Yeah, but at least we knew how to switch consoles.

I bet that most Linux users nowadays don’t event know the CTRL+ALT+Fx shortcuts to switch console.

Can’t say that the old days were really “good” compared to what we had now, but there was definitelly a lot of satisfaction in step by step getting the system to work.

Stories from the “good” old days running Linux on a 386 machine with 4 MB or less of memory aside, in the present day it’s still perfectly normal to run Linux on a much weaker machine as a server - you can just rent a the cheapest VPS you can find (which nowadays will have 128 MB, maybe 256MB, and definitelly only give you a single core) and install it there.

Of course, it won’t be something with X-Windows or Wayland, much less stuff like LibreOffice.

I think the server distribution of Ubunto might fit such a VPS, though there are server-specific Linux distros that will for sure fit and if everything fails TinyCore Linux will fit in a potato.

I current have a server like that using AlmaLinux on a VPS with less than 1GB in memory, which is used only as a Git repository and that machine is overkill for it (it’s the lowest end VPS with enough storage space for a Git repository big enough for the projects I’m working on, so judging by the server management interface and linux meminfo, that machine’s CPU power and memory are in practice far more than needed).

If you’re willing to live with a command line interface, you can run Linux on $50 worth of hardware.

Similar story but I just installed slackware on one of the University PCs (they just had a handful of PCs in the general computer room for the students and nobody actually watched over us) since I did not have a PC yet (only had a ZX Spectrum at the timback then).

Trying to get X-Windows to work in Slackware was interesting, to say the least: back then you had to manually create your own video timings configuration file to get the graphics to work - which means defining the video mode at the very low level, such as configuring the number of video clock cycles between end-of-line-drawing and horizontal-retrace - and fortunatelly I didn’t actually blow up any monitor (which was possible if you did the configuration wrong).

At least we had some access to the Internet (most things were blocked but we had Usenet and e-email and one could use FTPmail gateways to download stuff from remote servers) via Ethernet, so that part was easy.

Anyways, my first reaction looking at the OP’s post was like: yeah, if they’re running X it’s probably a too powerfull machine.

The more services you have depending on a 3rd party which can do whatever the fuck they want, either directly or by changing the rules when the feel like it (i.e. not bound by rules they cannot change, such as root DNS providers are) and then doing it, the less your system is actually self-hosted, IMHO.

For me the whole point of self-hosting is exactly being as independent as possible of 3rd parties that can just fuck you up, be it on purpose (generally for $$$) or because they go bankrupt and close their services.

This is why I’ve actually chosen to run Kodi on my home server that doubles down as TV Box even though I can’t easilly use it from anywhere else (it’s possible but it involves using a standalone database that is then shared, which can only be safelly done through customly setup ssh pipes) rather than something like Plex.

It’s kinda funny to see people into self-hosting still doing the kind of mistake I did almost 3 decades ago (fortunatelly in a professional environment) of trusting a 3rd party to the point of becoming dependent on them and later getting burned when they abused that trust, and which led me to avoid such situations like the plague ever since.

Mind you, I can understand if people for whom self-hosting is not driven by a desire to reduce vulnerability to the whims of 3rd parties (which includes reducing the risk of enshittification) and is instead driven by “waste not” (for example, bringing new life to old hardware rather than throwing it out) or by it being a fun challenge, don’t really care to be as independent as possible from such 3rd parties.

I vaguelly remember reading that Germany made Copyright Violation even for personal use a Crime, rather than merelly a Civil Law affair like it is in most countries.

Mind you, I might be wrong on the countries or on the details (i.e. maybe it’s only a Crime if it’s for profit).

Edit: So I searched for it and from here I got that:

Are there criminal copyright provisions? What are they?

Copyright infringements under German law also constitute criminal acts, which are punishable by fines or up to three years’ imprisonment. If the infringement is done on a commercial basis, the maximum punishment is five years in prison.

According to German copyright law, unlawful exploitation of copyrighted works, unlawful affixing of the designation of an author and the infringement of related rights are subject to imprisonment of not more than three years or a fine. In addition, any attempt shall be punishable.

The unlawful exploitation of copyrighted works on a commercial scale is subject to imprisonment of not more than five years or a fine.

The infringement of technological measures and rights management information is subject to imprisonment of not more than one year or a fine.

As I said, in most countries copyright infringement is not a Crime, just a Civil Law matter (i.e. you can be sued by the owners of the Copyright for damage but you won’t be sued by the State to pay a fine or even be jailed for it). Frankly judging by what it says there German law is very draconian on this.

Look, I’m extrapolating from the general rule to the specific case of torrenting.

