Showing my age here, but my similar story was in #warezart on ethernet (IRC). We had a pretty tight group of regulars. I spent nearly every day there for over 5 years starting in 1995.

It was unusual then that we were from all over. We had a mod in New Zealand, some euros, a bunch of americans from all over and a handful of canadians. But hanging out like we were in each other’s living rooms.

A bunch of us actually met up in person at the Siggraph trade show once and even made matching tshirts. lol.

except for that one guy and his son

Or be even more productive and go…

“STAND UP AND GET OFF THE FUCKIN RAIL AND GO LIVE YOUR LIFE!!!”

Frankly… I find that meme to be pretty tame. And funny how the article says it is like “Nazi propaganda”. I feel like they’re not giving our great American anti-Nazi propaganda enough respect. Like the WW2 era Bugs Bunny cartoons with super ugly neanderthal looking German soldiers and a squeaky voiced hyperventilating little Hitler with a Napoleon complex.

Maybe the Dutch are a nicer people and have higher standards.

I think it is more of a last 15 years kinda thing. It was obvious this would happen when Europe and the United Nations started funneling all the refugees into Europe and they weren’t really making an effort to culturally assimilate them. It always looked like they were being used like the jews were prior to ww2.

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…

After Greenland? ;]

Think they’re trying to put a wrench in the gears like Bolton did last time in Venezuela? I don’t buy the excuse that he is just stupid. The dude, and people like him, are neocons. They do and say things in order to fuck progress up and then pretend it wasn’t their fault and they are just stupid idiots saying things in public that anyone with half a brain would know better than to say.

Intended or not, keeping the US government over extended and wasting time and effort works to the advantage of their “globalist” agenda.

btw… I am referring to the mention of Cuba in case it wasn’t obvious.

I agree that much of the noise is intentionally created by Trump, but a lot of it is also neocons trying to act stupid.

Now that I think about it… Since when did Trump care about Venezuela or Cuba? Seems uncharacteristic that they’re going to straight to military and CIA methods for Venezuela, without any discussion at all. Not like the methods used with the Ukraine or Palestine issues… If this was just a ploy to keep those parts of the government distracted, then I’d believe that.

I look forward to having some clarity of hind sight in a couple years.

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.

Removed by mod

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.

Well… that lasted about as long as I expected.

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.

Yea… but the drug markets are underground and include massive money laundering systems. It has often been claimed that the CIA and other black operations get funded this way.

But aside from that… the financial machinery is down there. My understanding is that that is what the Panama Papers was largely about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers

Like how you can pay the local newspaper to print something for you. They got the equipment and system already.

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.