Anecdotal; but I spent 5ish years pirating via torrents from my home in Canada. Never once used a VPN and received an emailed copyright notice forwarded through my ISP about once every 3-5 days.

They never went further than that. The ISP isn’t permitted to give out my personal contact info short of a court order, and the copyright holder(s) can’t be bothered to pursue it further to get that info.

As long as you never reply to the notice; all they have is an IP, a time stamp, and a copy of the letter they sent to the ISP. They don’t know who I am to drag me to court; so first they’d have to sue the ISP for that info. Even then, tieing one specific individual to an entire IPs traffic is next to impossible. Was it the IPs subscriber? Another person in the household? A guest? Someone with unauthorised access? Too many variables/possibilities to prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ in a court of law.

Now a days however I use usenet. $12/year for an indexer, and ~$5/month for access to a usenet provider/server. Fast reliable downloads that always complete within 5min. No more waiting on slow or seedless torrents that potentially take days before giving up and trying another. This is all done though an ssl connection to a private server, so there’s nothing to snoop/get reported for.

If you have a static IP address, you can just use A records for each subdomain you want to use and not really worry about it.

If you do not have a static IP address, you may want to use one single A record, usually your base domain (example.com), then CNAME records for each of your subdomains.

A CNAME record is used to point one name at another name, in this case your base domain. This way, when your IP address changes, you only have to change the one A record and all the CNAME records will point at that new IP as well.

Example:

A example.com 1.2.3.4

CNAME sub1.example.com example.com

CNAME sub2.example.com example.com

You’d then use a tool like ACME.sh to automatically update that single A record when your IP changes.

THEN PAY WITH YOUR BLOOD!

Nobody breaks the law on my watch! I’m conficscating your stolen goods. Now pay your fine or it’s off to jail!

Pay the court a fine, or serve your sentence.

THEN PAY WITH YOUR BLOOD!!!

Not everyone can afford big guns and heavy armor; nor have the training/licensing required to cary/display them.

3D printed whistles are a cheap and easy aid. Every bit of resistance helps.

a whistle won’t stop these goons from harming you.

No it will not, but it will alert everyone around you to ICEs presence so they can have an opportunity to be somewhat prepared.

You’ll at least give your neighbours a chance to put some pants on, hide, barricade, or even arm themselves; before ICE tries to kick in their door.

It also calls others to your aid; quickly forming mob that out numbers ICE, forcing them to focus on crowd control instead of targeted kidnapping.

Back in my day, (shakes cane), Teamspeak and Ventrillo were the big voice chat platforms/tools. Both have text chat and channels/rooms; but their focus is voice chat for gaming.

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.