People read this stuff, get mislead, and get fucked up for the crime of wanting to watch a film from 60 years ago.

Using a condom doesn’t require trusting a third party to keep you out of gaol, and has lots of regulatory industry around it guaranteeing quality.

VPN companies are not ideological projects, they are businesses bound by the laws in the countries they operate in optimising for profit. They will abuse your trust if it makes them money or frees them from criminal liability.

Assuming the government defs doesn’t care and wont cooperate with lawsuits.

Yes and no. Knowing your IP is sort of like knowing a PO box you rent. It can be used to try and transmit stuff to you, it can also be crudely geolocated, or if the person you’re buying it from gives you up it can be traced directly to you as a person.

If someone wanted to, and you had terrible safety practices (such as opening mail you aren’t expecting, the digital equivalent would be having software listening to ports) they could send you something harmful but this is probably not very likely unless you are pissing powerful people off (e.g. you’re using that IP to distribute anti mossad documentaries or something :P). Your biggest threat is that somebody finds out who you are by going to your ISP and making them give you up.

If you are confident that this is very high effort and you are a small fish it’s not much of a risk.

If you actually need privacy you should use something like tor, or a box which you have access to that can’t or wont be traced to you (e.g. you have access to someone else’s by covert means, you bought a server with cash in the mail, you bought a server in a nation that will never cooperate with the nation you’re antagonising) which you tunnel to and use as a proxy.

A VPN is not necessarily very secure and doesn’t mitigate the most serious threats like phone home programs that will ID you over the clearnet later. Trusting a VPN is extremely dicey and should absolutely not be relied upon to keep you out of gaol. It’s better than nothing, but shouldn’t be over emphasised.

whimper was a dovecot and postfix machine. Email isn’t very fun

I don’t have many now, just minstrel (it plays music) but previously they’ve always just be sounds. Rawr, groan, whimper, bark, moan, growl etc.

Except minstrel (it plays music) :p

Sure but it’s not like networks get anything from piracy so they have to content themselves with some rather than infinity. Especially for old content, it’s just not worth much individually. There’s also a looooot of massively overpaid and wasteful people involved in the major networks.

I know it’s not just Netflix but you know, poetic licence or something. also I don’t really give a shit about being fair to multibillion dollar corporations that do basically nothing pro social :p

Netflix Buddy, friend, matey. If I have to pop open Google to find where I can watch something, find the best offers on pricing, and how to circumvent ads or whatever, or how to get Netflix to run on my devices without installing invasive crap or derooting my phone etc, and it’s actually quite expensive.

I’ll just do one search and not worry about whether I’ll have to fight ads, or automatic iffy quality settings, weird compression algorithms, device compatibility etc.

I was happy to hang up the peg leg when I could just VPN to usa and watch everything for the price of a lunch a month. I like simplicity, I enjoyed your more arty shows. It was you who changed the deal Netflix, not I. you decided being insanely profitable wasn’t enough and you needed infinite growth.