Well put, that's the most commonly experienced anti-feature introduced, another less common one where they have been less and less lenient over the years is geolocation restrictions: people in the past could register with other countries (cheaper) pricing, today most legitimate customers cannot access their content even when traveling for a few days, or they risk getting blocked. Similarly to the region-codes on dvds and blurays, I can't imagine it really helps sales, but it siloes consumers into country blocks and monopolies tend to like that.
pipes
joined 2 years ago
Not everyone is US based, but ofc it's an understandable assumption since it's a very populous and well Internet-connected country (plus we're discussing in English).
To save one's behind when torrenting (pirating is a bit generic), a VPN is a great tool, but falling into the privacy/security and legal nightmare of a cheap service installing malware (or getting their proprietary app hacked) and/or stealing residential connections is a big risk (like with those services where a huge budget is spent on predatory marketing on youtube); paradoxically having that unrestricted VPN app installed might mean that a lot more people are torrenting with your residential connection. This point is not a deal breaker, just a "beware", do your homework and isolate that connection within your OS or even better within your network.
Other counterpoint: within a country where they haven't started to really crack down on it, you are protected by the impossibility of fining / suing / arresting millions of people at once. More people sign up for VPNs and torrent from outside the country, the more their connationals will also need protection.
Sorry for the wall of text..
For those who want to know more about Piracy Shield and have a laugh at its ridiculousness (and danger), I enjoyed Max Stucchi presentation at https://ripe89.ripe.net/archives/video/1496/
"Blocking and Censoring the Italian Internet for Football Reasons"
I recently added a used mini pc to my lab and it has a Ryzen 3550H, 16GB ram and 512GB nvme; it cost less than 100€ total, hits almost 8000 passmark. Just to give you an idea of what you can get on the used market, I wouldn't buy a new Celeron pc myself.
1337x is my favorite. Look for efficient encodes like HEVC or AV1 for a better quality/size ratio (and ideally AAC or opus for audio). It's usually in the torrent name as well as the resolution, source, etc.
They are usually separate things. Cookies are produced/saved locally, to be read in the next visit (by the same website or maany websites basically forever unless you use firefox containers or at least clear them once in a while). There's also local storage which is different but can also be used to identify you across the web. Ads, trackers, all of these categories are often made of many small components: you read a single article on a "modern" newspaper website, hundreds of connection are being made, different tiny scripts or icons or images are being downloaded (usually from different subdomains for different purposes but there's no hard rule). It's possible to block one thing and not another. For example I can block Google Analytics (googletagmanager) which is a tracker, but accept all of Google's cookies.
I don't use a VPN but still had to assign a port interval or something to Soulseek from the router; other software maybe picks a more sensible (lower) port number?
Oh another tip, I have set it to always create subdirectories even if it's single files in the torrent. Makes it easier to browse the main folder alphabetically later!
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Depending on the laptop (or with any laptop + smart plug) you can set charging thresholds, both for starting and stopping the charge (lower and upper limits), this way it will do a few cycles instead of staying fixed to a certain level of charge.
In order the worst things we can do to batteries are: leave them at 0% for years, leave them at 100% for years, leave them halfway for years (what happens when left plugged in with only an upper charge limit like 80%) - batteries need to do a few partial cycles at least, once in a while.