You could say the same about patents for physical inventions. But there are legitimate reasons for patents to exist.

Nice strawman.

Be the change you want to see in the world. Find a physical copy, rip it, upload it.

There are private trackers where you can earn a currency based on seeding uptime, not actual upload. Then you can spend the currency to get more download buffer. Farm the currency by just downloading and seeding a bunch of freeleech stuff.

As I witnessed today, even just stating that you are opting out is not enough. You must ensure, of your own accord, that the camera is not directed at you when you approach the TSA agent, or else it will automatically photograph you.

I’ve also had a TSA agent tell me that I need to tell them I opt out before handing them my ID. This is obviously problematic but that’s just how this shit works today.

Only if you are reselling bitwarden. The client apps are still free for personal use.

Wow small world. Have you played Spitzer?

You don’t need to. But it’s probably a good idea for the same reason as with BitTorrent.

Reading through the docs about it here, it sounds like it’s only an indexer, not a tracker.

Well fuck me. I mean I don’t think that’s an immediate issue for me but that does suck.

EDIT: Although if we’re being honest, has PIA been found doing anything shady in the 7 years since they were acquired?

Do people not recommend PIA anymore? I’ve used it for a long time and never had issues. Supports port forwarding. Audits have shown they don’t store activity logs, and they even run RAM-only servers.

EDIT: Just looked at AirVPN. It’s nice they don’t request any identifying info on signup.

I agree the transport layer is good and having anonymity in a different layer works. I think my main gripes with it today are:

1. Anonymity is paid for and trust-based. It’d be awesome if something like I2P started working well enough that anyone could have anonymity for free without needing to trust a company or worry about poor performance.
2. Private trackers. While I understand the logic behind this form of community (incentivize seeding and make bans meaningful), I think it’s possible to solve those problems with a public tracker. I have ideas on how this could work if anyone is interested.

I haven’t tried SoulSeek. What does it do better than Bittorrent?

EDIT: After playing around with SoulSeek, it seems pretty cool, although the amount of time it takes to scan your files on startup is laughably bad.

Public trackers never seem to have as good of releases or swarm health, except for the most popular content.

So just browse piracy sites with Tor. Bittorrent clients might struggle to access blocked trackers, but the DHT can’t really be censored IIUC.

EDIT: It might even be possible to configure Bittorrent clients to use Tor specifically for communication with trackers (but not for the bulk P2P chunk transfers).

EDIT2: Not sure why I’m getting downvoted. Maybe the next person to downvote could reply and explain why.

They could also force ISPs to ban VPN IPs that don’t comply with their piracy blocking rules, regardless of whether they’re in the US.

Secrets

• Encrypted secrets file. All repo-managed credentials live in secrets/secrets.yaml, encrypted with SOPS/age.
• Encrypted OpenTofu state. State and plans are encrypted client-side (PBKDF2 + AES-GCM) with a passphrase from TF_VAR_state_passphrase.

Network perimeter

• Default-drop firewall on the router. I use a hand-written nftables ruleset with policy drop on both input and forward. Only lo, lan0 and wg0 are trusted. WAN accepts only established traffic, WireGuard UDP and HTTP/HTTPS.
• No SSH from the WAN. sshd on the router is not exposed to the internet at all.
• WireGuard for remote access.
• Forced DNS. NAT redirects all LAN and VPN port-53 traffic to the router’s AdGuard. AdGuard uses Quad9 over DoT upstream, with blocklists and safe search.
• Second-level ACL in nginx. Private .home vhosts and Grafana carry allow LAN; allow VPN; deny all;.
• TLS everywhere. Every public vhost sets forceSSL with recommendedTlsSettings. Certificates come from ACME DNS-01, so issuance needs no inbound port 80. Cloudflare is DNS-only with no proxy, so no third party sees plaintext.

Host access

• SSH hardening. Password and keyboard-interactive auth are off, PermitRootLogin = “no”, and logins are key-only.
• Dedicated deployer system user. It uses a CI-only keypair, separate from the interactive keys. Everything it does through sudo is logged with LOG_INPUT/LOG_OUTPUT to /var/log/sudo-deployer.log.

Thanks for sharing. I’m trying it out as a Google Keep replacement.

Probably best we just let them think they got one over on us.

Kent Overstreet