It’s worth it if you could benefit from having fast seeds or if you want to use Sonarr/Radarr with less failures/fake/bad media downloads.

For example, I use a VPS for my seedbox/media server. This makes it so that if I discover a movie/tv show that I’m interested in, I can add it to Sonarr and when it starts the torrent from the private tracker I’m guaranteed to have at least 5 multi-gigabit seeds so a 4k movie transfers in a few minutes. This makes it so that all movies and TV shows are essentially on-demand.

There are third party services (debrid) that give you a similar experience without having to deal with hosting issues or private trackers.

If you do decide to try, it’s not hard… they give you all of the material and it’s open notes. As long as you understand 1. You have some amount of time that you have to seed each torrent and you have a global ratio so seeding everything all the time is the best strategy and 2. Whatever domain specific knowledge to cover the site’s content… a movie site will make sure you know the difference between x264 and x265 and what an mkv file is and an audio site will want to make sure you know the difference between lossless and lossy encoding and the associated formats (FLAC, MP3, etc).

They’re mostly just checking that you’re a real person and not completely incompetent. If you’ve been using bittorrent for a while then you probably know most everything except the site specific rules on seeding and ratio.

Give it a shot!

I just cannot be bothered with going on IRC in 2026

This is the reason that private trackers make the interview process as annoying as possible. People think this way and filter themselves out without any effort on the part of the site’s moderation team. IRC has been core to the piracy world since the beginning, not being comfortable with IRC is a big indicator that a person is a newbie.

Because of the various hoops that you have to jump through: getting on IRC, reading the rules, being tested on the rules, etc. The people that make it through the interview process are pre-selected for being the kind of people who are willing and capable of finding the information that they need to know.

I didn’t have an invite for a large music tracker and so I had to take a ~2 hour test on audio codecs, formats, bittorrent configuration, etcetcetc. Yes, it is annoying, but there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so to speak.

Of course, you could just skip all of that and just get an invite, but then the responsibility for training you on the rules is on whoever invited you… if you screw up then they get kicked too.

It’s a good system, everyone has to individually prove their competence and the result is a much higher quality community.

If you use keepass*

I mean if you use syncthing.

Syncthing is what has the ability to set untrusted hosts. You set a password and the files are encrypted with that password before sending it to the untrusted computer.

“This is a shit sandwich, but at least it is human shit we’re eating.”

Keepass encrypts the database with AES-256 by default so there is already a layer of encryption protecting your passwords.

If you use keepass and want to use a third party service to store your files there’s a way to setup an untrusted mirror which will encrypt the files before sending it to that client. That way you still have your files elsewhere (often on a VPS, seedbox or other host) but that host doesn’t have the unencrypted sync folder just in case you decide to put non-encrypted files in there too.

Waiting for the “Whoops, we ‘forgot’ to remove it”.

Yeah, it’ll be horrible. We’ll have terrible art inflicted upon on us, for the first time in gaming history.

No Kings

Seems like a pretty clear goal to me.

Public key crypto is used to set up a secure network connection, but it’s not used to encrypt the data that flows on that connection. Quantum snooping would require an eavesdropper to intercept every bit on a connection, from initiation onward. And decrypting it would probably not be a real-time affair.

It depends.

The attack type that is currently being considered is what is called Store Now Decrypt Later (SNDL). The idea is that some hypothetical future attacker could have a copy of all of your Internet traffic data for the past decade and such an attacker could utilize a not yet invented, but theoretically possible, quantum computer to break the encryption.

This is why systems are changing over to post-quantum encryption, because even if there are not quantum computers yet. The assurance that factoring prime numbers will be hard forever is no longer the case and the difficulty of factoring prime numbers underpins a lot of classical encryption.

A way of encrypting data in the past was to use the RSA keypair to exchange a symmetrical key, which is a system where both parties encrypt/decrypt data using a shared key. This allowed for a secure connection from RSA and also fast and computationally cheap encryption using a symmetrical algorithm. An attacker that has recorded traffic secured in this manner only needs to crack the RSA keypair to obtain the symmetrical key afterwards they can decrypt the traffic as if they were a participant. This kind of attack only requires the quantum computer to factor a single key.

