Mordikan

The problem here is that it sounds like you think torrenting traffic is using the self-hosted VPN, but that wouldn’t be true. Here is how it sounds like it is currently working: Torrent Client -> VPN interface -> Default interface -> Torrent Users You could probably confirm that with mtr/traceroutes and bmon.

The reason your internet goes done when you run your iptable statements is because you’re preventing DNS resolution which uses UDP 53 from leaving the device. Even if you are running your own DNS server on that VPS, unless you have trackers’ statically mapped, DNS recursion has to be allowed for your VPS to determine host IPs.

This is basically Reddit doing marketing. Its the Anti-“Anti-Piracy Publicity Campaign” Campaign.

As mentioned in the comments, the VPN isn’t really viable here. That being said, your DNS iptable statements don’t work for two reasons:

1. TCP 53 isn’t going to be used unless something like EDNS or zone transfers occur which is like never.
2. The first statement blocks any traffic on the output chain (leaving your network) that is destined to a remote UDP port 53. This kills your access to any off-device DNS server.

You would have to have an ACCEPT statement to allow the DNS traffic through the VPN. Something like: iptables -A OUTPUT -o tun0 -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT

If you fully make the jump to Linux, you should test from the other side with QEMU+KVM and see about spinning up a Windows VM with GPU passthrough.

These people aren’t involved though. They just signed a petition. That’s near zero effort. The majority of these people think that petition passes = new law. That’s not what the petition does. That’s a main issue I have with all of this (in addition to the other points). The EU committees have previously stated its on the member nations to legislate this, not the EU itself. After the committee on petitions looks at this, the most they can do is refer it to another committee for fact-finding. This is where it has always died for the reason just mentioned. The question I’d have for the people who sign this is: if the EU has stated it is not within their power to legislate this, why do you think after 3-4 asks that they suddenly would now have the power to legislate?

You could try something lightweight and easier like sqlite3. You don’t have to have a full blown postgres or mysql server running that way. Just have your .db file and open it with the sqlite3 command. You still would have to learn basic SQL but nothing over the top especially if its only a few columns you’re creating.

One fun thing you can do technically is store files inside the DB structure as base64 encoded values. So, you might have something like a unique ID, the name of the torrent, then the torrent itself all in one location. If nothing else, something fun to play around with.

Exactly like you said. I think this whole thing is really good intentioned, but its just not feasible. I think if people don’t want companies to do this sort of thing, they should just stop buying crap from those companies. Maybe not quite accurate, but its like crack-addicts complaining about the quality of their crack to their dealers. The dealer knows they aren’t going to stop buying crack, so why would they change anything.

Nominally it means they can force the EU parliament to bring underway legislation concering the topic

If that’s true, why have all the other Actions failed? This is like the 10th(?) time they’ve tried and the furthest they’ve gotten is the EU saying that it is up to member nations to address.

And going further with that, all you need is 1 million signatures to change EU law? There are 449 million people in the EU. That would mean that 0.22% of your population gets to dictate what laws are made for the other 448 million people. Coming from a country that is quickly becoming authoritarian and non-democratic, that seems fairly non-democratic.

deleted by creator

Do you know how? Its pretty easy to just randomly generate addresses using something like this (https://www.bestrandoms.com/random-address-in-fi). I can just VPN to Finland and enter Itätuulenkuja 92, 02100 Espoo, Finland. Its just a construction yard, but is the petition recipient going to actually check that?

How is that petition even valid? For example, as a non-EU citizen, what’s to stop me from just selecting Finland and entering bogus info? Does that mean as a US citizen I get to decide EU laws?

Additionally, from the “initiative seeks to…” part, none of that is listed on their website as goals. They don’t list any goals which is kind of problematic if you have an EU petition. Its a petition to do what specifically (show me a goal)?

EDIT: I just read through the Past Actions & Results of their site. Of the completed Actions, all of the them have failed. I then realized this petition doesn’t require EU to pass anything, only that a committee look at it. I feel like this is a really well intentioned activity that ultimately will fail due to poor execution. Even if the petition succeeds, no action has to be taken by EU member nations and historically hasn’t.

Starting line 6040 the Constants class. That isn’t bytecode, those are binary blobs that look like licensing/hardware identifiers. Given those byte arrays are named for HWID and KMS that would make sense. They also are also only being used for versioning calls for KMS4k (Key Management Service). There isn’t anything suspicious about that.

