Em Adespoton

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • As someone who pre-dates the public Internet and spent a lot of time dialling in to BBSes when most people thought personal computers were for nerds…

    The Internet will fracture, but not break down. What would happen is balkanization of the Internet, with physical areas running their own networks, and a bunch of poor “dark” areas. Some of those networks would likely have low bandwidth interconnections, such that digest data could still spread, much like the early days of usenet and fidonet.

    Local culture and tribalism would increase, and information would skyrocket in value. The rich would still have access to, and control, the information. The poor would be left out completely.



  • Agreed; after using various running and other gloves, I settled on a set of work gloves that are thin nylon weave on the back and dipped in nitrile on the front, similar to gardening gloves.

    They let the steam out while keeping my hands from getting too cold in -10 weather, AND I can use my phone with them on (although I don’t recommend doing that below freezing).

    I do 3 hour trail runs through the winter and they’ve worked better than my running gloves or my merino wool cutoffs. And they’re $3 a pair.




  • One part of this is history.

    Canada and the US were British colonies; Mexico was a Spanish colony.

    When some of the British colonies declared independence, they still had to trade with the colonies that hadn’t. People had relatives on both sides, the postal systems were integrated, indigenous people were mistreated in the same manner, and the list goes on. Culturally, the two remained very similar while the political systems differed.

    Stuff coming from England often ended up in Toronto or New York; both of these cities became hubs of publication.

    This is the way the relationship stayed pretty much up until NAFTA in the 1990s; books had already had over a century of being published in Toronto and New York for distribution across English North America.

    Mexico had a different history, and a different relationship with California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Instead of Mexico being a route for culture and European goods to enter the US, it was a source of cheap labor once slavery was abolished.

    Unlike Canada where the most influential Canadians lived right along the border, in Mexico the influential Mexicans lived further south, with itinerant workers living along the border.

    NAFTA changed the balance of trade somewhat, but it didn’t change the already established cultural norms or the places people lived.


  • One clarification: carrier towers can still find a phone; GPS is passive; your phone locates itself in relation to the GPS satellites.

    Most phones are also broadcasting WiFi MAC IDs and Bluetooth MACs, plus hardware and capability strings over Bluetooth. And then any apps you’ve got loaded may also be calling home with your location unless you have that disabled and rotate your ad ID regularly.

    [edit] also worth pointing out that even if you turn a smartphone “off” it still pings the local cell towers with its IMEI regularly. Surprised me the first time I witnessed that.








  • It’s about the traffic shape and size; the packets are all encrypted, but unless you’re filling the gaps with random noise, there’s a pattern to the randomness, in terms of packet size and density, and to the shape of the traffic volume over time.

    If you’re streaming video AND torrenting at the same time, that will cover up some of the torrent fingerprints, but not all.

    And if someone has the fingerprint of a torrent from a non-VPN source, they can pretty reliably figure out exactly which torrent you’re connected to. Pretty much nobody goes to that level of analysis for a random person though; they’d have to already have some reason to be watching your network traffic AND find it worthwhile.


  • Torrenting means you’re sending copies of the files to anyone with a magnet link. Great for quickly sharing legitimate software with a wide group. If you’re trying to download stuff you don’t have a license for, torrenting is a bad solution. Better to find a small community where you can just share files directly, peer to peer or on a private server.

    Torrenting has a very obvious digital fingerprint, so even if you’re using a VPN, your ISP knows you’re torrenting. And if your VPN provider gets served with a notice and their country is a member of any international trade agreement, they know who you are and have a responsibility to take action against you.


  • I keep all my traffic encrypted, use my own DNS, and run a VPN so that anytime I’m away from my place, my traffic is tunnelled through my home setup, which includes a piHole.

    If I need more than that to obscure the traffic source, it goes through TOR.

    I also run a few public web services off the same IP, so the traffic coming out of my address has plausible deniability.

    Plus, I use tracker and ad blockers in all my browsers/devices, of course, as well as block JavaScript by default.


  • Generally, it’s best to go by capability, not by policy.

    Any company has to do what the government of its country says. This goes both for the VPN company, AND any exit node country. So you have to always assume that whatever country your exit node is in has full access to the data exiting the VPN there.

    Then there’s the technology being used, the expertise with which it is configured, and finally the policies in place for handling and storing your PII.

    Mullvad has a strong record on all accounts, even as far as just giving a year’s notice that it will stop supporting OpenVPN.

    AirVPN has virtually no track record, fewer details on hardware, configuration, expertise and PII handling, and it’s in the EU, so has to comply with EU laws as well as Italian laws.

    Being in the EU means it has to comply with the GDPR, which does have its benefits. But it also means an EU member state could put a gag order on your account and be monitoring all your data without you ever knowing.

    So it all comes down to who you want your data to be private from and why.

    Personally, I avoid all public VPN services as much as possible, and assume that the only thing they’re really doing is tricking the next service in the hop as to what country I’m connecting from.