stupid_asshole69 [none/use name]

I am some kind of troll.

Again, you’re making what reads like an incredibly stupid decision.

You have a computer with your name on it, the vps you set up, in a country where your actions are legal and another with your name on it in a country where you reside and your actions aren’t legal.

You connect to the vps using a protocol that authenticates your identity.

Let me just walk through the steps to prosecute you for piracy or a different crime with much more serious consequences:

Through leaky dns, a tipoff, some transformer or just the usual 24/7 isp traffic analysis someone realizes you’re doing a piracy.

They get logs from the isp and if your bad dns doesn’t give you up immediately then they see the outlier ip of the vps. ISPs always cooperate, often the special relationship between companies that are allowed to operate critical infrastructure and law enforcement is enshrined in law.

Whois points them at the vps company, whose policies may require them to get a warrant or equivalent in order to allow law enforcement into your actual running vps but will absolutely comply with kyc aligned requests and laws.

As an aside, you may think that the vps provider could stand up against the cops for you, but they’re not doing that. No one is keeping their mouth shut for $3/mo unless that’s their literal whole business model. They’ll just find new tenants.

Anyway so now they know it’s you on each end and have an airtight piracy case. If that seems like a lot of work to do through for someone whose downloading SpongeBob, it is! Piracy investigations are often not worthwhile as crimes in and of themselves.

The cops will have a strong incentive to get you on other charges, so when they search your house they’ll be looking not only for the computer with your name on it but for anything that could be misconstrued as illegal or prohibited. Hope you’re clean.

But assuming you don’t have an unregistered firearm and pile of illicit drugs next to your computer they’ll still take the computer in for a snoopin. Assuming again that nothing is found but wholesome episodes of SpongeBob on your computer they will without any doubt find your /etc/WireGuard folder with all the config files. Oh, they go to the vps you rented. Imagine that!

In America the crime of setting up a telecommunications system for the purpose of doing something illegal is prosecuted as wire fraud. It might be called different things in different countries but the basic conditions for the creation of law around those actions were about the same everywhere: big money stealin’ using new telegraph technology. The specific technology may have changed but the law inevitably didn’t, so they’ll pile the wire fraud equivalent charge onto you.

I don’t know your country but piracy is probably a low level crime there compared to wire fraud. So instead of facing a fine or a few months for downloading a soccer game now you’re facing a big monetary penalty and many years in jail for creating a system of wire fraud.

Even the often times not very smart police can figure out how to do this. You can check this out by looking in your own countries cop arrest records and see what they’re jamming people up for when it comes to computer crimes. It’s usually the local equivalent of wire fraud when they can get it because the newer, computer specific laws are harder to convict under or have more lenient penalties proscribed.

So anyway, instead of literally building an illegal crime tunnel which is a much worse crime than piracy, spend the money on air or one of the other piracy vpns. You’ll be saving yourself a lot of headache and protecting yourself much better than you did with a home built system.

I took the time to write this out much more explicitly after being told to fuck off because you’re making an incredibly stupid decision. I don’t want you to feel stupid, but I want you to recognize that you’re pursuing a more difficult path that opens you up to much more serious charges and which you are not even capable of getting up and running at the moment.

Just think on that for a second.

You can’t get your illegal crime tunnel working right and you’re asking for help with it on a public forum.

It’s good to try things for the sake of learning. I would strongly advise against trying to learn by doing illegal things and asking for help in public in the strongest possible terms.

Go get a piracy vpn service instead. It accomplishes your goals and keeps you safer than your home grown would if it were working.

That’s stupid.

You have a computer with your name on it in a country where what you’re doing is legal and you’re connecting to it using a process that authenticates with a shared secret from another computer that most likely has your name on it in a country where what you’re doing is illegal.

You’re not fooling anyone and by creating your own crime tunnel with your name on both ends of it and I’m gonna hesitate to use specific legal language to describe the new, more serious type of crime you are now committing because it’s different all over but there’s almost always a type of wire fraud that covers this because banks all tried to do it when different kinds of electronic transfers popped up.

Just use air like a normal person.

You mean the audio lessons? They’re on mya.

The supposed gnome workflow is for keyboard users to go fuck themselves.

Don’t waste time learning the gnome way of doing things, it’s not gonna remain consistent long enough to let you reap any benefits from that knowledge.

I wouldn’t worry about moving away from the apple devices. Just turn on lockdown and keep it on, do the privacy checkup or whatever it’s called and use a doh profile.

On the other hand, which is to say stuff you should be doing to enhance your privacy, stop voting. Assuming you’re in the us, voter rolls with your home address are free for any advocacy group to peruse. Consider moving your home under a trust or something so that your property taxes are not tied to your name. If you rent, stop renting, if you can’t, consider renting a place from your local credit union instead of from a company. Banks have more chance to protect your privacy than a rental company will r an individual.

