. You can’t control whether a VPN has knowledge of your data transfers, but you can deny them knowledge of your PII.

Also it definitely would cost them if they told me “we have not responded to this notice from the rightsholder” and then turned around and did exactly that. That would be a flat out lie to their client.

As of the time of their letter, they had not responded to that notice. They could respond tomorrow without ever having lied to you. You would not have grounds to sue.

Just out of curiosity, will your Canadian ISP and your (current) Canadian laws protect you when a rightsholder portrays you as a pedophile instead of a pirate? If they anonymously publish a torrent containing their movie and some hidden CSAM, are you fucked?

What incentive do they have to actually follow through on that claim?

I pay my ISP $600/yr. If a third party with a bug up their ass creates $601 worth of trouble for my ISP, why wouldn’t they throw me under the bus?

No ISP is deserving of the kind of trust you describe. It costs them nothing to put those words in a letter.

I don’t particularly trust a VPN provider either, for much the same reason. But, the VPN provider wants to know as little about me as possible, while the ISP needs to know everything.

On the public wifi, the operator of that wifi can see any data you pass through their network. They can likely see what sites you visit, but probably can’t see what data you send to and from those sites, due to encryption. Unless they have an account with you, or you provide your information in clearext, they can link your data to your devices, but not to you directly, at least not from your use of the AP. They can potentially link your data to your image on their cameras, and thus your identity.

Your ISP has the same access to your data, but they also have a payment account linked to you, and they regularly cooperate with rights holders and law enforcement.

A VPN can do the same thing as an ISP: they know what sites you visit, but probably don’t know what data you are sending and receiving, and they can link it to your payment account. However, they generally do not cooperate with rights holders, and may or may not cooperate with law enforcement in their jurisdiction. While you are using a VPN, your ISP knows you are using them, but doesn’t know what you are sending back and forth, due to encryption.

If you want to remain as anonymous as possible, use a burner device with no accounts on public wifi.

If you want to avoid harassment by rights holders while you engage in piracy, a VPN is sufficient.

There is an app on f-droid called “shelter” that gives you access to Android Work Profiles. This is a sandboxed area of your phone that makes it function like a second phone. You can install apps that are only accessible from within that sandbox. You can install a second, sandboxed copy of an app. You can shut down all your sandboxed apps simultaneously.

I have a bunch of bullshit, garbage apps I very rarely use installed in my sandboxed “work” profile (Facebook, restaurant apps, and some other assorted trash apps) so they won’t harass me at random.

To me It looks like a nightly routine of positive self-talk while visualizing myself getting up the next morning to carry out my planned agenda

All that visualization would have me excited to get started. I’d be up all night thinking about the plan, then be too exhausted to even get out of bed when it’s finally time to actually get started.

Wow.

That’s… Awesome.

Edit: That has pretty much every major feature I’ve been looking for.

Long shot, but does anyone know of any mapping app where you can easily project a bearing/azimuth line, or a point a given bearing and distance from another point?

The only app I’ve found so far that can come close to what I need is Backcountry Navigator, which has a terrible UI. Everything else seems to be focused entirely on GPS navigation from where you are now to a known destination; I have yet to find one that allows even basic triangulation, to be able to identify the location of an observed object.

Dual boot sucks donkey balls.

Install virtualbox and spin up a Windows VM on a Linux host.

Fuck all that.

Install Linux, any flavor. Install virtualbox, and set up a Windows VM. Go ahead and install any of your windows bullshit on that VM. That’s your crutch, your failsafe: a windows instance that you don’t have to leave Linux to access.

Save snapshots before and after any changes, so if/when it goes to shit, you can roll it back to where it was still working.