In the later books it’s not even a parody

.

Nevermind I asked to the “AI” it’s like 25% to 50% of zoomers doing OF, but maybe addicted to porn there are more than selling it.

I don’t dude, never thought that way but now you mentioned it maybe I should. in some years people instead of asking someone else for their Facebook, they will ask for their OF LMAO.

Yeah gone too far about 99%, it’s just like 25% to 50%…

Accordingly to the “AI” which isn’t my browsing history suggest every 1 of each 2 zoomers it’s doing porn at OF. So I guess more of 50% are porn addicts but let me check.

Edit: no answer.<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d10fdc73-eb73-4ab7-8743-54f23ee8ec2e.png">

I don't believe you have the authority to tell others what to do.

this software has a block feature.

I mean if you saw what was going on in Italy and had any clue about it, you’d have been smart and purchased it. There was a lockdown in Italy for like he saw it month before there was even talk of COVID coming to the states

.

I am not associated with Mullvad VPN in any capacity and I have nothing to disclose, lol.

Mullvad VPN doesn’t even offer a renewing subscription, that I know of, and I’m almost entirely certain that they used to and have since stopped doing so on principle. Their VPN service costs a little less than $5/month (USD) if you get their card off Amazon that’s good for a year, and that is literally a physical card sent through the mail—the kind you have to scratch off on the back to get to the number underneath, in other words—and so at least AFAIK, there’s no possible way for whichever unique card you happen to end up with, to ever be traced directly to that specific transaction on Amazon, even if you pay for it using your credit/debit card, and directly associate that purchase with your bank account in so doing. It’s even better than that if you pay them by means far less traceable to begin with, of course, and they make those options available as well. In fact, they prefer doing it that way as opposed to credit/debit card purchases, even of physical cards through Amazon, IIRC. At least AFAIK, they don’t even accept any form of payment directly traceable to a bank account on their own website, for every obvious reason.

They actually do not keep logs like they claim not to, at least according to the one time they were ever affected by a search warrant, at which point it was discovered by law enforcement that said warrant in its entirety described information that did not exist because it never had.

One thing I really like about (using) it, and I have no idea what other VPNs would also do something like this, if any: it sets up a SOCKS5 proxy for you internally, and you can use that anywhere that supports that, wherever you may need/want a killswitch properly—meaning to make said application unable to resolve hostnames in the event of your connection to the VPN being interrupted for some reason. I’m also pretty sure you can use their DNS-over-HTTPS no matter what, even if you don’t already use their VPN service. Anyway, especially if you already do, though, I always figure it’s never a bad idea to just use the same provider everywhere you can: use their encrypted DNS wherever possible, in addition to using the proxy provided by their VPN wherever possible, in addition to using their VPN anyway. I do that, and I also enable the setting (under Wireguard) to use multi-hop, which, albeit at the expense of some latency, even more thoroughly conceals my real external IP address from the ostensibly innocuous honeypots for people who are not lunatics of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, or whatever company doing business on that level of dystopia. It’s simply a technical matter that doing all of that will make nearly everything—excluding any/all abject OPSEC failure, browser fingerprinting, EXIF metadata, etc., which should go without saying—way more difficult to trace back to your real world identity than it otherwise would be. It has to be. I didn’t say “impossible” because I know better, and again, it’s never gonna protect anyone from themselves because it can’t. It’s good enough to be able to use the internet and also sleep, though, at least for me.

It’s just so many consecutive layers of obfuscation contrary to the best interest of the boogeyman, especially for the price, that if I didn’t have immediate access to $60 in order to buy another year’s worth of Mullvad VPN, or immediate access to Mullvad VPN, I would literally beg and/or borrow, figuratively steal, or otherwise aquire.

I mean, it is?

You’ve got a lot more options by way of selecting a VPN provider than an ISP. Your ISP options are those who have physical infrastructure at your location. You can get VPN service from anyone.

You have to trust your VPN provider to about the degree that you do your ISP in a VPN-less environment, true enough, but VPN providers are in a more-competitive market. It’s a lot easier to switch away from a VPN provider that you don’t like.

For example, I would trust an EFF-provided VPN service to a pretty considerable extent; I already trust the EFF on a lot of privacy matters.

Yeah wireguard is really nice, but it drains my battery pretty quick on Android.

encrypted over https

The TLS handshake will generally – through there are some ways to avoid this, and people are banging on it – expose hostnames in the clear. So even if the IP address that you’re talking to serves multiple virtual hosts, your ISP is likely to know who it is that you’re talking to.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

Even if your browser is using DNS-over-HTTP, which it may or may not be doing, most software doesn’t, so outside of your browser, DNS is generally visible.

