I get blocked from Google and reddit on Mullvad, but I see that as a Google and reddit problem, not a Mullvad problem lol.

Yeah Windows out of the box is really dumb/myopic. If it’s not Fat32 or NTFS, it doesn’t exist lol.

I remember being really surprised when I learned this lol. My SO had an old Windows work laptop that they’d forgotten the password for, and just out of curiosity I tried running a live Linux USB to see if we could access anything, and discovered that we could see everything from every user on there, and that login passwords really didn’t do anything at all. It was a real “we should encrypt all our drives” moment.

Yeah that was my first thought too. While I kind of get the spirit of it, in practice this is so absurdly dangerous IMO. Even if someone has the best possible intentions, there are so many things that could go wrong with this, especially if you include things like long-term effects that aren’t immediately apparent, or interactions with other drugs, especially if you’re taking other home-made pills with potentially unknown ingredients. While it can be frustrating to hear about a promising new medicine that won’t be available for years, there’s a reason why they spend so long testing these things.

IMO the better (but much more difficult) solution is reforming the medical industry so that it’s easier for people to see a doctor and actually afford to get medicine. I’m not usually a fan of big government stuff, but medicine is one of those things that just needs to be kept under supervision I think.

Literally every site in my regular rotation is completely unaffected lol.

It’s wild, I’m one of those patient gamer types but there are certain games that I’d make an exception for and buy as soon as they came out, and Civ has been one of those games as far back as I can remember. But this is gonna be the first one I’m not going to bother with. Between this and the absolutely bonkers price, I really can’t justify it. Maybe in a few years when the Denuvo is removed and you can get the full thing for like $40 or so, but no way am I paying $167 CAD for the full edition on day one.

Yeah same here, I’m on lemmy.ml using Mullvad and never had an issue. If an instance ever did block it though I’d just leave, that’s also why I never use reddit anymore lol.

Yeah same here, my backup for media is basically just a text file with the names of all the folders in my Movies directory so I have a list of what to download again when the drive craps out. I could buy terabytes of extra storage or a NAS or something and make sure it’s all synced, but it’s not really worth the expense/trouble for me TBH.

https://xkcd.com/538/

Veracrypt has something like this too! You can create a hidden volume with a separate password, so you can put some benign files in the main volume and hide your actual stuff in a second one with an alternate password.

Luckily I live in a country that doesn’t really seem to give a shit. I still use a VPN, but a friend of mine didn’t bother at all and used to be downloading constantly. Eventually he got a phone call from his ISP asking him to not seed so much lol

Yeah I’m just downloading random data for fun in little tiny bits. If that data happens to arrange itself in the form of the latest episode of Doctor Who then that’s not my problem.

I use Mullvad personally, but probably any of the major ones would do the trick.

I do! And I set QBittorrent to only run through the VPN connection 👍

Yeah that’s my preferred method too. Bitwarden’s password generator can create passphrases too, so I have it just create random ones for pretty much everything. The only ones I have to remember are the ones to unlock Bitwarden itself, and the one to unlock the decryption when I boot my PC up. So like two sentences essentially. I literally don’t even know what the passwords are to anything else lol.

Grayjay works well for me too.

Just a standard issue Lenovo, Linux, and a VPN. Nothing too wild or likely to stand out lol.

He may well have broken the law, and he may well be a bit of a dick (I don’t know, but I’m basing this off off comments I’ve seen), but the thing that’s confusing me about this is, why is this America’s business?

As far as I can tell Dotcom is German-born with New Zealand residence (so presumably still a German citizen?) and the article says:

The site was formally based in Hong Kong until 2012, when the US seized the domain names and closed down the website. But it survived, relaunching in 2013 as Mega, with a New Zealand domain name.

The only connection I can see this having to the US is that it cost some US corporations some money, but then that’s surely true for a bunch of other countries as well. I highly doubt it was only US content being pirated. Why does the US get to be in charge of this?

Also, if this is illegal, why aren’t they arresting the CEO of Google for Google Drive? You pay for that, and there’s a ton of pirated stuff on there. Same with Discord. And those are actually based in the US.

You could try Tails maybe? I found that a lot easier to set up that Qubes personally.

Currently Grayjay is working for me, but Freetube isn’t. Hopefully Google settles down with its YouTube fiddling soon so the app makers can just crack it once and we can all get on with it lol.