lol… I get that ;]

I’d probably stick with it as well. My current view is that VPN mostly just provides a cover for general piracy. If “they” wanted to devote the effort they could figure out who I was. But I am sure a lot of vpns serve as honey pots and you wouldn’t want to blow your cover just for someone downloading a movie they never would have paid for anyway. They got the signature thing, but if I was doing something serious then that is going to be quite different than my general use signature and match every other user of Tails or whatever. The signature thing really sucks, but we do have control over what signatures we leave where and via vpns and tor those different “personas” don’t need to be connected by singular ip address.

Or at least that is my present opinion. If anyone here has a good argument against it, I’d like to hear it.

Yep. Learning anything new or even just changing habits takes effort, time and mostly a sense of responsibility for yourself. A lot of the non-mainstream things we do in pursuit of privacy really aren’t much more complicated than their mainstream counterparts.

Thanks for rubbing it in… and failing to mention what service you use.

It can, but it isn’t likely as specific as an ip is.

My view is that security/privacy is a sliding rule and that every little effort helps.

It isn’t just Mullvad. I’m sure it is also AirVPN and I presume that it includes all of the popular ones. I doubt port forwarding has anything to do with it.

It was worth skimming through it for me…

I largely agree with stupid_asshole69’s comment, but I will add that just using a common commercial printer and using cash is still an option.

Looking at that map…

Tiny little Bangladesh having half the population of the US in that little space in mind blowing. I don’t quite understand how that happens.

The rule of thumb is that you want at least the same amount of ram that you have (plus a little more just in case) if you have a laptop or similar where you’re going to use hibernate, since that works by moving whatever is in the ram into the swap.

Also, note that swap is basically emergency (and slow) ram. You want enough to handle any emergencies. Although I think it gets used before ram fills up completely. There are a lot of uses of ram where swap works just as well. Like if you got a program and/or browser tabs open in the background that you’re not presently using, it needs somewhere to store that data. And don’t forget about all the programs you may use that handle or process large files. Typically that gets loaded into ram (or direct to swap if fast access isn’t needed), and if ram can’t hold it, something that is used less is moved to swap.

But if there is no room, it keeps trying any way and it all freezes up like what op describes.

So… since people often have 16 gigs of ram in their machines, no, that isn’t a huge amount of swap to have. Even on my desktops I generally have at least 32 gigs swap just because I often do things that fill up a lot of ram. One of them has 64 gigs ram, and it can fill a good chunk of the swap as well if I try to render something heavy in Blender. Add on to that, I may have a vm open as well. That often uses swap along with filling ram. And of course general web use where it is normal to keep several tabs constantly open.

I want to make sure I have more swap than will ever be used. Because if it does get used, then that means it and ram is full and the computer will freeze.

Is your swap big enough? Some installers default to only 1gig. That isn’t big enough normally.

If it fills the ram and the swap, it will cause what you are seeing. Typically the suggestion is a little more than however much ram you have. Personally I set it at either 16 or 32gigs or more. Depending on the machine and what I intend on doing with it and how much drive space I have available.

You can keep a system monitor open (or top, htop etc) and keep an eye on it when you’re doing something ram hungry, like having a bunch of browser tabs open or whatever. If it freezes and you look over and see the ram usage pegged to the top, that will suggest that that is your problem.

I don’t know. I’d be interested in learning more about that as well.

I do like it better than element, though. It is more light weight.

I use librewolf for browsing (with the temporary containers addon), nheko for matrix, thunderbird (of course)… that has pgp functionality built in.

When it comes to web browsing I think it is a good idea to use more than one browser. For most general use stuff I use librewolf and already mentioned. I do all my work related stuff, banking and purchasing in chromium. Unfortunately we’re back in the days of internet explorer when a lot of mainstream sites are broken and only work well on one browser. But the uses I mentioned are not as important in regards to privacy so it works for me.

Crypto sites are also often to be built for a chromium base, but I like to keep those separate and use Brave for that.

Yes… and if it needs to be said, I am also directly implying that anonymity is a large and crucial part of privacy.

I do a lot of risky and dangerous shit on the internet.

well… this seems to be the bigger issue. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but if it ain’t worth it, then it ain’t worth it. That seems to be what you are telling yourself.

If you’re ready to cut bait, then you just need to drop every connection that existed during that period. And start anew putting a solid line between before and now. Be the ringpop you want to be and act like old ringpop never happened. I suspect that guilt might be playing a part in your angst as well. The only way to fix that is to be a better man.

I doubt it is drugs that op is worrying about. The police need to catch you with that in possession. That doesn’t sound like what op is talking about. Sounds more like he is paranoid about getting caught for past actions.

If op is legitimately doing things that can get them serious legal time or worse, then the last thing they need to do is talk about it with someone who can identify them.

Which is also what you do when you vote. You control who has your identifying information and who has the information on how you voted. Which I guess is still different from Signal if we are still talking about that. Since you cannot control who has your identifying information.

Ah… I guess I didn’t understand how services like encrypted webmail worked. I’ve only ever used local pgp with thunderbird or whatever. I was assuming (incorrectly) that those services operated in the same manner. Thanks for explaining it to me.

I’m not finding any definitions of “privacy” that suggest the term refers to control of something. Regardless of whether that something is within or outside of your reach.

You appear to be saying that like it is a bad thing, rather than a good thing. Easily making multiple accounts is a crucial part of anonymity and privacy.