Spyke

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piracy

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My ISP sends me letters even if I am torrenting on VPN. Is there anyway to make my traffic not look like torrenting?

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Wouldn't advise turning off ipv6. We are probably getting near the point where some public services will disable or offer v4 as only best effort, and when this happens, your connectivity will be broken for certain things if you disable v6. Heck, it's to the point now where all my home hosted services are v6 only.

The better solution is to just get a VPN that supports ipv6 like airvpn or mullvad. I think pia disables ipv6 while the tunnel is up, which is better than disabling ipv6 altogether.

To validate the tunnel is working properly you can use something like this.

https://ipleak.net/

There is also a Torrent Address detection section, that when you activate it, will provide a magnet link that will show your ip to ensure that it is tunneled properly.

privacy

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Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser

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It's basically how widevine works. The hardware "secure" boots the OS, and the OS only loads signed code. And there is a chain of custody all the way to the hardware, so the software that communicates with the server can attest that it is the same as what they expect.

The simple explanation is that they wish to further erode property ownership by the proletariat by locking down operating systems such that they can't do as their owners wish, but only what the corporation wants.

news

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AAA pulls back from offering insurance in Florida, following Farmers

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Insurance doesn't work very well for things like hurricanes. When big events happen that cause large percentages of their policy holders to file claims at the same time, it results in large payouts which causes increases in price. When prices go up, people don't insure. This combined with the fact that florida gets hurricanes means prices for insurance are high.

Maybe the state could help by introducing laws to help combat insurance fraud, but that could lead to consumers getting fucked by their insurance companies.

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Odin or Rust

To be honest, I never heard of it, and it is interesting, but the language isn't the only factor, it's the ecosystem as well. It says it's an alternative to C, so I will just assume it can consume C libraries. But that still leaves you with using C libraries, which is not a great position to be in if you are looking to not use C.

If you are looking for something that is actually in use, but not rust, look into Zig. Still would need to use a lot of C libraries, but it at least looks like it has momentum. Not to mention they seek to completely replace libc, which would actually be useful and an achievement, since that is the biggest problem C actually has.

I am a rust fan myself, but if you are new to programming it's not a great place to start due to its' learning cliff.

piracy

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Importance of encrypted DNS?

DNS doesn't really matter for piracy, but it can help improve privacy and security.

DNS over TLS will ensure all your dns requests are encrypted, and most clients actually validate the certificate so attempts to hijack the connection are not easily possible.

Firefox can bypass your systems DNS and use DoH. I think windows also supports DoT.

For Linux, systemd networkd and resolved also support DoT.

Keep in mind that some software does not obey system dns settings and can do their own DNS.

linux

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Questions about an install

If you are using a typical distro like fedora, debian or ubuntu, and you are wiping everything, you don't really need to know anything. The installer will handle everything for you. Just delete all partitions while installing and start fresh and it should all just work.

If your install media refuses to boot for whatever reason, then you may have to disable secure boot in the system EFI/BIOS menu.

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Advocates raise alarm over Pfas pollution from datacenters amid AI boom

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Water isn't a renewable resource, especially not if the source of water is underground aquifers.

This is a long post, but these matters could be of grave importance.

The reason water isn't always renewable is that statistically, most of the water on earth ends up in the oceans where it gets "trapped". Sure, some of it evaporates and rains, but most of the rain is over the ocean. Some rain obviously makes it back to land, but most of it still stays in the ocean.

It's extra bad if you pump water out of the ground from what are called aquifers. The water in the ground has taken thousands of years to build up, so pumping it out for dumb reasons is not a good idea. We could argue about growing food with ground water, but most people might consider squandering ground water where it is optional to do so, to be short sighted.

At least some data centers pump water out of aquifers for the purposes of evaporative cooling. This is a method of cooling that is the same as "swap" coolers. It works by taking advantage of the fact that when a liquid undergoes a phase transition, there is a large exchange of energy.

This is a similar effect to how people can be cooled off by sweating. The sweat evaporates and it leaves the skin cooler, because when the liquid evaporates, heat is taken out of the skin.

Back to data centers, some pump water out of aquifers, and intentionally evaporate the water to remove heat out of whatever media is used for cooling chips/servers.

Why do they use this method of cooling? Because it's cheaper. Typical hvac systems involving compressors consume power and power costs money. So in effect, they are consuming water, an essential and non-renewable resource, in order to avoid having to pay for electricity to cool their servers in a more sustainable way. Evaporative cooling is not necessary to cool a data center. Data centers have been and still are cooled by typical hvac systems which do not consume water in this manner.

A common retort is "can't the vapor be condensed back into water?" Yes, but they don't because that would cost money. As mentioned earlier, creating the vapor consumed heat. To create water, energy would need to be spent to take the heat back out of the water. This is an unavoidable fact of thermodynamics.

Also, do not confuse evaporative cooling with what some people call a "water" loop. In such a loop, water is being used to move heat from one location to another, in a loop, similar to how water cooled PCs work. This is often done because air has a poor heat capacity, so the size ducts needed to move an adequate amount of air could be too big to be practical, so in these systems, the heat is transferred into water, usually to be sent to a heat exchanger (radiator/heat sink). The water does not undergo a phase transition in a typical water loop. The water merely is hotter when it leaves the so called "air conditioner" and cooler when it leaves the heat exchanger, heading back to the AC. The compressors in the AC units are what is doing the heavy lifting in these style systems.

piracy

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What is Swarm Merging?

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BitTorrent v2 allows this also. In v1, torrents with multiple files are hashed continuously (cat) together without respect to file boundaries. A side effect of this that many people notice is that to grab a specific file may require downloading some of the files before or after the one you want.

Under v2, each file is hashed separately, so this fixes the aforementioned problem and should allow sharing of files across torrent files.

piracy

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What's the replacement for RARBG now?

You can use this: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmbpRxBZ5HDZDVRoeAU8xFYnoP4r5eGCxdkmfFW3JbA6mq/

That is a low tech html page that can search the SQLite database someone posted. That page is hosted on IPFS, which you can access through one of the gateways, although I posted a link to the page via one of the gateways.

On that page is a button you can press for more information on how to download it to your local computer to have a speedy local copy.

How I have been using it is: search in the following format: [name] [release year] [quality like 1080p] [encode like x265]

do note that the database is not being updated since RARBG is obviously gone now, but stuff prior and including some of 2023 is all there, most what rarbg released.

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Could the internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world together

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I don't think you are wrong, but here is a bit of my perspective.

Rot has been occurring in the industry for over 10 years now. There are now fewer qualified network engineers than around the turn of the century and companies are less willing to spend money on upgrades of network infrastructure (6500 is still relevant...). Also, many ISPs, at least in the US, have merged resulting in fewer diverse networks.

The upside now at least, is that ports are easily 100g, so you could argue that we need less network equipment and fewer engineers, but I'm not sure how much that offsets the problems. And 100+g ports don't help you properly run a network, except maybe make it a smaller problem if you need fewer ports.

piracy

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My ISP sends me letters even if I am torrenting on VPN. Is there anyway to make my traffic not look like torrenting?

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Many ISPs are no longer handing out even 1 public ipv4 address per account, and instead opting for CGnat which further breaks and stratifies the internet.

Tmobile for example is 464xlat which is even worse than cgnat since it requires tampering with dns responses.

Given the situation many ISP are in, most serious companies offering services on the internet have supported ipv6 for a long time now in order to offer the most competitive service possible. And with cloudflare now serving up a large amount of traffic, a lot of all traffic is v6.

Believe it or not, but IPv6 is here and gaining ground.