Potential Rule 8 Question: Regarding the Recent Anti-NSFW Content Bans...

[Nyaa]

On the topic

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You can uninstall apps, including system ones, via adb, even without root. Note that uninstalling actually useful system apps can brick your phone or require factory reset.

Also, Spain is a part of EU, right? EU has at least semi-functional consumer protection laws last I heard. Can local governments really get away with such totalitarian bullshit?

 

[p3p3p0l3]

You can uninstall apps, including system ones, via adb, even without root. Note that uninstalling actually useful system apps can brick your phone or require factory reset.

Also, Spain is a part of EU, right? EU has at least semi-functional consumer protection laws last I heard. Can local governments really get away with such totalitarian bullshit?

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thanks! Didn't know about adb, and yes, they totally can get away with such bullshit even if it contradicts the own spanish constitution. If the whole catalan debacle has taugh me something is that politicians can and will bend even the most basic of rights if it suits them.

 

[Lady Naga]

Lol.... that was what it was like in the 80s and 90s, brah.

VHS and CDs and then DVDs was how anime and hentai got passed around...

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ɐnd occasionally, you'd find a huge stash in the woods from the porn fairy or something.

 

[da3monh0st3d]

Yeah, try watching porn when it takes an hour to load a single frame of video. Or stop being a cheapskate and pay for a proper VPN.

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Introducing wget and yt-dlp for videos and various kinds of data.

The oldschool way of doing it that isn't stupidly inconvenient is to batch download things locally while you're doing something else, such as sleeping or working. Not to rely on highspeed networking and the indefinitely long (or short) existence of the data on remote hosts. One should never trust remote hosts to not lose data for any number of reasons.

For doujins and such, gallery-dl is pretty nice too (even if I wrote my own thing instead). For erotica and written fiction in general, there's FanFicFare (it can in fact save images from stories too, just needs configuration).

All of those can be used with torsocks/torify or whatever other means of forcing routing through proxies one wants (many have built-in support for proxying too).

Mullvad's expensive and ultimately relies on trusting the corporation that their proxy vpn network actually works how they say, which is a problem compared to either Tor or I2P where one can actually verify what code is running at various layers (sure you can connect to Mullvad using Wireguard, but from there it's anyone's guess if they're full of air (or feds) or not) and what it does.

 

[Vajra]

You know a great number of TOR exit nodes are ran by the feds, right? And you can never tell which ones. And all of those things can be done a great deal faster with a VPN.
And no, mullvad is not expensive. It's 5 bucks. That's about as cheap as subscription services get, and mullvad haven't raised prices ever in the 15 years they've been active, so they're actually getting cheaper due to inflation.

If you want a VPN where the nuts and bolts are exposed to you, you can get AirVPN. I used it for about 2 years before switching to mullvad after an update caused performance issues on my old computer. AirVPN is the VPN for nerds.

 

[da3monh0st3d]

You know a great number of TOR exit nodes are ran by the feds, right? And you can never tell which ones. And all of those things can be done a great deal faster with a VPN.

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Timing attacks & global observers aside, Tor still provides better anonymity than most VPNs (Mullvad only recently added mitigations against timing/size analysis (or so they say) and it's literally the only one).

(Understanding the threat model and what guarantees it does claim matters.)

The better option though is to not need nor use exit nodes at all, and to have such mitigations as part of the network. I2P does that to some degree, though constant size isn't implemented at the moment and timing/batching could be improved. Cover traffic is present (to some degree) though.

I would indeed prefer if a new Loopix/Katzenpost-based network (proper mixnets) caught on (since Gnunet has the same kind of readiness forecasting as fusion power, i.e. "ready eventually™", so while it aims to address all the problems in a holistic manner... I'll probably be dead when it finally does so).

And no, mullvad is not expensive. It's 5 bucks. That's about as cheap as subscription services get.

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5 USD is expensive. If one goes for cryptocurrencies to obfuscate payment data, there's even more overhead cost.

I indeed do not have subscription services because they're typically scams and fail hard on the reliable long-term availability metric & on the short term (geoblocking is bullshit, I don't give a shit about distribution license agreements).

 

[Vajra]

Last time I tried I2P I could not get it to function properly, and I have no clue whether it was a problem with my network or a problem with my brain.

 

[da3monh0st3d]

Last time I tried I2P I could not get it to function properly, and I have no clue whether it was a problem with my network or a problem with my brain.

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It was probably either firewall-related or network bootstrap related. The latter differs in I2PD and might work better for you (although that implementation is written in C++ and I have reservations about making security software in languages that disregard memory safety as a matter of course).

edit: Much of the FAQ "help it doesn't work" here applies as much to I2PD as Java I2P.

 

[Vajra]

It was probably either firewall-related or network bootstrap related. The latter differs in I2PD and might work better for you (although that implementation is written in C++ and I have reservations about making security software in languages that disregard memory safety as a matter of course).

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My network has some strange issues that cause problems with some P2P programs. The most annoying one is that I can't get port forwarding to work, even when following the instructions from my router manufacturer to the letter. Funnily enough, VPNs were a way for me to get around that issue and get forwarded ports through the VPN server, until they started removing the ability to forward ports due to abuse.

I just want to use Perfect Dark. Is that too much to ask?

 

[da3monh0st3d]

My network has some strange issues that cause problems with some P2P programs. The most annoying one is that I can't get port forwarding to work, even when following the instructions from my router manufacturer to the letter. Funnily enough, VPNs were a way for me to get around that issue and get forwarded ports through the VPN server, until they started removing the ability to forward ports due to abuse.

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This makes me wonder if it isn't your ISP pulling shenanigans, rather than anything strictly in your home.

Didn't Perfect Dark's security get broken a while ago? Or were those just OPSEC failures?

edit: Well, in any case Perfect Dark should be subject to basically the same problem as Freenet/Hyphanet. The correlation one has been used for arrests with Freenet in the past.

 

[Vajra]

This makes me wonder if it isn't your ISP pulling shenanigans, rather than anything strictly in your home.

Didn't Perfect Dark's security get broken a while ago?

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It could be, but I'm more inclined to believe it's my router. The ISP I use has the second best reputation in my country. The one with the best reputation is not available where I live.

As for Perfect Dark, it's actually received a few updates in the past couple of years after a decade of nothing, probably to address security issues. Anti-piracy laws in Japan have become extremely draconian lately. I don't know of another way to get access to the Japanese market, though. Nyaa and DJT are somewhat limited in what kind of stuff they have.