Choose a db you’re comfortable with, create structures in it that represent your files and their location in your filesystems, add more structures that represent metadata and then query it when you need to find things.

It’s what phones do.

If you go to a website your phone reports its model number to that website. If it doesn’t then that website can (and often does) use javascript to figure out what model it is with, among other things, viewport size.

Unless you have taken the time to turn it off, your phones model is embedded in the metadata of the screenshot you took.

Before anyone takes action based on this post, consider critically weather your device and usage pattern merit concealing your phone model from people or other entities.

It’s also the ops bubble. My replies are generally directed at the op and their post.

I will also point to the requirement though, that us visa applicants give up social media account names or be subject to denial as evidence that it’s considered normal.

If it wasn’t considered normal to have social media then the cbp wouldn’t be so quick to implement that process.

If you’re in dadabots point me at the place to download the full 12hrs of no soul.

The ol’ sarcasm detectors’ flashing red, ringing the bell and pouring black smoke out of all the panel joints but yes: if you want to fit into society it’s important to have social media.

If you wanted to live a private life in the 1970s, would it be better to descend from your cabin hundreds of miles from civilization with a wild mane of shaggy hair wearing your homemade leather suit or with an unstylish but kempt haircut, nondescript jeans and shirt and military duffel bag looking like any other of the myriad characters wandering the roads at the time?

Obviously you’d want the latter. Part of privacy is blending in so that you don’t arouse interest.

Nowadays if you want to be a private person and still interact in society, like the op, you need to have all the trappings of a someone who doesn’t raise alarm bells. That includes, especially as your age drops, social media.

Social media is literally normal.

It has gone through a process called normalization in order to become an expected part of social interaction. The op even said that people expect them to have a particular type of account and they feel like not having one excludes them from having more friends.

Yes, you are normal if you have a social media account and abnormal if you don’t.

Anyone have any advice?

Yes: recognize what you’re trying to accomplish and change your actions.

Privacy requires shutting people out of your life. Meeting new people requires letting people into your life.

If people expect that the first “gate” into your life is your social media then meet that expectation. Have a social media presence. Post shit that you want people to see on it.

If you’re afraid of letting the companies that operate social media see your life, examine why. It may be that you’re perfectly fine with the trade off of a limited hang out in exchange for looking normal. Most people are.

It doesn’t have to be instagram. You could have a snapchat or a tiktok or whatever.

No, you can’t.

You are not the hero, effortlessly weaving down the highway between minivans on your 1300cc motorcycle, katana strapped across your back, using dual handlebar mounted twiddler boards to hack the multiverse.

If ai driven agentic systems were used to obfuscate a persons interactions online then the fact that they were using those systems would become incredibly obvious and provide a trove of information that could be easily used to locate and document what that person was doing.

But let’s assume what the op did worked, and no one could tell the difference.

That would be worse! Suddenly there’s hundreds of thousands of data points that could be linked to you and all that’s needed for a warrant are two or three that could be interpreted as probable cause of a crime!

You thought you were helping yourself out by turning the fuzzer on before reading trot pamphlets hosted on marxists.org but now they have an expressed interest in drain cleaner and glitter bombs and best case scenario you gotta adopt a new pitt mix from the humane society.

This isn’t a very smart idea.

People trying to obfuscate their actions would suddenly have massive associated datasets of actions to sift through and it would be trivial to distinguish between the browsing behaviors of a person and a bot.

Someone else said this is like chaff or flare anti missile defense and that’s a good analog. Anti missile defenses like that are deployed when the target recognizes a danger and sees an opportunity to confuse that danger temporarily. They’re used in conjunction with maneuvering and other flight techniques to maximize the potential of avoiding certain death, not constantly once the operator comes in contact with an opponent.

On a more philosophical tip, the masters tools cannot be turned against him.

The client saves them.

If you have a lot of crap in small files it might be time to stop depending on the directory structure to navigate and switch to a database.

Please stop. They accept cash, just use cash.

Oh fuck I didn’t actually answer your question! Sorry!

You want the two major private trackers for music. They both have active communities and all kinds of groupings of releases.

You have to have the cookie for squid dot wtf first. Go there.

You have two problems, curation and piracy.

Piracy is easy, get into a few good private trackers or download from YouTube or use soulseek (carefully!).

Curation is harder and if you don’t want to do it yourself you have to make friends with people who are into the same music as you or use the tools of feed based services like Spotify to dump into your piracy rube-Goldberg contraption.

It’s worth not doing the latter because you will end up failing the Dow Jones and the Industrials test if you just stick to only what the machine gives you because it’s what you like.

Go make friends with people and enjoy music, a collaborative hallucination unique to humanity, with them.