The internet provider on my dorm explicitly allows legal torrents

Overall the marketing is dishonest/over promises and there's some previous lack of transparency with data breaches along with being closed source. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordVPN#Criticism

There's just better options: https://thatoneprivacysite.xyz/

aside from the fact it just doesn't work on windows 10 anymore for me?

idk it also seems to not work for torrenting, one of my ISPs blocks torrent traffic when using it now

If you don't use the VPN for normal things then you leave yourself open to indentification by correlation. It's the same rule for naive Tor users. The more normal and distributed it appears in traffic, the harder it is to correlate other pieces of data they they already have access to.

We didn't start the fire....

Back in the olden days people scoffed at China fencing off the web, shutting down access to sites and whatnot. Now politicians in plenty of western countries actively talk about it like a good thing.

On top of that, the big visible VPN companies are all owned by the same one or two companies, and while they boast loudly about keeping you safe, they do fuck all for privacy. You're just paying to give your data away. There's a scarce few good private VPNs, but they also don't tend to advertise much.

Mossad says hello. So does Palantir and Penlink. They are all drinking buddies. They drink data.

Best I can do is a copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon.

I'm using Usenet , not sure what op is using though

NGL firing someone for downloading a movie seems like overkill

That's interesting, I always figured the router/OS or whatever did a decent job balancing network resources regardless of the type of application.

A better solution would just be to limit connections per client.

Spotify got its start by distributing its music files peer-to-peer as well.

Bram Cohen. He also created a crypto protocol called Chia, which is interesting. The idea was to create a green (ish) crypto that would leverage existing resources, in this case old storage drives. So it uses "proof of space" rather than "proof of work". The "plotter" (as opposed to computationally intensive GPU/CPU "mining") fills up your storage space with "plots", randomly generated data files ~100gb each. To earn crypto, it's basically a lottery against your plots. The network gives you a random hash, and if it matches one of your plot files, you get rewarded with a token. Very low power, keeps old storage out of landfill a while longer, and once those plots are initially made, they're good to go forever - they can "win" more than once, so the more energy-intensive process of plotting (though it's still nowhere near the consumption of proof-of-work, which is a disaster) has a natural upper limit of your total storage space.

The difficult bit is creating the plots, it takes hours to days to create one, depending on your write speed. I put my fastest storage on that, a specialised PCIe nvme SSD. I think I was able to bang out a plot every couple hours eventually, then I would offload it to a somewhat monstrous storage server with the maximum number of drives the motherboard would support. Others in the community created massive RAM drives. Very expensive, but super duper fast.

I plotted for a while, but cashed out when it stopped making sense economically. Eventually, the price per terabyte of storage + electricity eclipsed any significant gains. Did a lot of scavenging, haunting thrift shops, and trading up for higher storage capacity on eBay. Actually made a few grand of pure profit before the price settled down, and difficulty increased. That was the most fun I've ever had with crypto. Besides all the storage, cables and hubs, I built my "farm" solely from stuff I already had laying around. I even made a profit selling all the drives back, as this project singlehandedly pulled almost all the slack out of the used storage market. It kept a lot of equipment out of the landfill for much longer than usual, which is pretty neat.

I got into all the private trackers I'm on (4) during their open signup periods. Never had to beg for an invite. Just check from time to time.

100% of all P2P protocols, literally are blocked by our University F5 BigIP by rule.

All of them (including certain Lemmy features).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_P2P_protocols

When your IT has a small budget, you do what you need to do in order to mitigate the actions of the few.

Likely is. When a dorm resident does the torrenting, the university would be receiving those naughty letters.

It doesn't provide legal safety here in the states, you'll wanna use some kind of anonymizing service.

If, however, you plan to do lots of streaming of your torrents, it is absolutely the best way to go. I am familiar with RealDebrid, which is a similar service. Its good stuff, probably pay with cash-by-mail or cryptocurrency though.

I am under-educated on this matter. Does that mean that establishments that run torrenting trackers have to seed/peer content? If so, that is very cool for people in regions where torrenting is not punished yet.

No I meant like a tracker.

The image talks about the new one at the top.

I chose that specific wording because there must be at least a dozen of them, and I don't actually want to know the truth.