Showing my age here, but my similar story was in #warezart on ethernet (IRC). We had a pretty tight group of regulars. I spent nearly every day there for over 5 years starting in 1995.

It was unusual then that we were from all over. We had a mod in New Zealand, some euros, a bunch of americans from all over and a handful of canadians. But hanging out like we were in each other’s living rooms.

A bunch of us actually met up in person at the Siggraph trade show once and even made matching tshirts. lol.

except for that one guy and his son

Or be even more productive and go…

“STAND UP AND GET OFF THE FUCKIN RAIL AND GO LIVE YOUR LIFE!!!”

lol… I get that ;]

I’d probably stick with it as well. My current view is that VPN mostly just provides a cover for general piracy. If “they” wanted to devote the effort they could figure out who I was. But I am sure a lot of vpns serve as honey pots and you wouldn’t want to blow your cover just for someone downloading a movie they never would have paid for anyway. They got the signature thing, but if I was doing something serious then that is going to be quite different than my general use signature and match every other user of Tails or whatever. The signature thing really sucks, but we do have control over what signatures we leave where and via vpns and tor those different “personas” don’t need to be connected by singular ip address.

Or at least that is my present opinion. If anyone here has a good argument against it, I’d like to hear it.

Yep. Learning anything new or even just changing habits takes effort, time and mostly a sense of responsibility for yourself. A lot of the non-mainstream things we do in pursuit of privacy really aren’t much more complicated than their mainstream counterparts.

Thanks for rubbing it in… and failing to mention what service you use.

It can, but it isn’t likely as specific as an ip is.

My view is that security/privacy is a sliding rule and that every little effort helps.

It isn’t just Mullvad. I’m sure it is also AirVPN and I presume that it includes all of the popular ones. I doubt port forwarding has anything to do with it.