More modern systems use methods which would create ephemeral keys which are used and discarded. They use a system of key exchange that allows both parties to create a shared key even when a listening party has access to all of the traffic between them. The RSA keypairs are only used to authenticate the two parties to one another, afterwards they use Diffie-Hellman (or Elliptical Curve Diffie-Hellman) to generate the shared key to encrypt the next packet.

Crypto systems like the one Signal employs takes this concept a step further using a double ratchet system, if this kind of thing is interesting to you ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXv1boalsDI )

Both links are from Computerphile on YT, they do good videos on Computer Science and Mathematics topics.

Put the keepass database in a folder and use syncthing to sync that folder.

I just run syncthing on every device that needs my password and they all always have an up to date copy of the database.

You can choose to not install applications that use birthDate. It’s your system.

But, you cannot choose what other people want to install. It’s their system.

There are applications which exist, that other people can choose to install, that require this field and systemd is the logical place to store that information.

If you don’t like the applications that would use this field, and you don’t want your system to store information in birthDate then there is absolutely nothing stopping you from doing that. You don’t get to make that choice for other people, however.

The field doesn’t do anything by itself. There is zero harm inflicted on people using systemd. There are probably lots of features of systemd that you don’t want or use and the entire negative effect that you suffer is a few megabytes less free storage space.

The only way the field would be used is if a person decided to use a different piece of software that wants a birthdate. If they don’t choose to install such a program then the field is no more a danger than the realName or location fields. They have scary sounding labels but do absolutely nothing unless the user chooses to use them.

…and r/conspiracy was 80% stuff like birds ain’t real and the rest I always assumed was people posting ironically… now I’m not so sure that that was an accurate assessment.

and r/F7U12. It wasn’t just a meme it was an entire meme language, kids these days with their gifs and their template sites… smhing my head

I know! I paid an artist, from the forums, to draw my avatar and paid them to update it for holidays and stuff so it was consistent.

Also, you gotta have a good signature. Why not a live updating image of what is playing in your media player, that could not possibly end badly.

It’s just like the Tobacco companies who knew of their product’s danger but also wanted to keep making money.

Nobody will go to jail, some politicians will receive motor carriages and luxury vacations and hundreds of thousands of young people will have to deal with the problem on their own.

Back when Reddit was funny and not a bot hive

That’s how the OG Internet communities were. There would be like 500 total people maybe and you’d see them randomly throughout the week as they were online. You don’t know everyone but you recognize most of the names/pfps.

It cuts down on a lot of toxicity when you can actually know who is a jerk and who is probably just having a bad day. It makes the community a bit more empathic and less reactionary.

I think people should experience smaller communities, they are often much higher quality in terms of the actual social interactions (though, we’re starting to get our share of trolls and toxic people).

Who gets to decide what software should and should not be allowed to exist?

If someone wanted to store a birthDate (and, evidence exists to say that they do) then the most logical place to store that user detail is with all of the other user details… in systemd.

You can choose what you put on your system, that’s the Free in FOSS. But, you cannot choose what other people put on their systems.

Then, tell me, why bother adding this in the first place, exactly at the time governments are looking toward full control of everybody’s computers? If it’s that innocent and useless, either someone really likes throwing shit up, or it won’t stop there.

It’s there because systemd is the place that makes the most sense to store that kind of data.

Systemd stores user details.

This is a user detail.

So, storing it in systemd makes the most sense.

The alternative is having every individual program try to store data about the user in their own, non-interoperatble formats. That’s a needless complication when systemd already stores user details

This field will not affect you unless you choose to let it. You get to pick what software is installed on your system. Unless you choose to use an application that validates your birthdate, the field does absolutely nothing.

For people who want to use birth date (say, maybe people with multiple kids) it makes way more sense to store that detail about the user along with every other detail about the user that’s stored on the system.