6’4" 430lbs

Your ISP could snitch on you for tons of ‘illegal’ traffic, but they don’t because that would require deep packet inspection on an absurd amount of traffic and they gain nothing for it. Instead they pass on notices when they receive them from third parties, and take enforcement actions (like cutting off their service to you) only when they’re directed to. They want your money after all.

Torrenting for example; only gets flagged when copyright holders join torrent trackers, then send letters to ISPs that control the IPs found in those groups. That’s not the ISP hunting you down, they’re just passing on a legal notice they’ve been given and thus are obligated to pass it to you.

From and ISPs perspective; a VPN connection doesn’t look any different than any other TLS connection, ie https. There’s nothing for them to snitch because a) they can’t tell the difference without significant investment to capture and perform deep analysis on traffic at an absurd scale and b) they have no desire to even look and then snitch on customers, that just costs them paying customers.

The ONLY reason this can be enforced at all, is because comercial VPN companies want to advertise and sell their services to customers; so lawmakers can directly view and monitor those services.

Lawmakers have no way of even knowing about, let alone inspecting an individuals private VPN that’s either running from private systems or from a foreign VPS.

All that’s not even touching things like SSH tunneling - in a sense, creating a VPN from an SSH connection; one of the most ubiquitous protocols for controlling server infrastructure around the globe. Even if traffic was inspected to find SSH connections, you CAN’T block this or you disrupt IT infrastructure at such an alarming scale there’d be riots.

So rent a VPS abroad and run your own VPN from it. Comercial VPNs have a business to maintain so they’ve got to comply to keep operating and public advertising, but a privately run VPN just for yourself is just another TLS connection in a sea of other traffic.

The phrasing in your previous comment comes across very rude to someone that’s just trying to provide a solution for you. There’s better ways to ask for clarification.

I apologize if hostility was not your intention; but, food for thought.

Yup, and if you opened the webpage within a VM, you could easily screenshot it without the DRM blacking it out for you.

You’re in a piracy community asking for tips on pirating content. If you’re going to be an asshole when they’re given to you; you’re welcome to fuck off somewhere else.

A lot of DRMed content that prevents screen recording can be played within a VM, with the host recording the display output window.

Or so I’ve heard…

Given the way everything else is successfully disabled; something tells me they either did that and it’s just not working properly for Edge, or that flag got reset by some MS update that nobody asked for and it’s just not been noticed by IT yet.

Mhm. Shit people don’t want continues to be integrated into required system applications so you cannot remove/avoid it.

Seen it comming since the integration of Edge into Windows and how it’s forcibly re-installed everytime you try to remove it. Hell; even the corporate work PCs I use, which lock you out of every non-corporate supplied application such as wordpad, calculator and even the ability to see (not even modify, just view) the desktop background: failed to disable Edge (their default is Chrome). You can right click files > open with > Edge (none of the other applications listed work in any other circumstances, just edge and chrome).

Windows is dead.

Nice solid non-cable bike lock. Preferably a large hardened steel u-bolt lock.

I’ve been a big fan of Kryptonites New York Lock as well as their Kryptolok. Both have really nice mounts to attach the lock to the bike when not in use and the kryptolok comes with a robust cable that makes locking up the wheels easier. (do not use the cable to secure the main bike)

Using them correctly is important as well. Lots of people lock one of the wheels and not the frame. You’ve got to lock the frame itself to a solid object that it can’t be slid off of and optionally lock the wheels to the frame using a cable or chain.

I’d definitely consider a pyramid scam to be evil…

yt-dlp

I don’t know why I avoided this for so long and stuck to whatever the first search result for ‘online youtube downloader’ was; but it’s been much nicer having a consistent and versatile tool at the ready.

Perfectly happy to pay artists for their work; entirely unwilling to pay the scum that aggregate and charge for access to that art, with countless strings attached.

Bit old, but pretty much everything Source Engine is self-hostable isn’t it? Most of them even come with a pre-configured SRCDS (SouRCe Dedicated Server) you can download and run right from the steam launcher.

I know I ran a GarrysMod server for quite a while; piling a shit ton of mods on it. Plus any source game you’ve got installed, Garrys Mod can and will use the resources/assets from.

:/ shit.

I’m pretty sure I saw this a few months ago and moved to the beatkind/watchtower fork, but it’s not been updated in 6mo either. (Devs only been active in private repos; so they’re still around, just not actively working on watchtower)

Guess I’ll find another solution. Hell, I might just put my own script on crontab. Looping through folders running docker compose down/pull/up isn’t too hard really.

Setting their management interfaces to be accessed via https because the VPN blocks (after snooping on) http only access would be my guess

No. I’m talking about measuring the time in-between inputs being received over the remote connection. Purely observation from the receiver side of the connection.

Network overhead + dropped and re-sent packets, introducing unusual lag in between commands/keystrokes.

A key being pressed and key being released are two separate events that get transmitted separately and usually happen pretty close together. That gap getting larger, due to the long-distance connection introducing lag, could be what they were looking at.

Perhaps something like time between key pressed and key released being abnormally high? Or erratic mouse movement?

I know whenever a PC I’m using is being remotely controlled, the mouse jerks around instead of moving smoothly around the screen. I’d imagine that gets even worse with ping/more layers of remote connections.

My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.

Set static IPs for her devices, then whitelist that device IP past the block lists by adding it to a group, then regex allow domain: ‘*’ for that group.

A bit of redundancy is key.

I have my primary DNS, pihole, running on an RPI that’s dedicated to it; as well as a second backup version running in a docker container on my main server machine.

Nebula-Sync keeps the two synchronized with eachother, so if a change is made on one, it automatically syncs to the other. (things like local dns records or changes to blocklists).

If either one goes down (dead sd cards, me playing with things, power surges, whatever); the other picks up the slack until I fix the broken one, which is usually little more than re-install, then manually sync them using piholes ‘teleporter’ settings. Worse case, restore a backup (That you’re definitely taking. Regularly. Right?)

Both piholes use Cloudflared (here’s their guide *edit: I see I’ll have to find a new method for this… Just going to pin the containers to tag ‘2025.11.1’ for now) to translate ALL dns traffic into DOH traffic, encrypting it and using the provider of my choice, instead of my ISP or any other plain DNS. The router hands out both local DNS IPs with DHCP because Port 53 outbound (regular dns) is blocked at the router, so all LAN devices MUST use the local DNS or their own DOH config. Plain DNS won’t make it out.

DNS adblocking isn’t perfect, but it’s a really nice tool to have. Then having an internal DNS to resolve names for local-only services is super handy. Most of my subdomains are only used internally, so pihole handles those DNS records, while external DNS only has the records for publicly accessible things.

I have the same issue with Immich on android. It pretty much never uploads files until I manually open the app; then the app refuses to acknowledge it has uploaded those new files until it’s closed and re-opened :( (power saving is set to un-restricted in android, and background data usage is allowed. I’ve been through troubleshooting very thoroughly, it just doesn’t work)

FolderSync has been the only reliable (non-root) backup solution I’ve used. It’s set to monitor my image folders for changes and upload any new files as soon as they’re created; this works ~85% of the time. Then, It’s also set with a few schedules to check for changes every 3hrs, backing up everything on the phone the app can access; this catches anything the on-change/on-creation file detection misses, while also backing up more data than just my images. I have yet to see that fail after ~3 years.