The general rule is that, because the IP protocol requires numerical addresses to connect to a remote machine, if what you have is a site name you have to translate that name into a numerical address before you can actually establish a connection, and a DNS query is how you translate site names into their numerical IP addresses.

Now, if you look at the contents of a tracker, what you see are not numerical addresses but site names, so those must be translated into numerical addresses before your client can connect to those trackers, hence DNS queries are done to do that translation.

Meanwhile, if you look at the “peers” section in an active torrent in your torrenting program, you see that they all have numerical IP addresses, not site names. This makes sense for two reasons:

• Most of those machines are user machines, and usually users don’t just buy a domain to have site names for the machines they used only as clients (i.e. browsing, torrenting and so on) since that is not at all needed. Site names are required for machines which serve stuff (literally, “server machines”, such as machines hosting websites) to arbitrary clients that by their own initiative connect to that machine - they’re meant as a human readable memorable alias for the numerical IP address of a machine, which people can enter in appropriate fields of client applications to connect to that site (i.e. putting “lemmy.dbzer0.com” in your browser rather than having to remember that its IP address is “51.77.203.116”)
• As I said, IP connections require IP numerical addresses to be established. For performance reasons it makes sense that in the torrent protocol the information exchanged about peers and between peers is always and only the machine’s numerical IP address since with those there is no need to do the additional step which is the DNS query before they can be used by the networking layer to open TCP/IP or UDP/IP connections to those peers.

Hence my conclusion is that the torrenting protocol itself will only deal with site names (which require DNS queries before network connections can be made to them) for the entrance into the protocol (i.e. start up and connect to trackers) and then deal with everything else using numerical IP addresses only, both because almost no peer will actually have a site name and because it’s low performance and doesn’t make sense to get site names from peers and have to resolve those into numerical addresses when then peer itself already knows its numerical address and can directly provide it. Certainly that’s how I would design it.

Now, since I didn’t actually read the protocol or logged the network connections in a machine torrenting to see what’s going one, I’m not absolutely certain there are now DNS queries at all after the initial resolution of the trackers of a torrent. I am however confident that it is so because that makes sense from a programming point of view.

Well, if the trackers are specified as names (and a quick peek at some random torrent shows that most if not all all), those do have to be resolved to IP adresses and if that DNS query is happening outside the VPN then your ISP as well as the DNS server being queried can see you’re interest in those names (and it wouldn’t be hard to determine with a high probability that you are indeed torrenting something, though WHAT you are torrenting can’t really be determined by you merely accessing certain servers which have torrent trackers active, unless a specific server only tracks a single torrent, which would be pretty weird).

Things like peers aren’t DNS resolved since they already come as IP adresses.

So when it comes to torrenting as far as I know all that the DNS can leak is the information that you ARE torrenting but not specifically WHAT you are torrenting.

It’s more in things were you’re constantly doing DNS queries, such as browsing, that DNS leaking can endanger you privacy: if for example somebody is going to “hotsheepbestialityporn.com”, somebody at their ISP could determine that person’s very specific sexual tastes from seeing the DNS queries for hotsheepbestialityporn.com coming in the open from their connection.

It might be a DNS problem.

I vaguely remember that Mullvad has a setting to make sure that DNS queries go via the VPN but maybe that’s not enabled in your environment?!

Another possibility is that Mullvad going down and then back up along with your physical connection when your ISP forces a renewal of the DHCP is somehow crapping up the DNS client on your side.

If you have the numerical IP address of a site, you can try and access the site by name in your browser when you have problems in the morning and then try it by nunerical IP address - if it doesn’t work by name but it does by numerical IP it’s probably a DNS issue.

PS: you can just run the “ping” command from the command line to see if your machinr can reach a remote machine (i.e. “ping lemmy.dbzer0.com”) and don’t need to use a browser (in fact for checking if you can reach machines without a webserver, the browser won’t work but the ping command will).

Even if Mullvad did erroneously allow applications to access your physical network connection for a moment, because you bound qbittorrent explicitly to the network device of the Mullvad VPN, qbittorrent will never use the physical connection.

You can check this out easily by disconnecting Mullvad and trying to torrent something on qbittorrent and also browsing the Net: you’ll notice the browser gets through just fine but qbittorrent will not.

Mullvad leaking would be a problem if what you’re worried about is loss of privacy or government surveillance, not for torrenting if your torrent server is correctly bound to the VPN device.

You can configure launchers such as Lutris to run your games inside a proper sandboxing application such as “firejail”.

