Thought this was a Republican ad for a second. Similar language and appeal to fear and ignorance.

I’ve been using last.fm for, I guess, decades now. Looking at what my “neighbors” are listening to is the most helpful.

Yeah, torrents usually run 100-300KiB/s. I guess not too bad for smaller files. About an hour or three per GB.

I mean, you can be sued for anything, but it will get thrown out. Like, I guess the MPAA could offer a movie for download, then try to sue the first hop they upload a chunk to, but that really doesn’t make any sense (because they offered it for download in the first place). Furthermore, the first hop(s) aren’t the people that are using the file, and they can’t even read it. If people could successfully sue nodes, then ISPs and postal services could be sued for anything that passes through their networks.

Onion-like routing. It takes multiple hops to get to a destination. Each hop can only decrypt the next destination to send the packet to (i.e. peeling off a layer of the onion).

Hmm, so looks like around 100kB/s. That’s about what I remember (100kB/s - 300kB/s).

I’ve recently been trying out Tribler, and it’s much faster than the last time I tried it (I’ve seen 2MB/s on popular torrents, but around 500kB/s on less popular). Not sure if there are simply more exit nodes with more bandwidth now or if there are more people on the Tribler network seeding.

According to the docs there’s some kind of search functionality built into it: https://github.com/BiglySoftware/BiglyBT/wiki/MetaSearch

Off-topic: I haven’t tried i2p in years and have never used BiglyBT. Out of curiosity, what download speeds are you seeing?

Where I live, I would still need to pay for a VPN to use torrents. I’ve been banned from an ISP before for torrenting (thankfully, I had multiple ISPs available for me).

At the moment, I just “pay” legally because I get a few “free” streaming plans from my mobile provider and ISP. Occasionally, I just use a free streaming site if I really want to watch something that’s not available to me. Every once in a while, I try anonymous p2p such as Tribler or torrenting over I2P, but it’s still extremely slow, unfortunately. I’ve never used Usenet, but I think it’s about the same price as a VPN or seedbox would be?

Large “activist” shareholders (usually fund managers, I believe) often step-in and make demands when the stock isn’t performing as they would like. Gabe could be CEO, but shareholders could threaten to dump stock to get the company to act in a certain way. I believe that was behind all the tech layoffs. My conspiracy-biased mind believes these shareholders sometimes push for things that aren’t exactly in the company’s best interest, but are in the investor’s best interest. E.g. if the fund management company is also heavily in commercial real-estate, they may try to get other companies they are invested in to institute return-to-office mandates. My guess is these big players do all kinds of shady shit (use their influence to control media narratives, politicians, etc).