Once the company goes out of business (or they focus on a different business) they tell you to get your tires or they will be discarded if you don’t. So you have to get them from them and you stop paying for the storage.

That’s where there’s no analogy for media purchased through streaming services. When streaming services withdraw content, the analogy would be the tire shop sending you an email saying “Just so you know, we’re burning your tires next week. No, you can’t come and get them.”

If the backup HDD was the only copy, it was an archive and not a backup, and you also need backups of the archive.

The only difference between Steam and the streaming companies is that Steam seems to have managed to create a lasting profitable business. If this changed and Steam faced more challenges, they’d put the screws on the users just like the TV and music services do.

My understanding is that if you change the contents of a torrent you’d have to create a new torrent to seed the result. You can’t change the contents of a torrent and expect other people to receive the modified files via the original torrent. Your client will be doing a checksum and realizing its local files are corrupt (due to your changes) so replacing them with good copies.

So create a new torrent with the modified files and an explanatory title, and seed that.

It’s not my post so you’d have to ask OP to do that.

https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor

Perhaps the main differences are:

• Unidirectional tunnels instead of bidirectional circuits
• Fully distributed and self organizing
• Packet switched instead of circuit switched
• Tunnels in I2P are short lived
• i2p puts an emphasis on communicating within the network, whereas Tor puts more emphasis on communicating via the network to outside

Together these provide some additional resilience and protection against traffic analysis compared to Tor, arguably improving security.

https://geti2p.net/en/

OPNsense is excellent. You can run it on a cheap mini PC with multiple Ethernet ports and it makes a great router. I run several VLANs through it.

Edit: It’s based on FreeBSD, not Linux, in case that matters to you.

It doesn’t sound like a particularly bad breach but they didn’t disclose it very quickly, which never works in a company’s favor. I use Nord VPN still. I tried Mullvad for a while and it was good, but I found Nord did a better job at getting around geoblocks, and was cheaper. I use Mullvad’s browser with it though.

The N100 has a reputation for decent performance and good power efficiency at a cheap price. It’s a basic quad core CPU with only efficiency cores (no performance cores) and no hyperthreading, but it comes with modern codec capabilities. It will certainly give you more power than a Raspberry Pi for everyday tasks, but don’t expect to do anything too demanding with it. If your needs are basic an N100 mini PC seems like a good option.

I just found the general combination of security - mindedness and cheap Chinese hardware curious / amusing.

I think it can make sense, since there are so often vulnerabilities in consumer router firmware, and because those devices are so common the vulnerabilities are profitable to exploit. Running a BSD-based router on a cheap Chinese PC is likely to be better security for the router’s OS and software itself, even if you don’t know for sure about the firmware on the board (which you don’t with consumer routers either, really). Overall you could still have reduced your attack surface compared to a popular consumer router.

I use one with 6 LAN ports and a fanless 10th gen i5 running OPNsense, and it has worked well for years. It runs many services including Unbound DNS and Suricata with capacity to spare. It’s much better than any consumer router, though I run WiFi separately with an Asus AI Mesh set to AP mode.

The only concerns are that you don’t get BIOS updates, and you don’t know for sure that there’s nothing nasty in the firmware. But then you don’t really know that on consumer routers either.

It’s not easy to gain entry to another “better” country for most people. You tend to need money, connections, or specialist skills. When people say “well, then I’ll just move to another country” they may be unaware of this.

They should sue Alan Turing and John von Neumann.

Why? Can you elaborate?

Discovery was always the thing that made streaming services better than buying recordings individually. If these services stop being good for finding new music, then there’s not much reason to keep using them.

I think they have always done that, but maybe they’re just doing more of that now. It seems harder now to find interesting artists I don’t know.

I find the same thing with music streaming on Spotify. I used to discover lots of new music I liked on it but these days I can’t get it to generate an interesting playlist. It’s songs I already know interspersed with things that are boring. Seems like the recommendations got worse.

IMDb gives recommendations based on your ratings for things you’ve seen.

Firefox Focus on Android - just keep deleting history.