Love seeing older ladies in here! Mine isn’t this old yet but love my lady cat as she starts to get a little older and wiser.

When you say car camp, do you mean like in an RV? Or “glamping”?

If it is just the essense of travelling and sleeping with minimal stuff in your car, then there are some places up in Manistee National Forest where I have done exactly that as well.

Seems like this is a great spot based on the suggestions! Will definitely consider a trip out there this year then.

I don’t mind memes and stuff like that at all. I would agree with @KingStrafeIV@midwest.social, once the memes and stuff get out of hand it can start to drown out useful conversation.

I say post and let people decide what they want to see. If we see some backlash then we can start to reign things in or modify as needed. “Meme Mondays” or something of the sort is a good, contained way to still have them be present.

I would have to agree. All the wilderness that is out there along with changing environments and terrain really makes for some amazing scenery as well as places for wildlife to really blossom.

Same here. My wife has seen/known about him for a while and was heartbroken hearing what happened to him.

Love it! Even though I am not from there they play a big influence in the midwest area, and are one of the nicer areas for camping I have found so I go there often.

Would love to see input on info from the area from locals so hopefully they also join.

Another good solution for tangles like this is taking warm oil and trying to run a comb through it. Helps break up tangles and stuff for anyone else having issues! Glad little girl is doing better!

So it seems like it was ProtonMail that handed over the information and not their VPN service. Just for clarification.

Technically speaking, if the people really wanted to remain fully anonymous they could’ve used a VPN to login to their email and the information could’ve then pointed to a VPN service which would have to comply with the authorities. Not sure how much they have to comply with Swiss orders in those regards but it seems like this is unfortunate but not fully on Proton imo.

Care to share why those are terrible? Because from what I’ve seen Proton and Mullvad are pretty reputable.

I agree NordVPN isn’t a good one, they have had a bad rep for breaches in the past and tbh that site used to be more credible a year or two ago before they reformatted and inserted all the ads in there.

Maybe share actual reputable VPNs then than talking down?

If you do solid research on it, it shouldn’t be a huge concern. Considering all my charges for my VPN are processed through Gibraltar and they post third-party audits on data retention and clarify what is logged, then I’d trust mine.

This is a decent list from a trustworthy website, although the one I use isn’t on there.

This is great! Love having something I can send people when trying to introduce them other than me trying to explain it.

lol wow such a silly thing and makes total sense as to why insta is fighting them on it then. Companies will fight tooth and nail over their particular “branding” of tech/products that basically everyone has.

Wish they would explain in the first post as to what legal actions have been taken against them because I am curious what grounds they would have for that (also kinda weird to have a request for donations in the same message without any further explanation).

Love the alternatives and think that Insta is grasping at straws, but hope we can get more info as stuff moves along and these fedi services get the support they need to withstand bullshit legal actions that grind down smaller operations.

I also think a big portion of it is riding the popularity wave while you can and getting your name tossed in the bowl while it is going on is a good look.

Seems more like people trying to capitalize on the bull run before it is not as lucrative to an outside investor.

You know they dump logs because like I said they employ third-party contractors to come in and perform security audits that validate their privacy policy, which if you do proper research should include dumping of logs, or only minimal data retention (like how mine only required an email address) along with dumping. So you can confirm it, I guess you can still be weary of that if you’d like but it is in their best interest to make sure you are actually safe, otherwise that is a hit on their reputation.

As for what happened after receiving a DMCA, they tell you that you have so many strikes on your account and that if you violate that a certain amount of times within a time period, then they will terminate your service. The ISP is not the person who would be pursuing you, their only liability is that you don’t do illegal things on their network.

But again, all these steps beyond just a VPN are to ensure there is as little identifying information as possible so they can’t track you down. Unless you are a literal Scene person who is doing the actual dumping and uploading of content, no one is out here watching you unless you leave easily identifiable information public while torrenting, at least this has been my experience after torrenting probably 100s of TBs of data both via seeding and leeching.

Ah lol my bad, unfortunately I have also been looking for this but the only direction I’ve ever seen is that large financial insititutions are really only in work with the big guys and there isn’t much on the open source or alternative front besides Google and Apple.

Are you just looking for a place to install apps?

Aurora Store is an open source alternative store front for Google Play. It anonimizes info using dummy Google accounts so that way you have some anonimity when acquiring apps.

Another alternative would be F-Droid which is a FOSS app store. From there you are opened up to a lot of open source apps you wouldn’t normally find.

You can also go to any site that hosts APKs (since that is all that is happening when you install an app, you’re installing the APK file), but those are kinda sketchy sometimes and no real way to confirm stuff. Or you can go to whatever Git repo that the app has maybe like GitHub and see the “releases” section.

Hope that helps!

Sorry but this just isn’t really correct and assumes the ISP puts in a lot of work to track people down.

They are not the ones enforcing DMCAs from illegal content. That is performed by cybersecurity companies that crawl through IPs in seed swarms and then report that automatically to the ISP if it registered within their IP range. This is a page from one of those companies advertising this service. You can see the report that Comcast gives out and it sites who reported the violation.

Also, yes a lot of VPNs do actually remove logs. Can’t report to authorities what you do not have, although some areas do have retention logs which is why you should be using a VPN service that hosts a server in a country that doesn’t care about that (I point mine to Canada depending on ping and that works for me). Lots of VPN services have third-party audits to confirm their privacy statements, and I utilize one that has no information on me besides the email I signed up with (and could use cash/crypto payments if I would like for extra anonymity).

Also, there are sites that check for IP leaks like this one which can confirm you are showing only the VPN IP address. As for the port issue, they also allow for port forwarding on a lot of VPN servers so you don’t need to be utilizing any ports directly to your connection, only to the server and then gets forwarded to a WireGuard port to finalize the connection.

I have torrented absolutely astounding amounts of data with my VPN active and have had zero issues. Then, the moment I accidentally disable the VPN for one reason or another and keep my torrents active, I received a DMCA for two torrents I was running at nearly the exact time I disabled my VPN connection.

To add to what the other person said, if you are not using your own IP (as in a VPN), then that isn’t much of a concern as long as the connection between you and your VPN server is properly secured and encrypted.