ISP around me had policies like “we can provide Usenet except for the binaries trees”

Gen X here. I agree torrents are for legit uses only

Usenet is the best for piracy

If the password hashes aren’t salted they can be cracked with a rainbow table - every password up to (whatever length the rainbow tables go up to now - 10 chars?) is easily cracked in seconds

I expect Internet archive salts their password hashes.

It doesn’t matter if the salting method is known, all salting methods are known and it’s easy to see what salt a password is hashed with as you need to know so you can hash a received password the same way for validation

The real advice is to use a password manager to generate random passwords and store them for you, so no two passwords are the same, and the only password you need to remember is the one to unlock the password manager

I use keePass as it’s open source and available on all operating systems. Also you can move the camel case in your head to make it keepAss.

I have felt vertigo in high places in regular 3D games like Minecraft. I have to sit for VR Ghost Busters

I can’t imagine how immersed I’ll be in more immersive VR

You can keep secrets from the future. Future decryption won’t help government see what you did in the now, the logs don’t store the encrypted payload, only the end points and the user/ip

Your ISP sees the connection to news.usenetserver.com and if they cared could get a court order to get your data from them. They can compel you to release your username and password.

You also need to protect yourself against future law and enforcement

I know that government prosecutions for fraud against government use IP addresses

The IP address identifies the company or home the fraud was done from, the account the money went to identifies the individual

If breaking the law and able to afford to make it difficult for prosecutors, it’s probably best to make it difficult for the prosecutors, we may have an activist pro copyright holder government in future and logs are forever (or 5 years)

It seems trivial for the US government to tie data into TOR to data out. If you’re hiding things that government is willing to spend effort seeking, it’s not safe.

Is your home machine, your phone, better protected than the VPN servers? I bet you’re not as good at IT security as the IT security staff VPN companies hire

If your threat model includes nation state actors, you’re best off not using networked computers

That says their error was trying American threats “we got you dead to rights, tell us your income and we’ll tell you how much to pay our we’ll sue for punitive damages”

Which isn’t legal in Australia. They would have been ok if they had asked to send a letter saying “stop it or pay us a reasonable amount for one person viewing the film once” but of course actual damages aren’t enough for film companies

They were too greedy.

As much as people hate Musk, Tesla is unusual in that they allow you to opt out of all connectivity. Get no updates, send no video, audio, or data to the company

I play freeciv (an open source civ 3.5 clone) much more often than civ 5 which I bought. I’ll agree with you. Newer civ isn’t all that attractive.

Disney will happily spend a million to defend against 50k if they have a chance of getting a court decision that their contract is valid for everything associated with the Disney brand

Throwaways are the standard for the legal advice subreddits, and some are clearly fiction. This one sounds legit

When you vote in private, on paper, none is always an option. You can deposit a blank form, a form with 1 in every box, a form with zero in every box, a sketch

We can. And pre-poll votes. We don’t need to mail forms to everyone as most people can and will make it to a polling place on the day.

We can also vote out of state or from outside the country at an embassy or High Commission

And you can buy a sausage on a slice of bread

Yep. Us Aussies can only waste our vote deliberately. If we want to vote we can number every box. And because we have a single transferable vote we have a lot of boxes, the last senate vote form had more than 40, and you could vote any of them first

And if the rest of your electorate didn’t rate your number 1, you might agree on number 2

News reports call out the losers — this party is last, its votes get distributed per the voters’ forms and you watch for which bars on the graph grow as the shooters and hunters party (I didn’t get to vote in the election where the sun ripened warm tomato party failed to get elected) is excluded. A forty horse race is better than a two horse race

It’s also nice to choose your actual preference, even if it isn’t popular

I knew it would be that Tom Scott video