stupid_asshole69 [none/use name]

I generally point people away from both the solutions you’re asking about and the thing you’re doing.

If you are concerned about recovering from a failure then everything you’re talking about doing will make it very hard to complete using standard tools and techniques and very easy to lock yourself out of completing.

If you’re not concerned about recovering from a failure then why are you doing what you’re talking about doing?

A more functional solution for a laptop or desktop might be ext4 with dm-crypt or whatever and nightly backups. Another fix might be moving towards software that doesn’t require the capacity to reverse updates frequently.

Just speaking one hexbear to another: switching away from the operating system and ecosystem favored by the security industry and privacy conscious elite which has a well documented history of being the hardest target for law enforcement, requiring the highest bar for legal cooperation and providing methods of protecting personal data (even if that behavior isn’t the default) and yet keeping yourself on the voter rolls is something to chew on.

I been mulling over your reply and I can’t put into words what I feel but it’s similar to when a friend in recovery with a ton of trauma and long ass rap sheet was excited to get out there at the demonstration.

I can’t say what’s best for you but it makes me worry.

I’m about halfway through extreme privacy and I’m legit about to order a personal copy just so I can scribble in the margins. I’ll read your link too probably tomorrow after work.

You can always do a computer swap. Figure out what you want, like for example a dell or thinkpad with core or libreboot and swap your mac for it. That way there’s no money that changes hands. There’s a hardware list on both projects websites if you wanna windowshop on ebay.

One way to improve your privacy that people always overlook is to stop registering to vote. The rolls are basically public information, all you gotta have is a specific type of company to get access to them.

So, that has nothing to do with apple or macs. (Except a part at the end which might not be what you’re talking about)

When you use a credit card the transaction record is kept by the merchant who sells you the computer, the card processor and the card issuer (I’m probably using the wrong terms, it’s been awhile since I had to accurately talk about the precise operation of credit card payments.). So when you buy anything using a credit card, at least three entities who can be ordered to submit to law enforcement requests and are legally required to keep records of transactions actually have records of that transaction.

So when I swipe my visa to get a bag of apples at the wal mart, wal mart, their processor and my bank all have record that they’re required to keep for accounting purposes and will turn over when they get a lawful order to do so.

I don’t remember if it’s the law now, back when I was really in pos there were lots of bills trying to make it law, but it’s certainly industry practice to record serial numbers of high dollar items. The goal is to have a more precise and quick return/service process. You bought unit abcdef123456 and that means if they don’t get abcdef123456 back when you try to return it then there’s a problem.

So when I buy an ideapad at Walmart with cash they record the serial at time of sale and when I try to return a different one with my receipt there’s a serial number line that can be compared and verified.

That transaction is only stored by wal mart, but can be corroborated by my banks records where I withdrew enough money to buy a computer all at once in person because it’s more than they let me pull from an atm at one time.

I’ll go even farther:

Know your customer laws require that merchants verify and in some cases record ids of people making some purchases. So when I go to the wal mart to buy a cheap phone and a prepaid SIM card to stuff in my glovebox, they’re required to record my id for both purchases.

Now one thing that is true of apple computers and phones and that you might be referring to is that it’s super fucking difficult to remove a device from someone’s appleid without that person doing it for you. When you first use a mac or iPhone you have the chance to tie it to an iCloud account, just like you can with google accounts in android devices and Microsoft accounts on windows computers. If you do, then in order for someone else to reset the device and wipe/reinstall/take ownership of it you have to remove it from your account. Theres a wizard that guides you through the process just like in windows and android. If you never do this then the person who bought the device (or stole it, or dug it out of the trash) can’t use it.

If you lose your password then apple can verify your identity using their records (if you have their adp turned on then you just have to give em your code and make a new one when you’re done doing whatever you’re doing) and reset the password and remove devices from your account. Certified resellers/repair shops can do this too, but they’re under a lot of scrutiny when they do because Apple views them as possible cracks in the anti-theft armor.

So that means that when I dig a mac out of the trash to fix and use or sell, I have to either contact the iCloud account holder and convince them to drop the device from their profile or perform some decently tough microsoldering and reprogramming of tiny chips on the mainboard.

Of course, all that is optional. People just almost never choose not to do it because it is all upside and no downside for the owner. You as the computer owner get theft prevention, stolen device tracking and control over who can use things you bought in exchange for essentially nothing (especially if you turn on adp).

I haven’t read extreme privacy. I will as soon as I can, but I gotta ask: what are you trying to accomplish or understand? Sometimes for people who aren’t technical it’s easier to start from goals as opposed to metabolizing a bunch of literature on the topic.

No, if what you described were true it would be impossible to give someone an apple computer without getting confused for the person you gave it to.

Or to refurbish and use a mac from the trash can without being mistaken for the previous user.

I have done both with no problems.

Apple does know what you bought from them… because they sold it to you and gave you a receipt and kept a record of it to accurately account for taxes just like wal mart does when I buy a bag of apples from the produce department.

