site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4014 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 27, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What are some of the best VPN services?

I'd want plenty of speed (live in Europe if that matters), and privacy you might actually trust somewhat.

What are your goals from it, who do you want privacy from?

I'm pretty skeptical on the usefulness of VPNs. Nothing is going to be faster than your bare connection of course. If you want privacy from your parents, local ISP, employer, etc, then any of them will do. If you want privacy from your government, then use Tor from a freshly imaged disposable laptop, and then pray to God because even that probably isn't good enough.

I want to be tracked less by my ISP for torrenting purposes; tracked less by google and others in everything I do online.

I'm becoming more conscious of how thumbprinted I am everywhere by how youtube gives me video recs based on things my android phone has recorded, things said out loud by me or others. Even turning off the mic access on my phone does not stop this. It seems to record all audio at all times anyway. Not sure what to do about that.

I don't think VPNs are a great solution to any of that.

If you want less tracking from the tech majors, it's probably more effective to get adblock and/or pihole and block all traffic to them. After voluntarily switching away from their services of course. Being on a VPN while logged into their accounts and/or still allowing every website that integrates with them to send traffic to them doesn't accomplish anything. And being on a VPN while blocking all traffic to them also doesn't accomplish anything.

For torrents, I've tended to think it's better to use only private trackers locally and use remote seedboxes for any "public" torrents that might be tracked or detected. Why VPN all traffic to and from your home PC just to hide your torrents from your ISP badly (they will still know you're using a lot of upstream bandwidth in patterns typical of torrent servers, if they actually care enough to check), when for a similar price, you can set up a proper seedbox that's always online and your ISP will never know about at all?

I do stick to private trackers exclusively.

I use ublock origin, privacy badger and a couple of other Firefox privacy add-ons.

It would be difficult to fully break off from google. I use youtube every day. And discord, who send all chat data straight to google. Not to mention my expensive Android phone...

What are vpns good for?

IMO, VPNs are good for hiding your traffic and evading blocks from people or organizations that are very close to you, such as family, building, employer, ISP, etc. Still not great - it's better to avoid those types of monitored connections entirely if possible; VPN is just a workaround for when it can't be otherwise avoided. They're also good for corporate/hosting stuff - if you want to set up an intranet somewhere for a group of servers to talk to each other while blocking all outside traffic, and then access them remotely. If you don't do any of that or don't know what it is, don't worry about it.

VPNs are also very cheap to operate and very profitable to run, so lots of companies get started up to run them and spam ads and sponsorships all over the place. It's a nice feel-good talisman for people who are worried about security, but mostly doesn't help much.

Forgot to mention mobile, which is indeed a tough nut to crack to have actual privacy along with the functionality that people expect. Apple and Google both track the shit out of everything on proper devices. There are alternative de-googled Android ROMs you can load, but they're mostly not very good and painful or impossible to get most of the apps you want. Banking/finance apps, mainstream social media apps, Uber and food ordering apps, etc may refuse to run on devices that aren't fully locked down stock devices.

Ideally, we wouldn't use Youtube at all. That can be rather limiting though. Viable alternatives may include creating a new Google account just for it that you only use on devices you watch on. Not sure if you can do that on mobile though. I think there might be alternative mobile youtube apps that don't use the device's main Google account, but I haven't checked that in a while. You could also download everything you want to watch with youtube-dl and send the files around manually, but most people consider that a headache.

Similarly the best you can do with Discord is probably to limit the accounts you connect to your Discord account and the devices you use it on. I've also heard that Discord desktop and mobile apps are very spy-happy, you can limit data collection better by using the web browser version of Discord only. You might need a new account though, since they probably already know everything about your old one, and will probably remember the links even if you remove them now.

There's NewPipe for alternative Android youtubing. It works well. Can't write comments though. Not sure if there's a similar thing for PC.

I've uninstalled the discord apps on my devices.

It is pretty terrifying sometimes. At this point I've pretty much given up any real opsec because I doubt I can defend myself from the spying of major companies, let alone governments, without an inordinate amount of time studying cryptography.

Mullvad is considered the most privacy-conscious.

Looks good. Thank you. :)

I considered installing that one, and apparently one of their payment options is to mail them an envelope full of cash. Can't beat that, I guess.

I chose to send them cash in an envelope, just because I could lol. Got the correct amount of time added to my account a few days later. :) The price is very reasonable.

Hope you used gloves to handle that cash. They can take DNA from it…

With that they can deduce my biological sex (with a karyotype) and my ethnicity (with finer sequencing), but they still couldn't find my specific identity unless my DNA is already in a database somewhere (which is probably the case for people for whom this kind of security is an issue) that they have access to (less likely). Tbc, this is hypothetical, I haven't purchased their services and I probably wouldn't go to these lengths if I did.

They don’t need your DNA. They need your distant relations’ DNA. See how the police caught the Golden State Killer.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats