NaibofTabr

…and the penalties are enforced.

“I want a number four, number six, and throw in a plastic doughnut…”

https://xkcd.com/977/

Again?

OK, so what is a VPN?

A Virtual Private Network is a virtual network that lives on top of a physical network. In the case of the Internet, basically what happens is that your network traffic goes into the VPN on one side and comes out of the VPN provider’s network somewhere else, rather than out of your ISP’s network. All this really does is move any privacy concerns from your ISP to your VPN, which may or may not protect you from any legal inquiries.

For a more thorough explanation look here: https://www.howtogeek.com/133680/htg-explains-what-is-a-vpn/

Is it possible to use torrent without a VPN?

Certainly, however your torrent traffic will be visible to and inspectable by your ISP. If a copyright holder chooses to, they may sue your ISP for the personal information of the person whose IP address matches the illegal traffic that they found. After they have your personal information they can prosecute you directly. A VPN might shield against this by changing the apparent IP address associated with your torrent traffic, but then you are at the mercy of the VPN provider and the government of whichever country they operate in.

It should be noted that if you are not paying the bill for the Internet, and you use it for illegal activity, then the person you are putting at risk is the person who pays the bill. It’s their name attached to the ISP records.

If you are caught, or if they just don’t like torrent traffic on their network, the ISP may decide that you are simply too much trouble and it’s not worth keeping you as a customer, and just cut off your service (for your whole house).

Umm, but then your VPN leads to a server rented from a web host which you are paying with (presumably) a credit card, and if they’re reputable at all then you had to register with a government ID. The ones that don’t check ID are the ones that host ransomware gangs and CSAM distributors.

A VPN provides no privacy at all if it’s linked to an IP address or domain name and hardware that is registered to you.

Actual Budget is an open-source envelope-style budgeting tool similar to YNAB. It has a self-hostable syncing service so that you can manage your budget across multiple devices.

The reason you might want to do this is that it’s probably easier to do full account review sitting at your computer, but you might want to track expenses/receipts on your smartphone while you’re away from home.

When people you have maligned and persecuted show you compassion and give you aid, that should be humiliating and humbling.

Unfortunately it probably won’t have that effect on the people who need it.

There is no paradox.

Tolerance is a social contract.

If you abide by the terms of the contract (e.g. tolerance) then the contract applies to you and you are protected by it.

If you do not abide by the terms of the contract then it is broken, and you are not protected by the contract.

Would this mini pc be a good homeserver

For what purpose?

umm…

Yeah their whole shtick has been mimicking American corporatism et al since before the 80s. Aint working out for them.

There absolutely was an effort in Japanese businesses to imitate American businesses in the 1980s, but it was also very much a two-way street and it’s important to keep this in mind. Some of the toxic work culture elements that exist in the US corporate world today were imported. Also keep in mind that learning about other businesses was more difficult at the time because the Internet wasn’t a thing yet. Computers were barely getting local proprietary networks in very few, leading-edge businesses. If you wanted to learn about business operarions in another country you’d have to buy physical media (newspapers, industry journals, commentary books) or visit in person. It was slow and expensive.

Ultimately a lot of what you’re referring to tracks back to Theory Z which was also called “Japanese Management”.

In fact there has been a lot of cultural crosstalk between Japan and the US, going back a long time. For instance, baseball

Baseball was introduced to Japan in 1859 and is Japan’s most popular participatory and spectator sport. […]

The Japanese government appointed American oyatoi in order to start a state-inspired modernization process. This involved the education ministry, who made baseball accessible to children by integrating the sport into the physical education curriculum. Japanese students, who returned from studying in the United States captivated by the sport, took government positions. Clubs and private teams such as the Shinbashi Athletic Club, along with high school and college teams, commenced the baseball infrastructure.

When the digital electronics revolution came in the 1970s, Japan was both a competitor and a partner for the US. In the 1980s Japan’s economy rivaled the US. Frankly, a lot of it did in fact “work out” for them, though it’s difficult to separate the economic success from the electronics industry boom (how much of the rapid development of electronics was dependent on the corporate culture that had developed during the previous decade? how much of the business success was a result of the demand for the electronics products? how much of the demand was created internally by the businesses themselves? how would you even go about drawing lines between them?). The exploding popularity of video games (a side effect of the electronics revolution) resulted in a massive cultural export from Japan to the rest of the world, including the US.

And really the rabit hole goes way deeper. I highly recommend this video: Kawaii: Anime, Propaganda, and Soft Power Politics. by Moon Channel

So what you said is true, technically, but it is really a half-truth which projects the idea that the relationship was somehow one-sided, when in reality it was very much not.

And don’t you worry, the AI, the advertising partners and anyone who pays for data access can still see all of it anyway.

There’s nothing functionally communist about the government of China.

Encrypting the connection is good, it means that no one should be able capture the data and read it - but my concern is more about the holes in the network boundary you have to create to establish the connection.

My point of view is, that’s not something you want happening automatically, unless you manually configured it to do that yourself and you know exactly how it works, what it connects to and how it authenticates (and preferably have some kind of inbound/outbound traffic monitoring for that connection).

Ah, just one question - is your current Syncthing use internal to your home network, or does it sync remotely?

Because if you’re just having your mobile devices sync files when they get on your home wifi, it’s reasonably safe for that to be fire-and-forget, but if you’re syncing from public networks into private that really should require some more specific configuration and active control.

My main reasons are sailing the high seas

If this is the goal, then you need to concern yourself with your network first and the computer/server second. You need as much operational control over your home network as you can manage, you need to put this traffic in a separate tunnel from all of your normal network traffic and have it pop up on the public network from a different location. You need to own the modem that links you to your provider’s network, and the router that is the entry/exit point for your network. You need to segregate the thing doing the sailing on its own network segment that doesn’t have direct access to any of your other devices. You can not use the combo modem/router gateway device provided by your ISP. You need to plan your internal network intentionally and understand how, when, and why each device transmits on the network. You should understand your firewall configuration (on your network boundary, not on your PC). You should also get PiHole up and running and start dropping unwanted inbound and outbound traffic.

OpSec first.

In comparison with other city-builders Wandering Village isn’t very deep. There isn’t much in the way of complex systems. The art is nice though and it’s fairly relaxing to play.

Timberborn is a lot more involved and there is a lot more depth to population management and economics, and it’s pretty fun when you get to the level of reshaping the ground to suit your purposes. My favorite challenge is to arrange to keep the whole map green through a drought.

Wandering Village is more like a story or adventure game with city-builder mechanics, so it kind of needs a proper narrative arc.

I played this through shortly after the release and it is really enjoyable, but once you’ve built and stabilized your town and used all the space there’s nothing else to do. You can keep walking through the world but it’s just an endless series of repeat biomes and there’s no more growth potential so none of the side quests are of any interest.

Adding some endgame content might really help this.

There was no period without warfare or economic stability in Palestine.

I mean… there was time to build a bunch of modern residential buildings, hospitals and businesses (the things Israel is currently blowing up and bulldozing) and for people to live their lives without having to be armed 24/7. It literally has not been open warfare (at least for a little while), and yes there was some economic stability, enough for local Palestinian businesses to develop, for a semi-functional civilian government to form, and for civil services like hospitals and schools to be established. It hasn’t just been a warzone for 100 years.