I had an issue with an old Lenovo X260 laptop. The onboard bluetooth device was showing as not being present if the wireless device was loaded. I could have one or the other, but not both. BT/Wifi was being supplied by the same M.2 card, so as soon as a module loaded (the wireless loaded first I guess) it prevented it from being used by another module. I’m not sure if there was an actual fix to that, though. I had a spare USB bluetooth dongle so I just ran that instead.

If these services want to act like an al a carte service, then their pricing needs to reflect that. If they had a plan that allowed someone to subscribe to 2-3 shows for $5 a month (but only those shows could be accessed), people would flood their platforms. The problem is the service’s greed would take hold and they’d try to find a way to ruin the experience to push people to the higher price plans. They don’t get that people don’t want 100s of janky shows to watch, they literally are only there for maybe 1 to 2 shows and that’s it.

digital piracy remains prevalent and costs the U.S. economy an estimated $29.2 billion annually

That’s based on the false assumption that if pirated materials weren’t available, people would then be forced to buy them. That’s not true, they just don’t buy them. If someone has no intention to spend money your content, you aren’t losing anything when they find it for free.

You could try using Open WebUI (https://docs.openwebui.com/) and setup ollama with smollm2:135m (https://ollama.com/library/smollm2) on the backend. Then you’d just have to pass the equation with step-by-step mentioned.

This is the argument that bothers me:

The court also identified a third argument, which the authors didn’t pursue in great detail; market dilution. Under this theory, AI models trained on copyrighted works can generate “countless works that compete with the originals, even if those works aren’t themselves infringing,” Judge Chhabria wrote.

So, even if what you make isn’t infringing on their rights, its still competing with them which should be forbidden. That whole argument is a machine shouldn’t be allowed to compete with a human. So, if I am inspired by another’s work, that’s ok, but if a machine does that we need to ban it.

Are you sure linux-firmware was the only thing uninstalled? What are those XYZ’s? you might just need to reinstall those items.

Yes and no.

A lot of privacy threads focus on fantastical what-if scenarios that just never really come up. For the majority of Internet users, the biggest threat they would face comes from the adtech sector. Now most people aren’t going to understand what is collected in realtime as that’s usually company specific and usually encoded on the site/app, but standards are all open for anyone to read. Mostly this is going to come in the form of OpenRTB 2.6 (https://iabtechlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/OpenRTB-2-6_FINAL.pdf) or the Prebid library and its User ID Module (https://docs.prebid.org/dev-docs/modules/userId.html) with maybe some custom fields and VERY granular audience mapping.

Specific to that standard, 3.2.20 Object: User and 3.2.27 Object: EID and 3.2.28 Object: UID are the important ones, but honestly all of the information can be used in conjunction with other pieces. Now if you look through that info, you’ll notice you don’t really see that much. You’re real name isn’t present. Your email isn’t present. Your physical address isn’t present (although its likely your geo location info is accurate from the device object). The thing is that so many little bread crumbs exists and so many actors are mapping those bread crumbs that once human psychology is overlaid on top of it crazy amounts of information that was not collected can be inferred. People think info like “His name is John Smith” is important when really “This is device ID EA7583CD-A667-48BC-B806-42ECB2B48606” and the numerous IDs built from that or a dozen other things is what matters.

Just from that standard with enough data/time, its possible to determine your demographic/sociographic information. One could determine who you will vote for and political leanings, how much money you make, what your job is, your sexual orientation, etc. This is great if someone is trying to sell you Tide detergent, but its also really useful if you’re wanting to start a “grassroots” campaign to add/remove rights for specific citizens. It allows you to know where you can get a foothold for your legislation (Cambridge Analytica comes to mind). And these things are all easily verifiable from your browser. Without an adblocker, go browse the internet and keep track of how many 1x1 tracking pixels get dropped on you. Checkout what’s in your cookie store and what’s sitting in sessionStorage and localStorage.

So, I think groups like r/privacy focus a lot on sci-fi inspired dystopia, when instead they could be focused on more real world dystopia.

That’s a valid reason. AirVPN is slower than Mullvad or PIA. AirVPN does fit some use cases better, like multi-port forwarding, but that’s not going to be what everybody is doing. PIA does offer port forwarding but only single port for single instance. To do multiple, you’d have to have multiple sessions running which doesn’t really work well from one machine.

So, if speed is your only criteria, don’t use AirVPN. Better options exist.