I still recommend it. I’m not fully happy with the situation but for now I consider it my best option.

1. I consider Chromium-based browsers out of the question as they give too much power to Google. This is already showing to be a problem with new APIs and “features” that Google is pushing into the web platform and the bigger the market share gets the more control they have.
2. Web browsers are the biggest attack surface that most people have. Displaying untrusted webpages and running untrusted code is incredibly difficult and vulnerabilities are regularly discovered. I don’t yet know a Firefox fork that I trust enough to reliably respond to security vulnerabilities quickly and correctly.

So for now I am staying with raw Firefox. Not to mention that as a disto-built Firefox I have some insulation from Mozilla’s ToS. But I am very much considering some of the forks, especially the ones that are very light with patches and are mostly configuration tweaks.

Wine will mount your root folder as a Windows drive by default. So if the malware is scanning all connected drives and encrypting/uploading them you still have a problem.

Oops, I linked the wrong one and got fooled because the most recent post is actually open again.

!opensignups@lemmy.ml is more active. (Although not bustling either)

!opensignups@lemmy.world is active enough.

Yeah, public trackers definitely raise your chance of a notice by at least an order of magnitude. New content also tends to be more noisy than old content. I also found a drop by selecting “require encryption” although I can’t imagine why it would help (IIUC most of these scanners just connect to everyone in the swarm, not sniff random internet traffic.

I’ve been using nginx forever. It works, I can do almost everything I want, even if more complex things sometimes require some contortions. I’m not sure I would pick it again if starting from scratch, but I have no problems that are worth switching for.

The most likely situation is that the torrent isn’t good. I would also force a recheck of the torrent to double-check that the files on your disk haven’t been corrupted. But if that file is still saying “0 B” remaining (don’t just look at 100% as it may be rounded) after the recheck then I would bet pretty good money on a broken torrent. If this is a public tracker it is fairly common.

However even if it is broken you may be able to play by using a different players. Different apps can skip over different forms of corruption, so you may get lucky.

If you don’t need to watch Jeopardy live it is pretty readily available via torrents. Probably in better quality and without ads.

Sports are much harder to find. There are trackers but they are much harder to get into and I can’t attest to the completeness (I’m not really into sports) and watching it live is probably more relevant.

The main issue is accepting incoming connections. When you are behind a NAT (as most VPNs are for IPv4) you need some solution (such as port-forwarding) to make your torrent client connectable. This causes a number of issues when torrenting.

1. When someone starts a download they will try to connect to the seeders. If the seeders are not connectable this will fail.
2. As a fallback when the seeders notice the leachers they will try to connect to them. If the leacher also isn’t connectable this will also fail.

If neither party is connectable the download can’t happen, so you may fail to get content that you want.

This is extra relevant if you are on private trackers where seeding is tracked, has direct value and is competitive. If you are not connectable every new downloader will immediately connect to the connectable seeders and finish the download before your client even knows that they exist. (reannounces for seeders can be very infrequent, such as hourly, so it will take an average of 30min for you to notice a new seeder and try to connect to them). This makes it very difficult to acquire much upload unless there are very few other seeders.

NAT is evil, all hail IPv6.

It would be nice if there was a shortcut to go “back to previous site”. Because on one hand using back to navigate around map moves is often very convenient, but sometimes I want to go to the site before the map. Having a two-level history with page and site would be super useful.

#1 items should be backups. (Well maybe #2 so that you have something to back up, but don’t delete the source data until the backups are running.)

You need offsite backups, and ideally multiple locations.

Closed-source software that sends home tons of information about your system without consent. All communication accessible to a VC funded company that has huge pressure to make as much money as possible.

I’ve been doing this from Firefox forever…

But “with audio” is actually a new feature. Previously I was manually sending the audio through my voice channel which worked pretty well but it would be nice to have a separate stream for the streaming audio.

Probably not enough for me to install the spyware though, I’ll keep using Discord via Firefox.

Yeah, the music industry gets it and nearly everyone happily pays for Spotify as a result. Spotify is slowly enshitifying but it is still fairly convenient and has most things you would want to listen to.

I was on this train. I paid for Netflix for a handful of years. Really my only complaint is that I couldn’t share screenshots because of the DRM (you don’t want free advertising?). But then the selection went downhill, new seasons of shows I was watching started appearing on other services. The UI got worse and slow. I eventually started getting pissed off and was wondering why I was paying for a frustrating service.

I had a very similar arc for YouTube Premium a few years after that one, I must have been a subscriber for 5 years at least. But then it got worse and worse.

I don’t think this is a major “this is why people pirate”. Pirate sites also regularly get cracked (possibly more often the the average streaming service). It isn’t like bank details were leaked here so the only real difference is that in some pirate sites you don’t need a login at all.

Ah great, so a messenger run by a data hoarding giant that resists usage of anything but the proprietary non-free client.

IDK, what else do they use? Email has to be the least bad option. At least with email you can choose your provider (or be your own).

Yeah, I don’t think there are many benefits when keeping the key on the same drive. Other than a bit of obfuscation. It does still help with erasing, as you can wipe the keyslots (rendering the key useless) but with modern storage media deletion is fairly hard to ensure. But still better than unencrypted.

IMHO Arch is actually a great choice. They do have a minimum update frequency you need to maintain (I don’t recall exactly, I think it is somewhere between 1 and 3 months) but if you do, and read the news before updates (and you are usually fine if you don’t, usually the update will just refuse to run until you intervene) things are pretty seamless. I had many arch machines running for >5 years with no issues and no reason to expect that it would change. This is many major version updates for other distros which are often not as seamless.

That being said I am on NixOS now which takes this to the next level, I am running nixos-unstable but thanks to the way NixOS is structured I don’t need to worry about any legacy cruft accumulating from the many years of updates.

And after all of that I don’t think it really matters. I think any major distro you pick, weather stable, release-based or LTS will be fine. They all have some sort of update path these days. (unlike in the past where some distros just recommended a re-install for major updates).