Wal mart doesn’t serialize their apples, but they do serialize their game consoles and keep track of those, so maybe that’s a better example.

I guess I gotta ask: what do you think is happening between the credit card and the serial number of the computer and how do you think it’s happening?

It depends on your goal.

If you want to prevent cops from using information about you in data brokers’ dbs, yes it’s worth your time.

If you want to keep from getting scammed or duped or have accounts open in your name then yes.

If you just feel worried then probably not, just freeze your credit with the reporting agencies and schedule a temporary unfreeze when you want to apply for something.

No matter what you decide, rotate the passwords to each account you’re worried about to a new unique one.

I’m not sneezing at it. It’s more than my use in a month, but I’m not trying to maximize my bandwidth use with 100gb of space.

Just as a thought experiment let’s assume you’re able to use the maximum amount of total bandwidth in a month with your 100gb storage. That’s 40 complete write cycles a month on your ssd.

Now there’s nuance to the idea of minimizing write cycles, the specific technology plays a big role and ssds that stay constantly powered on can avoid the worst degradation for a long time but:

That’s 480 write cycles a year.

No problem if you’re keeping the ssd always powered on, but you may end up with data loss if it’s in a laptop that gets turned off for a little bit.

That’s why I said a hard drive may be cheaper than Usenet or debrid over the course of a year. Because it’s a solution that kills a lot of birds with one stone.

You said in another comment that you have a 100gb hd and a 4tb monthly bandwidth cap?

Torrents probably aren’t the solution for you. Spend some time learning about newsgroups. It costs money but you aren’t expected to keep files after you download them or upload for everyone else.

I think realdebrid also does this but it also costs money.

You’re excluded from the informal economy because of your situation so you gotta participate in the formal economy. You could always buy a hard drive and set a bandwidth limit in your client too. I expect that would be cheaper over a year than either usenet or debrid.

You don’t know or understand what laws you may be in violation of. If you ask a lawyer they’ll advise you to stop doing crimes.

If you want to obscure your actions, switch to DoT or DoH and bind your torrent client or computer to a vpn with port forwarding. Don’t do just one. Use a paid vpn not owned by kape technologies because that umbrella company is an Israeli honeypot.

Turn off pex and dht and only use private trackers.

Lots of games do lag compensation. What you’re trying to do is get under their lag compensation wire, where they’ll do what’s possible to keep everything fair for everyone and you.

Someone already said to shoot for Singapore remote servers. That’s a good start. Make sure you have qsv or your computers equivalent of it to decode video quickly. The decoding time adds to your input lag because you can’t see the stream until it gets decoded for you.

Someone already said to look into the Chinese bizarro mobo/cpu combos built off of excess chips, prototypes and factory seconds. Bear in mind that support for these is nonexistent unless you read Chinese and sparse at best there. Bear in mind that a lot of the time the CPUs are soldered to the board so you can’t upgrade and have to be a little more careful when installing a heatsink. If you’ve been in the game long enough to pull a bare motherboard out of a dumpster and fiddle around with it until it works then the aliexpress computer pipeline might be a good one for you.

Check out the Chinese video cards too.

I have an alternative set of solutions though, and they’ve worked well so far:

Turn down the resolution. It makes a huge difference. Turn down the texture quality and post processing.

Alternately, stop playing new games. They’re so bad.

If you don’t want to turn down the music or stop listening to it, give the intel b series a look. They’re competent at 1440 and cost a fraction of what nvidia cards cost.

Mullvad didn’t pull port forwarding because of people abusing torrenting. They pulled it because interpol resorted to telling everyone to block their servers after mullvad wouldn’t/couldn’t assist in its investigation into csam sharing across forwarded ports using stuff as simple as the windows file and printer sharing system.

What caused them to pull port forwarding was the threat of being dropped from the routing table over stonewalling a police investigation into csam, not torrenting.

This is well documented and reflects the experience of many mullvad users including myself over the time period that it occurred. Saying that the decision had anything to do with torrenting is just false.

Air has worked really well for me. It’s not as straightforward to set up as some others, but it’s had better uptime than my server.

Boycotts are useful alongside militancy. The Montgomery bus boycott for example, was powerful because it gave an alternate path to resolve disputes that were playing out through marches and demonstrations that faced violent opposition.

Boycotts do not generally succeed at their aims if they are not accompanied by that militant wing.

I don’t know of any actions taken by proton that align with the ceos positions you oppose, for example: selective logging and reporting targeted at people in opposition to the trump government. I don’t know of any militant opposition or public demonstrations against those actions even if they did exist.

So I don’t think a boycott of proton would be effective at its goals even if they were explicit and achievable.

More broadly speaking, political action needs to be weighed against the negative repercussions it can bring; which is why in America, for example, lots of political demonstration tends to be younger people with less to lose.

When weighing that decision against having access to a privacy focused (if you don’t give them any identifying information) service, it may make more sense to abandon the boycott in order to get the service.

