Tldr: capitalist efficiency

There is a neat piece about the OS side; worth reading.

As someone who went with the Mullvad suggestion despite having heard about port forwarding, I think a big part of why is because whenever it comes up people don’t take the time to explain why port forwarding is important. Until I asked in this thread the only thing I’d seen is some vague handwaving about it being faster.

I’ve only just dipped my toes in so maybe this is off base, but the community seems to have an elitism problem. If the people who know are dismissive of ignorant noobs who want to learn, the long term health of the community suffers for it.

Maybe sometimes you gotta shitpost the shitpost with sincerity. Maybe sometimes you don’t particularly care about loss references. Maybe it’s Maybelline. I don’t think we’ll ever know.

It’s a “fantasy football” miniatures/board game, except by fantasy I mean orcs and elves. There’s a lot of violence.

Mechanically it’s about positioning and risk management. Like chess, but the pieces are asymmetrical, unbalanced by design, and wildly incompetent. But it’s ok you don’t have to do probability math because “haha funny sports man trips on his feet just before the endzone, then dies” is all you need to understand to appreciate it as a spectator sport.

Blood Bowl

Oh yikes. Thanks for explaining!

What’s wrong with not using port forwarding?

The prison industrial complex: hold my beer

There’s definitely problems with that option. But in the situation you described I’d just say fuck you and close the page rather than support that. People immediately leaving is probably worse than bad questions don’t get answers.

An abstain, maybe? Would also be useful for questions that you won’t know enough to answer. Then if you keep getting hung juries you know you’re asking bad questions.

They’re just trying to teach their human to hunt. First step is to demonstrate that the mouse is food. Diva is clearly just getting frustrated with how slow a learner the human is.

It works for me… I think it’s something like it goes faster with port forwarding but to be honest I don’t know the details.

Dang that is a perfectly shaped box for such a streamlined cat 😍

As a general rule, if you’re getting a service for free, you’re the product.

I don’t know much about the downsides of free in the context of VPNs, as I didn’t really get in to the technical ins and outs. But when we’re talking security and privacy I think the cost of supporting something good and sustainable is well worth it.

I’ve heard port forwarding is helpful for speed, and that might be a paid only thing, but to be honest I’m consistently surprised by how fast things go for me just using mullvad.

Another thing you may wish to consider: the Proton CEO has praised Trump which is a huge red flag to me in the privacy space.

These resources are really all you need, but they’re all individually quite focused so for a new person it can be hard to see the forest.

An overview:

For movies, streaming sites are fine.

To start torrenting safely:

• get a paid vpn (i use mullvad)
• download qbittorrent or the like
• find a public tracker from the megathead, general ones are easy/convenient for starting imo
• virus scan/use common sense/be careful

It’s what I use and it works well for me. It seemed like the best option when I was researching this recently. Plus the icon is cute.