Andy yen praising trump is one thing and I kind of don’t care about that so much. What I do care about is how proton practices predatory sales to cash in on FOMO. Or if you subscribe for one month it’s an auto renewing subscription. Or that the best rates are if you sign up for a year. It’s weird for a not-for-profit structure to do billing like this

Mullvad doesn’t play games. A flat price and you get what you pay for.

10-20 requests per second

That’s not a DDOS

The VM is Debian Linux with a basic XFCE UI (for a system tray + notification widget) via QEMU/KVM which I run through virt-manager. Most unnecessary packages are removed or not installed in the first place. This is so that I can browse the sites, again, in a fool-proof manner. I share a directory from my host OS to the VM, which mounts it on boot in the fstab. This prevents me from downloading into the guest VM’s disk image and having to keep dealing with that file getting overly big. In the past I’ve done a Samba share but recently I’ve just been using direct shared memory/filesystem and that seems to work OK, too.

As a bonus to this setup, I can use Microsocks in the VM to also proxy a profile in Firefox to get VPN coverage in a specific Firefox profile. I use this when watching on streaming sites instead of trying to watch within the VM, since there is considerable overhead to doing that.

And that’s it, really. My VPN killswitches the VM if it ever experiences a connection interruption. And Qbittorrent is set up to use the VPN interface, as well. I use the aforementioned automatic torrents management feature to sort things when they’re done downloading.

I should state that there are some obvious downsides to this setup. The first is now I have to overcommit disk space and RAM to keep and run a guest VM. You want enough to be able to run updates and the software in the VM without running into a wall. The second is that there does seem to be a CPU penalty when downloading files (maybe it’s because of the way I’m sharing the downloads directory into the VM with virtiofs?)

I have some beginner questions, for example: if I have the arr stack running in docker with a vpn, can I browse the internet non-anonymously on that same machine without compromising identifying details, assuming qbittorrent is configured to only move traffic through a VPN? (I’m wondering if I need a dedicated piece of hardware to run everything safely)

The answer to this question is you can setup a docker system (or podman) so that all the traffic in that pod (don’t know the docker term for this) will route through the vpn. A good image to accomplish this easily and successfully is gluetun – and it will only affect the traffic in the containers, not the rest of your computer.

Personally, my setup is much more like yours and it works fine for me, except I use a VM. So all the activity gets confined to the VM and that makes a bit idiot-proof. Using automatic management in the torrent client, completed torrents get put in the correct directory. You could combine this with Jellyfin if you desired.

My own problem with Jellyfin is if I ever use it for anything I want direct playback on all relevant devices, because my computer is not good enough for transcoding (and why waste the energy and time on on-demand transcoding, anyway?) so it requires some massaging of the data to get everything right. I only use it infrequently, practically on-demand. I don’t use Jellyfin for myself.

The YT-DLP team by refusing to support DRM videos

If they did this they could be sued for the exact same reason Yuzu got sued: circumvention of DRM. That’s a crime in the USA. Apparently.

Firefox with like 10 different settings checkboxes unticked through its settings to disable phoning home, prevent sponsored suggestions, prevent recommendations, etc. + ublock origin extension installed, obviously.

It used to be just an install and go ordeal. Now you have to have all these caveats. I used to send technical and interaction to Mozilla but given their terms changes I can’t be confident in them with even that much information anymore.

Final thought is I don’t see what Mozilla’s endgame is. It costs a lot of money to develop a competitive and impactful web browser, I understand that much. Where are they supposed to get their money from? Well. I don’t get paid millions a year to solve this problem, but it seems pretty obvious the current leadership have made their minds up to make Firefox yet another advertisement browser.

Chuck Schumer - People Are Aroused.webm

How do you manage your podman pod? I just manually wrote it out into a script just this past week, but it seems inelegant to do all these commands so manually.

Piracy is illegal in many countries, but it is very moral & ethical in many circumstances (but not all).

There are archives of all the rarbg magnet links. I still use them to successfully find stuff. As long as those links are out there it is still possible to help people out.

When rarbg went down I immediately went and for any torrent I still had loaded in my client I quadrupled my normal ratio (3.5 -> 12.00). Then I also just increased my ratio generally.

I wish I had more disk space to keep things going even longer, but I really gotta cycle stuff out unfortunately.