Some protocols still are not encrypted; I was looking at MUDs the other day, and few of them support encrypted connections. The networks that I’m most worried about are random WiFi access points, and VPNs solve that well.

The network provider can still see which addresses and ports someone is connecting to and to where the traffic goes, and how much traffic is sent.

Some network providers blacklist material – as is the case in OP’s article. For example, one of my first experiences on the Threadiverse was kbin sending me to a random discussion on policy that Ada (the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin) was having with some gay user who lived somewhere in the Middle East. Lemmy.blahaj.zone had been blocked in that country – the country presumably didn’t like something related to the server having LGBT content. The Threadiverse is semi-resillient to that – they could still connect to a federated server and see comments. But it meant that images on lemmy.blahaj.zone were blocked in that country.

For another contemporary example, Russia has cracked down on politics online. Can’t block access to content without killing off VPNs, and they went after those too.

For people who maintain a long-running IP address, it’s possible to cross-correlate logs from various services. So, okay, let’s say that a given IP address has been logged downloading BitTorrent content. That same IP address is linked to, at various times, use of an app where a particular unique phone ID has shown up, or maybe that a user has logged into some account service on, which is linked to personal information. Even a party who is not someone’s ISP can cross-correlate logs using the IP. A VPN doesn’t absolutely avoid that, but it makes it harder.

Without a VPN, anyone can get at least a rough geographical location of a user by geolocating their IP address. IPv4 scarcity has made this harder than it once was, reduced geography/address correlation, but I expect that IPv6 will make it easier.

People don’t need to write their network software securely. Your cool multiplayer network game may-or-may not be encrypted and may-or-may-not be resillient to modified network traffic. If there are buffer overflows in how Quake or whatever handles network traffic, I’d rather not let the network provider be an attack vector. This has been exploited before, and while a typical ISP probably isn’t generally a real risk, I’d trust random WiFi networks a lot less. A VPN will get cleartext traffic off their network.

Probably more, but that’s some off-the-cuff.

Kape technologies comes to mind, which owns Private Internet Access, CyberGhost, and ExpressVPN, and is in turn owned by an Israeli billionaire

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teddy_Sagi

Let me make it clear folks, nobody has better morals than white people, believe me. They’re tremendous, the best. They follow the rules, they respect authority, they’re just fantastic. I mean, look at me, I’m the best example of great morals, and I’m white, folks. White people, they’re winners, they know how to do things right, they’re tremendous patriots. So let’s make America great again with the incredible morals of white people leading the way.

The outlook on everything on Lemmy is driving me away from the platform. I’m not saying other platforms are any better. I might just stop using it.

The same people who complain about government propaganda are the same people who type “Russia bad! China bad!” like it’s not decades of propaganda to make westerners hate these countries.

Reread the comment considering it’s taking the view point of a Republican in Texas who voted this law, it will make more sense.

His argument is that the average person won’t know any better and will just take the first sponsored result for “free VPN” of Google

Right. Why do I have to submit a retinal scan and 3 forms of ID to watch porn because parents can’t be bothered to learn basic computer skills and monitor their own children?

Outside the issue of yet another competing standard to do the same thing, there’s an inherent issue with verification in these kinds of apps. That is, how the identity is actually verified for the account. Is it the government itself, a for-profit company partnered in some way with governments, something else? The issue begs the question, is this something we should have in the first place?

I don’t think so. And it seems to me that those who do likely don’t realize how much of a slippery slope it is to complete privacy erosion. Others are simply trying to live their life and this is very far down on their list of worries. Yet here we are, where services are built around the assumption that every user has a phone (and phone number).

Some relevant media to the topic: xkcd 927 Electric Dreams S1E9

the old guys with piles of old greasy porn mags grinning with their remaining teeth.

Millions of people not voting because it would take millions of people voting to elicit positive change and nobody is doing that is one of the most frustrating things.

Isn’t Texas getting more and more purple? I think Biden only Lots by 5 percentage points. Lots of tech people, California emigrants, and “east coast” educated types moved to the cities there (like Austin).

Granted Texas is huge so the cities play less of a role in the overall state picture.

It might not be a swing state yet, by I don’t know that it’s as entrenched red as it used to be.

I honestly think that a lot of the bullshit about abortion is an attempt to force those blue voters out of their state because they are scared they are losing their grip.

I’ve never really understood why they claim it didn’t happen, it’s not like they were the ones doing it so I don’t understand why they feel the need to protect themselves by claiming its non-existence.

Meanwhile the actual people who did do it fully acknowledge that it happened, was bad, and have taken steps to ensure it never can be allowed to happen again.