For those who want to know more about Piracy Shield and have a laugh at its ridiculousness (and danger), I enjoyed Max Stucchi presentation at https://ripe89.ripe.net/archives/video/1496/

“Blocking and Censoring the Italian Internet for Football Reasons”

1337x is my favorite. Look for efficient encodes like HEVC or AV1 for a better quality/size ratio (and ideally AAC or opus for audio). It’s usually in the torrent name as well as the resolution, source, etc.

They are usually separate things. Cookies are produced/saved locally, to be read in the next visit (by the same website or maany websites basically forever unless you use firefox containers or at least clear them once in a while). There’s also local storage which is different but can also be used to identify you across the web. Ads, trackers, all of these categories are often made of many small components: you read a single article on a “modern” newspaper website, hundreds of connection are being made, different tiny scripts or icons or images are being downloaded (usually from different subdomains for different purposes but there’s no hard rule). It’s possible to block one thing and not another. For example I can block Google Analytics (googletagmanager) which is a tracker, but accept all of Google’s cookies.

I don’t use a VPN but still had to assign a port interval or something to Soulseek from the router; other software maybe picks a more sensible (lower) port number?

You gotta pump those numbers up 🤓 holy sheet 16TiB is actually more dl than I remembered…this is from a 2TB ssd :) in a couple of years

Most people give their real full name, phone number and email for any loyalty card wothout batting an eye, plus even with anonymized data it’s useful to the owners to track correlation of purchases, time, location. Definitively what you said too, we all make mistakes (some more than others), every needless complication of a system is a disadvantage to the customer.

There are free services that allow you to create countless emails, one per site is ideal, just like one (different) password per site. Addy and Simplelogin have a generous free tier, last I checked the first one allows for unlimited receive-only addresses (when shopping it’s very rare you need to respond), the second gives you some two-way addresses.

If you get a domain, many registrars include free mail service, and have mail forwarding, or “redirecting”, which basically will allow you to create countless addresses (that can also send/respond) for your one account (You add these “email forwards”, or “Identities”, to your app of choice, like K9-Mail for android). You don’t necessarily need to buy their separate email package (although the interface might be more convenient). I’ll give you one example which includes email: OVHcloud, one of the largest clouds in europe.

If you can afford it there are all-in-one services like Soverin with easier interface.

It might be wise to start a slow process of migrating (or maybe deleting and creating again) accounts, and saving all this stuff in a password manager (like KeepassXC) if you aren’t already.

Yep. Loads of unorganized (and some organized) files uploaded over decades via FTP 😅 a mess full of gems

Apparently the issues are mostly with the outgoing download links from libgen.rs and .st (passing through libgen.lol), including the IPFS links which were being problematic in the past few months already.

Instead I just tried something from libgen.gs which is the one for comicbooks, and it’s downloading fine from the direct link.

Thankfully most if not all content should be backed up on Annas-archive!

There are many encodes floating around and even a full bluray copy (criterion collection) on ygg.re… but I’m curious, how come it’s at the top of your list?

I would disable Network Access at least, if you’ve never done it go to App Info (holding the app’s icon) -> Mobile Data Usage -> Allow Network Access (at least it’s there now in A14 / LOS 21, could be slightly different in other versions)

croc is great, works even when devices cant find each other on the network, or with gigantic folders (I use it between computers).

Or Simplex chat, I dont use it to chat but only to quickly share between phone and laptop :)

Hi there, it looks like Journeys is considered the 23rd season of Pokemon (wikipedia says so too), I found it on TMDB: https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/60572/season/23

A lazy option to set up a player (what I do a t least), is installing via flatpak Jellyfin Media Player. For android, installing from F-droid.

Other than cleaning the vents, I would also see if any problem come up with a few passes of Memtest, and with a linux live system (I suggest Ventoy if you don’t have one ready, you install it once on a usb pen drive and from there on you only drag and drop the .iso files)

From a quick look on wikipedia, looks like AC3 does not support VBR. That is enough to make AAC twice as good at least, especially since movies have a lot of silence in them, so your ratio of 1:2 equivalence seems right to me

Sorry I edited my other reply heavily because I noticed later that you were interested in some exact bitrate numbers… I don’t know enough about AC3 to know an equivalent number, all I can say is those numbers I’ve written for opus and AAC are in my experience enough to enjoy any movie.

Hi Zedstrain If compressing, why not opus? AAC is almost as good but you have to make sure you’re using a good encoder, and its licensing is not as open.

Anyway I found this table, next to “Music Storage”, it shows the suggested bitrate values depending on the number of audio channels, from 96 to 450. Should applicable to movies, and to AAC (maybe adding 10% bitrate?).

For movies I’d use these values personally:

2 channels: kbps 128 (150 AAC)

6 (5.1): 196 (224 AAC)

8 (7.1): 256 (300 AAC)

Flatpak (and flathub.org) has been a lifesaver for this, I use Ungoogled Chromium. Of course only for the few broken shitty websites that I’m forced to use

where put bag tho?