• 0 Posts
  • 64 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle










  • I didn’t see anything about not keeping logs (please correct me if I just missed it). Also, they don’t have any built-in DNS protection, and it’s expensive at $8.34usd/month.

    It’s an interesting idea to stratify your VPN and force individual apps to bind to their own tunnels, but seems like a lot of extra setup for little payoff, and if you can’t be certain they’re not keeping logs, there’s little benefit to having multiple VPN connections vs one.

    Please, feel free to correct me if I’ve misunderstood something.


  • I can also vouch for PIA’s cost vs. performance, but their prices have risen recently (still cheaper than most), and I also learned the other day that they’re now owned by Kape Technologies, a company that used to do bloat/malware development to do shady data mining.

    I’m actually considering switching to AirVPN or Mozilla VPN/Mullvad, despite being a longtime customer, just for the peace of mind. Also, if you buy the three year plan of AirVPN, it’s cheaper than PIA.

    And, PIA still doesn’t offer a standalone WireGuard configuration file, despite promising it was in the works a few years ago, and that’s been a stick in my craw when trying to set it up the way I want on Bazzite Linux.



  • It doesn’t matter if god exists, it matters that most everybody thinks one exists. Using that belief to discuss piracy is not a flawed discussion, and it is not dependent on the actual existence of a god, just the existence of people’s belief in them.

    And here’s where we disagree. I suppose I can see this logic, but my issue is that anyone can and will interpret “God’s will” in their own way. How the author presents their case is less reasonable than simply talking about the moral justifications from a secular standpoint. People who rely on God’s opinion that much are likely some variety of fundamentalist and not likely to be engaging in piracy in the first place.

    So for the rest, why bother with the religious part, since they’ll just interpret in their own way?



  • Prove gods exist, else the core question is moot.

    Religion really does have the potential to blow up in one’s face, and in the worst cases, literally.

    But religion has so many good sides too and much to say on many issues, so what advice does it have to offer on file-sharing? Is it a sin? Or is sharing with one’s peers a supreme act of kindness and generosity?

    The first question is made irrelevant by the latter two. If religion in general had helpful things to say, it would be unambiguous. However, due to the intrinsically interpretive nature of religion, it is confusing at best and harmful at worst. Sure, some people might arrive at an answer to a question, but it is not necessarily a rational answer.

    Also, the fact that religion can and is often used to turn insane notions like killing people into acceptable behavior (to the religious) should be reason enough to disregard it when seeking answers. Why should we care what religion has to say whatsoever based on this fact?

    Lastly, whatever good comes from religion is humanistic in origin. All of the “good” of religion can be found without it, and if it offered anything substantively unique, magic would be real. You get to decide your own morality, and this entire article is doing precisely that, regardless of religious preference.

    Time will tell if the various Gods in the universe will choose to forgive those who copy music and movies, or those who merely covet their neighbor’s files.

    No it won’t, because again, there’s no objective evidence gods exist. Some might say that we’d find out when we die, but we have no evidence of any particular afterlife existing beyond blind assertions by people who have had near death experiences and religious texts, neither of which agree or should be taken as proof of anything (unless you want to argue that works like the Epic of Gilgamesh were also true tales).

    If God(s) has a problem with piracy, let him put a stop to it himself, but I don’t see him stopping real problems like billionaire robber barons and cancer in children, so nobody should feel any concern or worry that there’s some cosmic policeman waiting in the bushes to jump out and catch them.