For me if Christmas eve is a Monday we usually get the whole Monday off, if it’s later in the week we only get a half day. We get from Christmas eve 12 noon to January 1 off normally

ISP around me had policies like “we can provide Usenet except for the binaries trees”

Gen X here. I agree torrents are for legit uses only

Usenet is the best for piracy

Removed by mod

I think in 2001 I was making a Linux from scratch system having not gotten enough from red hat and Debian with home configured and compiled kernels

Fun times and no, nothing like the commercial home operating systems back then

I occasionally accidentally open the fandom page for a game on Chrome with no ad block (which I keep around for Google apps) and it’s unusable. Go there on Firefox with ublock origin and it’s fine

And there’s worse sites than that

Download sites for things like Minecraft mods have several competing “download” buttons without ad block

It’s nuts people might accept these, let alone want them

You can keep secrets from the future. Future decryption won’t help government see what you did in the now, the logs don’t store the encrypted payload, only the end points and the user/ip

Your ISP sees the connection to news.usenetserver.com and if they cared could get a court order to get your data from them. They can compel you to release your username and password.

You also need to protect yourself against future law and enforcement

I know that government prosecutions for fraud against government use IP addresses

The IP address identifies the company or home the fraud was done from, the account the money went to identifies the individual

If breaking the law and able to afford to make it difficult for prosecutors, it’s probably best to make it difficult for the prosecutors, we may have an activist pro copyright holder government in future and logs are forever (or 5 years)

It seems trivial for the US government to tie data into TOR to data out. If you’re hiding things that government is willing to spend effort seeking, it’s not safe.

Is your home machine, your phone, better protected than the VPN servers? I bet you’re not as good at IT security as the IT security staff VPN companies hire

If your threat model includes nation state actors, you’re best off not using networked computers

That says their error was trying American threats “we got you dead to rights, tell us your income and we’ll tell you how much to pay our we’ll sue for punitive damages”

Which isn’t legal in Australia. They would have been ok if they had asked to send a letter saying “stop it or pay us a reasonable amount for one person viewing the film once” but of course actual damages aren’t enough for film companies

They were too greedy.

We have a clean desk policy at my workplace too, we also don’t take classified documents home

We need to provide a photo of our home work area as part of our application for work from home. It’s needed as part of the employer’s duty of care - managers are supposed to examine the photo and determine its a safe work area

Really all that happens is a photo is attached to the application and never looked at

I doubt American employers have any duty of care towards work from home employees.

I bet the unblurring was about being able to see the documents. AI blur is pretty aggressive at blurring anything that isn’t a face

They might be able to see if the data indicates the network has been though NAT (network address translation) twice, but that would look just like someone who has plugged their own wifi box into the modem

There’s always NAT. You get one IP address, your router/wifi shares the network using NAT

But ISPs aren’t looking for NAT, since everyone with wifi is using it

Were Firefox to go bad, we would use a non-bad fork off Firefox. It’s open source.

Lucky kids

Do you mean that you don’t like the way they prefer to defend individuals against corporations rather than the other way around, or the way they don’t help people defend themselves against lawful and reasonable government action?

Disney will happily spend a million to defend against 50k if they have a chance of getting a court decision that their contract is valid for everything associated with the Disney brand