If you have slower internet or don’t seed 24/7, I would recommend just focusing on seediing torrents with a low number of seeders. It doesn’t really matter if you leech the latest episode of a popular new TV series, as there will be so many other seeders, (many with a better capacity to seed). However, for something older or more niche your decision to seed or leech could determine whether someone else gets to enjoy that content.

The first game is much creepier than the second, I think due to a combination of the character designs, the writing and the general plot. The second game feels more akin to Danganronpa, in that the characters and setting are a bit surreal. Because it was a 3DS game, it also uses cartoony 3D models that make everything a bit lighter and less gritty than the original game. I haven’t played the third one yet (still need to get around to 100% completing the second game).

I found 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors to be very unsettling. I played it in bed at night with headphones on and it totally sucked me in. I guess this is a different type of horror to many of the games suggested here, which I personally don’t find scary.

I limit as much as I can through a combination of privacy-respecting apps and fewer apps (if I can reliably use the web browser for something, I will) and then use custom DNS filters (NextDNS) to minimise further leakage. I also disable any pre-installed applications I don’t need (you can remove them with Universal Android Debloater but I don’t need the extra storage space). I also use a VPN at all times.

Mine just plays a jingle lol

If you want to stick with Chromium-based browsers, you could try Vivaldi. I am a Firefox user myself but Vivaldi is my backup browser for those rare occasions where I have issues. 95% of the browser is open source, with the remaining 5% being comprised of the closed source UI. Vivaldi has a pretty reasonable privacy policy, an inbuilt ad-blocker and is a 100% employee owned company. It supports all major operating systems and has a sync feature so you could use it as your main browser across all devices if you wanted.

Signal…what? The Android version hasn’t supported SMS for 2 years at this point.

SMS is less secure and arguably less private.

To me it’s much more of an ethical concern than a practical concern. Digital privacy is a human right (privacy is listed under Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The only immediate ways in which I can uphold this right and contribute to a fairer society is through exercising my right to vote and making ethically superior choices as a consumer. So for me, it’s less about avoiding the government or big tech for practical reasons like surveillance and scams driven by data breaches (though of course these are still valid concerns for many) and more about supporting those who I believe are doing the right thing (or are at least an improvement).

If we don’t support the better alternatives then they will never grow enough to achieve mainstream success and challenge the current establishment. I know some people here hate Proton, but that is a great example of a privacy-focused tech company which has grown significantly because of consumer support - to the point where it has a full suite of products that do a much better job of competing with heavyweights like Google than a tiny, unsupported startup would have had. A company like that might not even have survived without its early adopters, and then the next one to come along would be even less likely to receive investment in the early stages due to the history of failure within the sector. To me, being privacy conscious is all about being part of a positive movement; supporting people and companies that are doing the right thing and refusing to accept problematic behaviours and practices I see in the world.

I know for some people, particularly minorities, privacy is a real world concern and I fully acknowledge that but I think sometimes we do ourselves a disservice by trying to sell it to everyone in such a scary way. Humans are not very good at perceiving or responding to threat until there is actual undisputable evidence of it in their immediate surroundings. So when you tell these people that they’ll lose all their money to scammers or that their government is going to unjustly target them they don’t actually believe you or take you seriously. They think you are insane. The better sell, I think, is to show people that this is a positive movement and worldwide community that they can be a part of.

EDIT: I was going to add this yesterday but forgot. I don’t know if anyone here has seen The Social Dilemma - the big reason that documentary went viral was not just because it gave a very detailed and scary overview of all the problems with surveillance capitalism and the attention economy, but also because it finished on quite an optimistic note. They told viewers “we know this is all really scary for you but we have smart people working tirelessly to change things and build a movement that we want you to be a part of”. It left people feeling engaged, like they still had some level of agency over the situation instead of paralysed with fear and just totally abandoning all hope.

Not laughing at the paying customers

You literally changed the title so you could call them idiots.

Yes, people have had these existential crisis moments about piracy for many years. Just a couple of notable examples within my lifetime were the many issues of The Pirate Bay in the 2000s, the closure of KickassTorrents in the 2010s and RARBG’s shutdown last year. People panicked over the initial DeezLoader and YouTube Vanced project shutdowns too. Every single time, without fail, something new rises up whether it’s a direct clone or something entirely new. It’s not always as good initially, but I can’t really say any of these “crackdowns” have had a significant effect from my perspective.

Yes, the projects on GitHub were shutdown. That doesn’t mean the extension suddenly became “ineffective” or is no longer being worked on. It was simply cloned elsewhere and development continues. I think I am getting an idea of why you’re so pessimistic about piracy - you base your opinions on articles and forum speculation instead of lived experience. If you actually used this extension, you would know that at no point has it stopped working.

Almost all the ways to bypass news paywalls are currently ineffective.

What are you referring to here? Bypass Paywalls Clean is still being updated and covers a lot of stuff across multiple languages.

Is that actually a proxy or just a clone?

I never said it’s not happening and I’m not sure why you’re suggesting otherwise. All I said is that it is a vague reason to have this level of paranoia about your privacy. It’s like having a super strict diet because you’ve read that certain foods contain carcinogens and will increase your risk of cancer. Technically it’s true, but the only people who should actually be concerned about this are people with pre-existing risk factors or whose excessive/unusual lifestyle places them at extreme risk. Nothing you have said in this thread suggests you are any different from any other regular person in the world, so I don’t feel you should be as concerned as you seem to be.

Yes, you are worrying too much I’d say. Your concerns are valid and real but you are overestimating the likelihood of something happening to you if you make a mistake or compromise and that is causing you unnecessary anxiety. You don’t have to choose between perfect privacy or caving in completely. Everything you do will help, but not necessarily to the degree required to justify sacrifices to your personal life or mental health. If you have a very specific concern about your government targeting you based on something you are doing, maybe it is worth it, but vague reasoning like “hackers with AI” is not worth this level of paranoia.

🤡

As I said last time this was shared, the article isn’t really about TikTok - that is only used as a recent example of why these big proprietary datasets are problematic. The main point of the article is really to explain why we need an alternative and how it could work, using the example of Getgee. I wish more people would read past headlines, especially for interesting articles such as this one.

*Nyaa-uh

It’s funny how similar these shutdown messages always are. They never state the real reason why the project is ending and always have some weird sentence at the end recommending everyone use paid services, even though their entire project completely undermined them for years. I guess they are advised (threatened) to use certain language by whoever is pressuring them.