kbal

Personally I enjoy seeing the numbers go up. Looking at the current top ten by ratio according to my torrent client most of them are obscure things that I’m probably the only one seeding — but the number one spot, at a ratio of 565, goes to “Shrek (2001) [1080p]”.

foreign piracy in the United States

For a moment there I thought they were talking about actual pirate ships sailing across from Liberia to raid the east coast.

Follow-up question: Can someone explain it in a goofy pirate accent?

Windscribe, although unless you pay an extra $2/month they time out and need to be reconfigured after one week.

they’re just manipulating the DOM

Imagine trying to explain that in court. Yes, your honour, it’s a sort of object-based model representing the document. No, it’s not really a model of an object exactly. Yes, it’s made of bits and bytes, the same kind as you would use in a computer program, but it has that in common with… no, it does not actually object to anything…

Probably some kind of translation error. They must mean “privacy”.

Bear in mind that the people coming up with this stuff are not completely stupid. Completely corrupt and ignorant perhaps, but not so inept that if they write legislation that strongly encourages practically everyone to use a VPN to avoid the bullshit it isn’t a good possibility that their aim (or the aim of those manipulating them) is to generate excuses to eventually make easy-to-use commercial VPN services illegal. Obviously many of us could get around such a ban with ease, but the more difficult they make it the fewer people will do it. There are reasons why not every kid on your average street is an I2P user. What they can’t effectively ban they’ll suppress by other means.

Instead of zero as a comparison base, the report uses a pseudo count of one, concluding that the risk is 65 times higher

How delightfully nonsensical. I hope the authors were well-paid for their efforts.

I wouldn’t be willing to disable my vpn for the nyt so thanks for confirming that it wouldn’t have made a difference. It appears that they now block everyone who doesn’t let javascript freely do whatever it wants to fingerprint you or whatever. I’ll not miss them too much.

Sucks if you’re in France. For the rest of us it should be interesting to see which of these VPN providers choose to comply by geo-blocking France, which choose to cut any ties they have with France and otherwise ignore the order, and which to abandon their mission and become agents of censorship on behalf of France.

ACE sure did go downhill since they released Ace Stream.

That’s technically within your legal rights I guess, just like (depending what the fine print says) it’s within their rights to throttle all your traffic one way or another to a low speed including the stuff you actually need to go faster. The places that always have low speeds for everyone are like that because they’re designed to cater to people who don’t give a shit about what their fair share might be and just want to max out their connection. Those services are fine for torrenting, useless for everything else. Windscribe isn’t one of those but it could become one if enough of its users think like you and insist on it.

Hopefully they’ll set a soft 2TB limit or something before they do that, though.

Them calling it “unlimited” when there’s a limit is wrong, but so is using all of the available upload bandwidth 100% of the time on a cheap home VPN service when you consider the current market prices for data transfer. Mine’s limited to 2Mbps. Seems fair for $7/month or whatever it is.

Edit: Oh right it was 2Mbps. I spent 20 minutes surveying datacentre prices around the world to come up with that number, but bandwidth prices vary widely and might’ve changed by now.

Port forwarding lets you connect with other hosts peer-to-peer which a VPN would otherwise block if both sides are behind one. For torrents you’d get more peers (which doesn’t matter if you’re just downloading the latest and most popular stuff) and be able to seed more effectively.

The requirement for port forwarding narrows that down to AirVPN and Windscribe, which is an unfortunately small set of choices.

The Pirate Bay is perfectly fine for that sort of thing.

Welcome to 2014

approx $6.84USD

Huh. So definitely not worth it then. Just buy a space heater instead. When I did it a few years ago I got $500 out of it, but it cost me a $350 video card which died soon after.

I also don’t want to be running an antique OS… Just a debloated one.

This is not a Windows forum, so I feel justified in pointing out that in that case you should probably avoid Microsoft products entirely.

Since you’re already on btrfs it’s probably better to actually use the features it has to expand your existing filesystem to cover both drives.

But if you just want to mount it somewhere and not worry about figuring out anything complicated, what I did is mount my big new cheap disk at /home/bigdisk and then have symlinks pointing to it such as ~/Videos -> /home/bigdisk/Videos.