The point is that for a state actor which can watch (or at least buy detailed traffic data for) both ends, a certain pattern of packets happenning from your side to a known Tor entry node and the exact same pattern between a specific server being watched and a known Tor exit node on the other side will indicate that it’s your machine connecting to that end server, the more such patterns spotted the higher the level of confidence.

This is quite independent of how much your data is mixed with other data inside the Tor network and how many nodes it has been routed around, because this kind of analysis doesn’t care about the IP address your machine is sending requests to or the IP address the watched server is receiving request from, it only cares about your pattern of data requests and responses matching that server’s pattern of received requests and returned responses.

Whatever protocol is in the middle is wholly irrelevant. At best if the website is heavilly used and you’re lucky, the specific end node (be it the router on the other side of your VPN connection or the exit node of your Tor connection) sending your requests to that server might have other users also sending requests to that server hence you’re all disguising each other’s pattern, but this is to do with popularity of the service more than the protocol itself being good at defeating this kind of analysis.

Edit

This is not entirelly true - if the protocol changes the exit node between requests to the server then it can disguise your pattern. However given that changing the IP address from were the request comes breaks all the keep-alive performance optimizations in HTTP since v1.1, performance would be horrible at least for web browsing in modern websites (which have tons of additional content associated with a typical webpage).

/Edit

It’s all there in the Mullvad post (so you need to actually read it) and it helps if you have a background in IT Security and Cryptography since there are kinds of attack using similar mathematical principles in other areas (such as the statistical analysis of unchained symetrical encryption protocols to derive the text from the encrypted text based on the probability of the words and letters occuring in a specific pattern or the power consumption analysis of cryptographic microchips such as those in smartcards to derive the encryption keys based on the way power was drawn by the ALU during encryption and decryption, a weakness which was funnilly enough also defeated by adding noise in the form of junk operations).

It’s all pretty obvious, really ;)

Hum… this was one of the original reasons I signed up with them. I totally missed them dropping support. I’m not mad about it because I don’t torrent much anymore, but it’s still a pretty lame excuse.

I want all my services supporting maximum fuckery at all times as a matter of general principle.

Any alternatives that you know of?

If so easy to fix issue, why not make company and fix it?

You should be using a seedbox to torrent in this age. Let the company run their business, if they don’t want to be a part of the group that allows torrents, so be it.

I can download at the maximum rate my ISP supports and I can seed after downloading (probably only to those clients which my own client has connected to).

However I cannot seed in a brand new session during which I did not download that specific torrent (as I just tested).

I expect this is because, as I explained, the NAT implementation actually tracks which IP addresses your client connected to and through which VPN Router port that went so that subsequent connections from those IPs to that port get sent to the right port in your own machine, but it doesn’t support uPNP/NAT-PMP port forwarding so the bitttorrent client cannot configure on that VPN Router a static port-forwarding so that it can listen for connections from any random client.

So if I understand it correctly it totally screws self-hosted seedboxes and if you want to give back to the community you have leave it seeding immediatelly after downloading and it’s not going to be seeding anywhere as fast since its limited to peers connected to during the dowload stage.

Economy of scale?

I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective. When put next to a lot of other subscription services (like Netflix 😩) it’s pretty cheap. Compared to other VPNs maybe not so much? I’ve honestly never looked at a VPN-only service before, like Nord etc. as VPNs have never been something I’ve prioritised.

Still, knowing what little I know about Mullvad, €5 a month for a VPN that prioritises privacy seems fair to me. Again, it’s less than any of the streaming services and if privacy is important then it seems a fair price to pay.

€5 a month for a VPN is expensive compared to others? I always saw Mullvad as one of the least expensive options other than like protonvpn and very few other open source ones. Most VPNs are hella expensive

Personally I use Mullvad because it’s simple, very usable, open-source, and I can trust it the most (not to say some of the other open-source privacy-oriented options aren’t trustable). Ever since I got into programming, I’ve only ever used completely open-source options when I had the chance – if it’s not open source, I won’t use it. I make very few exceptions, like for games, because open source isn’t as successful there for the most part

.

Not even grad? Wow.