You could also just use airvpn, but it’s a little spartan and has a different feature set.

Anyway that was the whole point, that it’s easy to jump into an ineffective type of boycott that really hurts you by exposing you to prosecution and also doesn’t actually accomplish your political goals.

You can’t forward ports on mullvad. You know if that matters to you. Airvpn and proton allow port forwarding.

We are swiftly reaching a time where boycotting companies run by people you disagree with will negatively impact your ability to function. Consider abandoning this type of purchasing in the future.

Private trackers: they’re easy to get into. Ipt will probably temporarily open signups this month, mya is always open afaik and plenty of others have signups where you just have to take a test they give you the answers to. Once you’re in you just gotta maintain a ratio by seeding instead of just downloading all the time and climb the “tracker ladder” to get to the ones you want.

Mya is the one most people start with now.

On VPNs: you have to understand your own security, just like anything else. Ones like mullvad refuse to keep information about you (your login credentials are a random string of numbers and they do cash transactions similarly anonymized), and ones like proton allow you to use information that isn’t tied back to you (it’s your responsibility to make sure that information can’t be tied back to you!). It’s worth learning about them now even if you’re not in a position to pay for one because knowing will help you make good decisions when you are in that position.

If you aren’t gonna use a vpn then require encryption, disable dht and pex, use doh or dot and only use private trackers.

Require encryption, distributed hash table and peer exchange are options in your client. Requiring encryption means a mitm observation of your traffic won’t show you are doing torrenting. Turning off dht and pex prevents someone who’s not a member of your tracker jumping into the swarm and clocking users. DNS over https or tls makes requests to get the ip of a website from the url encrypted, so a mitm observer can’t even see that you went to the bad website to ostensibly do bad things. Private trackers get you out of the low hanging fruit category where enforcement is usually focused.

Of course, anyone who monitors traffic patterns will know you’re torrenting, so laws (or a change in laws or enforcement strategy) can still get you.

If you read all this way and you want to know what the solution is, it’s not i2p or tor, it’s a vpn service. I know you said you don’t want that, but it’s the solution to your problem. You figured out yourself that i2p and tor don’t suit your needs already.

Good vpns have infrastructure that makes it impossible to keep logs and will pass independent audits. They will also not have a history of turning over users data or otherwise acting badly.

I use airvpn for torrenting. It works fine as long as you’re not in Italy.

If you want to understand how a person can trust and afford a vpn, ask away. If you cannot or do not want to use a credit card, use a vpn service like mullvad or proton that accepts cash.

E: edited for a typo

That client doesn’t support it, but for your purposes, bind will do the same job.

Can you just set a bandwidth cap on your client or would your server still not have the cpu power to serve video?

What are you running this on, and are you transcoding, btw?

At least a couple of years ago, rd was looked down upon because users only share within the rd network so despite using torrent technology and maybe even torrent releases only subscribers get the benefits.

If you want an off ramp from it, private trackers are easy to get into now. They want interviews where they give you the answers first and people still fail them.

What are you torrenting and watching on?

If you’re one of those people who just leaves their computer on at home all day you can go ahead and set up the arr stack in preparation for getting that pi5 you mentioned.

No matter if you stick with rd or switch to something else: If you have a spare old computer lying around you can use that too. People will say “no, your power bill!” but the cost is almost always negligible and the hard drives you add for more storage will be the same power draw no matter what. For me, running twelve drives in an old gaming case with a 4th gen i5 comes out to a little under a buck more a month than my rpi3 in the same (not really, I couldn’t plug the sas expander and hba into it, but with the drives in a set of external enclosures) configuration. And the rpi was less stable. And less upgradable. And less powerful and less efficient as I started to use the cpu more.

A free/$20 “junk” pc starts to look a hell of a lot better in the long term when it’s competing against a platform that can only be cheaper per month at idle.

Please bear in mind that even if you were to figure out a process for torrenting without a vpn in a jurisdiction with a law against it that you don’t want to bear the repercussions of, you still need to seriously audit and understand your own security practices.

Just last week, the guy who runs the website “have I been pwned”, which hosts a searchable database of credentials that have been found in data breaches, was phished and had to add the people on his mailing list to his own websites database of people who suffered from data breaches.

This person is a security consultant to many organizations all over the world and operates one of the first resources used to figure out the breadth and depth of an individual or organizations exposure to leaks.

There are many cases just like this ripped from the headlines example.

If experts in the field cannot guarantee their own security, it follows that you cannot do so either and you may be well served by thinking critically about your own capacity to perform the research required to accomplish the task you’ve laid out for yourself.

To put it more succinctly, and I have to ask that you read the following with as much kindness, understanding and warmth as possible:

You are likely not capable of figuring this out for yourself in a way that keeps you safe from the law.

Please be careful out there and make good decisions. Not everyone on Reddit or lemmy is an expert and many people don’t have your best interests in mind.