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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Yes, it’s the next step and an evolution because it is far more of a trust less approach. With VPNs you need to trust your provider. If they “give you up” then you’re well and truly fucked. For I2P there is no way for a malicious node operators to parse out who is doing what. And the source code you can vet yourself so no need to trust it. Still if you have actors working together in the nodes, the torrent provider and at the ISP level then you can most certainly find a way to break the layer of secrecy. The barrier is however vast and so far police haven’t spent that much effort on piracy because it isn’t a serious crime in the eyes of the law. And I don’t foresee that they will for many years.

    It’s also far more accessible than say Usenet and VPN+private trackers. Which is a very good thing for privacy in general.


  • Yes, it’s the next step and an evolution because it is far more of a trust less approach. With VPNs you need to trust your provider. If they “give you up” then you’re well and truly fucked. For I2P there is no way for a malicious node operators to parse out who is doing what. And the source code you can vet yourself so no need to trust it. Still if you have actors working together in the nodes, the torrent provider and at the ISP level then you can most certainly find a way to break the layer of secrecy. The barrier is however vast and so far police haven’t spent that much effort on piracy because it isn’t a serious crime in the eyes of the law. And I don’t foresee that they will for many years.

    It’s also far more accessible than say Usenet and VPN+private trackers. Which is a very good thing for privacy in general.


  • Yes, it’s the next step and an evolution because it is far more of a trust less approach. With VPNs you need to trust your provider. If they “give you up” then you’re well and truly fucked. For I2P there is no way for a malicious node operators to parse out who is doing what. And the source code you can vet yourself so no need to trust it. Still if you have actors working together in the nodes, the torrent provider and at the ISP level then you can most certainly find a way to break the layer of secrecy. The barrier is however vast and so far police haven’t spent that much effort on piracy because it isn’t a serious crime in the eyes of the law. And I don’t foresee that they will for many years.

    It’s also far more accessible than say Usenet and VPN+private trackers. Which is a very good thing for privacy in general.



  • That’s what I’m saying. It’s like everyone knows some college kids smoke pot from the smell in the dorms, but Police can’t legally search room by room to find out who it is, they need a search warrant which they need more than a general suspicion that someone in the dorms smoke to get.

    Same with I2P, it’s done in a public setting so from traffic patterns we can be pretty sure someone is downloading a shit ton, and that it’s likely illegal content. Residential IPs have little reason to consistently download several GB files on a daily/weekly basis, streaming and download also look vastly different profile wise and at least no one I know of go to those lengths to try and mask their traffic patterns by trying to make streaming look like download or vice versa.

    But as I said and you reiterated, you still need to crack the encryption to actually prove it in court. But given a specific target there are many ways to do that. A generic approach is likely not going to happen. Which means that I2P is secure much like having a secret chat in a crowded place like Grand Central Station in NY. You know that people are meeting there to chat about illegal stuff but you don’t know who. It becomes much easier if you know who to follow and eavesdrop on, but of course still not easy.

    It is however nowhere near as safe as communication over channels that aren’t public to begin with. But such of course do not exist outside military and other special contexts.



  • +1 for Genshin. While I think your gacha warning is excellent I do want to point out that the amount of resources you get for getting characters is more than enough to clear all story content. Hell if you’re a good player you could probably clear the whole game without using a single primogem, not even the countless thousands you get along the way.

    And massive is also the understatement of the year. There is voiced content here that dwarfs even whole trilogies. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more recorded lines than all of Dragon Age and Mass Effect put together. And the story is likely not even at the halfway point yet, there’s still years to go. Closest analogy would probably be SWTOR, the MMO, but with much better combat.




  • I don’t know why the article doesn’t bring up Valve being the company to bring loot boxes and that business model to gaming as the prime example. Valve earns extreme money from the skins market and gambling in CSGO / CS2 since they sell the keys and take a cut of trades as well. They’re far more concerned with money than actually caring for the people involved. Gambling ruins lives and Valve is the gambling company that faces by far the least vitriol in that horrendous crowd.


  • I disagree because the biggest they did and continue to do is loot boxes. I argue that it was Valve that popularized that business model with CSGO and it is the most predatory shit that has ever entered the gaming sphere. It’s a complete cancer and Valves implementation is amongst the worst there is because of their market giving the items easily accessible real money value. This makes it not just like gambling in my extremely firm opinion, it makes it actual gambling. They’re also double dipping with the community market since it also takes a cut from aforementioned gambling. How Valve has escaped the vast majority of loot box hate is completely beyond me. And how they’ve managed to so far avoid a world wide crackdown on the unregulated gambling is also to me mind boggling. I despise Valve for this to the very core of my being because I know first hand how easily that shit can ruin lives and I know people that have got hooked and fucked up their life big time from CS skins. Left at the altar fucked up levels.