Just look into “Command Prefix” under Global Options in Lutris: a sandboxing app like firejail is used by really just running the sandbox app with the original command as a parameter of it, so that means you “prefix” the original command with the sandbox app and its parameters.

You can go as crazy as you want if you do sandboxing like that (down to only allowing access to whitelisted directories). In my case I’ve actually limited networking inside the sandbox to localhost-only.

I’m running the games in Linux, using Lutris as a launcher with a default configuration that wraps them in a firejail sandbox (for anybody interested, you add firejail as the “command prefix” under Global Options or in the System Options of the game) which amongst other things blocks networking.

In fact I went and figure out how to do all that exactly because I wanted to run pirated games in Linux in a safe way and you can’t just rely on the lower probability of Windows games of having code that tries to determine if it’s being run with Wine and accesses Linux-specific functionality and files if it is.

PS: That firejail stuff also works for Linux native games (it just wraps whatever you’re running to start the game, be it Wine or directly the game Linux binary).

You can keep on seeding after downloading and your torrenting program will still manage to upload to any member of the swarm for that torrent that it connected to (even if only to check their status) during the download phase.

This should be enough to get you consistently above a 1:1 upload to download ratio for any popular public torrents, though for those with very few leechers you might never get there.

The lack of port forwarding is only a problem for remote machines your program has not connected to during the current session for a torrent (i.e. not yet seen machines that try to connect to your client), which means you can’t seed at all in a purely for seeding session or upload to machines that joined the swarm after your download was done in a mixed session.

If your pattern of usage is that of mainly a downloader of public torrents who tries to give back to the communy at least as much as they took and whose not mainly into obscure stuff, it works fine.

It massively depends on the country - it’s probably fine in Southern and Eastern Europe but not for example in Germany were if I’m not mistaken copyright violation is even part of Criminal Law rather than Civil Law as in pretty much the rest of the World.

Personally ever since I lived in the UK - which has the most insane levels of civil society surveillance in Europe, including of Internet usage - I got into the habit of doing pretty much everything behind a VPN, which also helps with peace of mind for the whole torreting thing no matter which country I’m living in at the moment, plus I pay 5 euros a month for the VPN which is less than a single streaming service, so in a way it pays itself (it’s funny how piracy compensates for the costs of protecting myself from dragnet surveillance).

I run my pirated games in Linux sandboxed using firejail (Wine itself doesn’t sandbox anything as it’s only an adaptor layer) configured to block a lot of things including network access.

Then again I also run my non-pirated games in Linux in the same way.

Acting techniques improved massively during the XXth century, so stuff that relies on that (basically anything but slapstick Comedy and mindless Action) will feel less believable, which impacts mostly things from the 60s and earlier.

Then there are the Production values: the scenarios in early XXth century films were basically Theatre stages whilst more recent stuff can be incredibly realistic (pay attention to the details in things like clothing and the objects and furniture in indoor scenes in period movies) and Sci-Fi benefited massive from the early XXIst century techniques for physically correct 3D rendering and Mocap techniques so there is a disjunction in perceived realism between even the early Star Wars Movies and something like The Mandalorian.

Method Acting (which is a pretty powerful Acting technique for getting actors to genuinely feel the emotions of the character) dates back to the 60s in Movies (it dates back even longer to Stanislavski in 19th century Russia, but its popularity really took off mid 20th century) so before that actors were just faking it whilst after that it will be more and more them reacting genuinely to imaginary circumstances (in terms of the audience it means we will actually empathise with what’s hapenning to the character because the emotions on display are genuine).

So the quality of the acting in the kind of Films that are now coming into the Public Domain will be lower than what we are use to (though in stuff like Comedy and certain kinds of Action it’s seldom noticeable).

And this is before we even go into the quality of the Production (in audience terms, how believable are the scenarios).

I doubt Hollywood will be threatened by this for at leat a couple of decades.

I’m pretty sure those things are trained on content which was obtained without paying royalties to the creators, hence by definition pirated content - so that would count as “piracy around them”.

On the opposite side, as far as I know the things created with Generative AI so far can’t be copyrighted, hence by definition can’t be pirated as they’ve always belonged to the Public Domain.

As for the engines themselves, there are good fully open source options out there which can be locally installed (if you have enough memory in your graphics card) and there seem to be thriving communities around it (at least it looks like it from what bit I dipped into that stuff so far). I’m not sure if it’s at all possible to pirate the closed source engines since I expect those things are designed to be deployed to very specific server farm architectures.

I did get the idea you were just quoting their excuse and meant it the same as in my post.

I just wanted to really hammer down the point beyond any doubt.

More like “not making as much money as they want”.

Thank the gods you put an /S at the end.