This is my thinking for using .world. I don’t get all my news or interaction from Lemmy or the internet as a whole, and Lemmy is small enough that it has an almost zero impact on broader society. I respect those who try, but if my internet experience was antagonistic or frustrating I’d probably just stop using it.

I also feel that conversations of that nature are best had in person, where there’s a higher chance of changing minds. I’ve no proof but it feels like internet discussions are taken less seriously and thus merely end before any opinion changing can occur.

Maybe, but your list is, in part, so large because we keep pushing people out to let them become extremists

I don’t think your whole thought process differs from a tankie. They think the same in a “my team is better, other one is sowing misinformation” way.

All the more reason to walk around on hexbear and talk to people

not safe debating

Sorry, just to comment on this one: I really dislike that phrase, its use is part of the reason why we are where we are. You ARE safe, all the time. It’s not like you talking in a lemmy instance puts you at risk of being shot in the head.

You may encounter assholes, and opinions that you don’t like but that doesn’t make you unsafe. Uncomfortable, mayby, for having to read information you oppose?

A black man driving and stopped by US police can claim he feels not safe. We lemmies are perfectly fine. I think many people need to grow a little thicker skin in that regard.

Hexbear mods are paid to spread propaganda, not use their brain, two fairly exclusive activities.

And that’s the problem from both sides. You both need to continue talking. I got banned from Reddit subs too for literally asking questions or wrong think.

People need to grow skin

I would argue it’s not. It caused people to become more and more extreme, locked in their own echo rooms where they just become more distant from a common center…

Exhibit a

I didn’t vote on your post, but want to say that you’re not going to convince many people with an antagonistic approach.

Funny how you call everyone hateful while being so full of hatred. You literally talk about becoming violent once outlived my usefulness, yet other are the violent ones?

YOU, my man, are the problem hwre., you are the authoritarian here, not others.

Hence me talking to you because I prefer to keep the discussion going. Noone is beyond saving. Do some reading up on Daryl Davis, he would be a good influence on you.

Most extremists, like you, are not inherently violent, bad, or beyond saving. You’re simply a bit lost and maybe need to do some talking, have someone listen to you and validate you. Some different points of view can be very helpful to get rid of that hate that you feel inside you

Problem I see with this is that a lot of “I block people who act in bad faith” have hair triggers when it comes to what they consider bad faith. I see their comments all over the place where its a disagreement and 6 comments in they’re claiming the other person is acting in bad faith and they’re blocking them

I very well get what you’re saying but a lot of people don’t understand the difference between “has a valid opinion I disagree with” and “is a flame troll LLM” and just block anyone with an opinion they don’t like, loudly proclaiming"you are a bad fatig actor!"

I think it really made the entire world a worse place to be in, everyone is in their own echo chambers now, nice and safely shielded from scary opinions that don’t align with their warped world view.

While LLMs have become a problem recently, this problem existed since way before that

Lemmy.ml was originally only federated with Lemmygrad.ml, so most people who stayed around in those days were quasitankie themselves

Lemmy.world has many tankies. You keep seeing them pretend israel is not committing Genocide and America needs to kill all student protesters Tiannenmen style. They are also called liberals

Lemmy.ml does not have many tankies.

Yup. I generally avoid communities on lemmy.ml and I’m much happier for it. I used to sub to several because that was the biggest instance, but now other instances (this one, mine, and some others) are big enough to replace the stuff I don’t like there.

I don’t like that the community is divided like this, but it’s more pleasant I suppose.

youtu.be/kl6rsi7BEtk?si=VK0Mn-Ld2mVW85ev

I think we’re mixing up vocabulary.

Every IP you talk to is visible to anybody monitoring your network. The sale of net flow data is commonly acknowledged by ISPs. So every computer you talk to is common knowledge for sale.

In your scenario, let’s say you have five VPN connections set up to go to five endpoints that you control. But if nobody else is using those same endpoints. Your net flow data still exposes exactly what you’re doing. There’s no ambiguity. Your traffic is plainly obvious to anybody observing the network. Even if those VPN connections are adding randomized traffic onto the links.