• 1 Post
  • 15 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 16th, 2022

help-circle




  • You know they dump logs because like I said they employ third-party contractors to come in and perform security audits that validate their privacy policy, which if you do proper research should include dumping of logs, or only minimal data retention (like how mine only required an email address) along with dumping. So you can confirm it, I guess you can still be weary of that if you’d like but it is in their best interest to make sure you are actually safe, otherwise that is a hit on their reputation.

    As for what happened after receiving a DMCA, they tell you that you have so many strikes on your account and that if you violate that a certain amount of times within a time period, then they will terminate your service. The ISP is not the person who would be pursuing you, their only liability is that you don’t do illegal things on their network.

    But again, all these steps beyond just a VPN are to ensure there is as little identifying information as possible so they can’t track you down. Unless you are a literal Scene person who is doing the actual dumping and uploading of content, no one is out here watching you unless you leave easily identifiable information public while torrenting, at least this has been my experience after torrenting probably 100s of TBs of data both via seeding and leeching.



  • Are you just looking for a place to install apps?

    Aurora Store is an open source alternative store front for Google Play. It anonimizes info using dummy Google accounts so that way you have some anonimity when acquiring apps.

    Another alternative would be F-Droid which is a FOSS app store. From there you are opened up to a lot of open source apps you wouldn’t normally find.

    You can also go to any site that hosts APKs (since that is all that is happening when you install an app, you’re installing the APK file), but those are kinda sketchy sometimes and no real way to confirm stuff. Or you can go to whatever Git repo that the app has maybe like GitHub and see the “releases” section.

    Hope that helps!


  • Sorry but this just isn’t really correct and assumes the ISP puts in a lot of work to track people down.

    They are not the ones enforcing DMCAs from illegal content. That is performed by cybersecurity companies that crawl through IPs in seed swarms and then report that automatically to the ISP if it registered within their IP range. This is a page from one of those companies advertising this service. You can see the report that Comcast gives out and it sites who reported the violation.

    Also, yes a lot of VPNs do actually remove logs. Can’t report to authorities what you do not have, although some areas do have retention logs which is why you should be using a VPN service that hosts a server in a country that doesn’t care about that (I point mine to Canada depending on ping and that works for me). Lots of VPN services have third-party audits to confirm their privacy statements, and I utilize one that has no information on me besides the email I signed up with (and could use cash/crypto payments if I would like for extra anonymity).

    Also, there are sites that check for IP leaks like this one which can confirm you are showing only the VPN IP address. As for the port issue, they also allow for port forwarding on a lot of VPN servers so you don’t need to be utilizing any ports directly to your connection, only to the server and then gets forwarded to a WireGuard port to finalize the connection.

    I have torrented absolutely astounding amounts of data with my VPN active and have had zero issues. Then, the moment I accidentally disable the VPN for one reason or another and keep my torrents active, I received a DMCA for two torrents I was running at nearly the exact time I disabled my VPN connection.





  • I would also love to check out the new PineTab since the first one was tempting but at this point seems a little dated.

    I hopped on the new PineBuds as soon as they released, and we all know the shipping costs for Pine products is a bitch so I obviously had to get a second PineTime watch to make it worth it :)

    Want to say the PineBuds are amazing! In-box eartips are a bit questionable with how round they are but they perform amazing and the ANC as well as passthrough mode are both impressive for only $70!