apecat

Yeah. If your ISP is manned by dipshits, they won't like Tor relays, just because.

It's also worth setting up a Tor relay to use a different external ip address. Because VPN/Procy whitelists employed by dumb web firewall products will temporarily blacklist all publically listed Tor relay IPs.

Here's a typical residential setup: ISP-provided broadband modem in bridged mode + some sensible home router with security patches you should be using anyway and the Tor relay server connected to the modem with a non-managed switch (if needed).

Please note that Bridges give help directly to individuals who can't access Tor, due to blockage in their home country. They don't use a lot of bandwidth and aren't listed publicly, so bad actors on the firewall market won't block them.

So, if you only have one IP address available and you want to do the internet at large a huge solid, just run a Bridge.

For anyone interested in running Tor relays, here's an intro to why your new box won't use all available bandwidth for a while https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-new-relay

Yeah. It's a term we've got to live with though: it's too widely used in media.

That's why news and public service actors with global ambitions launching onion services is likely a huge net gain in the long run.

This is a double-edged sword. I can admit up front that don't have a very flattering view of the most popular British commercial news outlets. But they're popular.

So, in a way, if BBC wishes to remain accessible among people who are used to... certain popular British news outlets, it shouldn't isolate itself in an ivory tower. If BBC's domestic target demographics have a poor reading level, that's likely more of a Britain problem than a BBC problem.

There's probably also an aspect of serving populations inside Britain who don't speak English as their first language. The BBC's mission statement[1] also mentions mirroring Britain to the world, which likely increases the need for accessible language.

This is a basic soft power strategy anyone seeking global relevance should pay attention to.

1 - https://www.bbc.com/aboutthebbc/governance/mission

These proxies can appear useful, but I'm just going to drop by here to say that this a particularly bad idea to spread among non-technical people.

I've seen these proxies bleed into more problematic Tor use cases among vulnerable individuals. Defaults matter, and as technical people we should assume a bit of 'do no harm' moral responsibility for people who seek our advice.

Tor Browser is painstakingly maintained to be fit for its specific purpose. If you're not authorized to install Tor Browser on a device and to emit Tor traffic on the network you're using, you generally shouldn't access Tor there.

Anyone using Tor to access resources that might get them in trouble in the country they're in should look into proper operational security with Tor Project-provided infrastructure like bridges.[1] The special purpose Tails operating system can be used with bootable USB memory on common hardware like laptops without leaving a trace.[2]

1 - https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en

2 - https://tails.boum.org/

You absolutely should use Tor for regular non-logged in browsing if you can bear the slowness. Exit bandwidth is limited, but I'd say being a needle in the haystack of people who actually need the privacy is a net benefit.

I'd just really advise against touching Tor with a regular browser. For starters, you shouldn't browse Tor without blocking JavaScript by default. Hogging the bandwidth needed for video is also where 'normal use' turns problematic for the people who actually rely on Tor for personal safety.

Tor Browser is painstakingly maintained to make it suitable for Tor. Even Brave's Tor mode is more fit for purpose than proxying Tor manually.

I'd also argue that it's better for the anonymity of all to use a browser prepared to avoid fingerprinting.

In terms of non-exit Tor relays, it doesn't. In fact, for anyone looking at your traffic, Tor relaying is opaque, unlike legal torrents.

As for exits, you'll be dealing with abuse reports from countless parties, including the off-chance that someone sends a death threat through your exit and you have may to fend off law-enforcement that still hasn't gotten the memo on Tor. In countries, like the US where any police encounter might turn deadly, I'd highly advise against running exits at home.

As a Tor exit operator, I can in fact honestly tell you not to run exits on production business networks, or basically anywhere where you're not prepared to be a recipient of a lot of unwanted attention.

Nah https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios

I speak Finnish, and if I'm 'google cancelled my main account'-level pissed, I just might pick a username very much like that for a site I don't really want to be on in the first place. Maybe a cultural thing. So that argument is moot.

Agree with ryanlol's comment here next to mine on the rest. I'd really want more clarifications before I touch third party Youtube clients while logged in (which I want to be, for recommendations etc).

I'm game. What should the monthly price be though?

Considering that it needs to make actual money (and the streaming royalties for music are kinda expensive).

Sigh, yeah, that's actually a great point. Wonder how many great pairs of ears have been ruined by opening a random youtube tab while Spotify is playing with the quiet normalization mode enabled.

And just like the PS4 example, it's just insane to me that Spotify Connect doesn't mandate normalization.

Yes! Which is why you won't hear me waste a whole lot of breath yammering about lossy compression.

I'd sure pay Spotify extra for lossless, because I'm weird in ways I'll reveal below, but I agree that people should give lossy compression a break. Well-encoded AAC and Vorbis averaging over 256 kbps are very transparent-sounding, in ways that never was possible with mp3. If I put in time, I get 5/6 right in this famous test from NPR's website[1], just because mp3 is awful and ancient.

But I double dare anyone to blind test Opus as low as ~128 and ~160 kbps and working upwards, with decent gear. Having grown up with shitty mp3s, it feels like magically good. And it's free software.

Even lossy-lossy transcoded AAC and Opus, which Youtube uses for a lot of stuff, sounds shockingly fine, most of the time, on most equipment, if the original copy was ok to begin with. All this is mostly passable, especially as background music.

That is, until you run into special circumstances, like listening attentively with halfway-decent equipment. Spotify's default normalization mode sometimes can adds dynamic compression, which sounds bad in itself. But this can make artifacts stand out in ways shouldn't (thank god for the 'quiet' setting, added sometime in 2018). This is especially true with poor source material, for example the stupidly bright 90s Led Zeppelin remasters, which still float around on tons of curated Spotify playlists, despite being superseded by really good releases.

So what I'm trying to say is that I want to maintain a music library I can pull up on any device and expect consistently good quality during playback. Take my little hobby I discussed here as an example (that is, me and my friends independently inventing the Japanese audiophile parlor/café concept) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20583900

Just because I can't hear a guitar riff getting slightly distorted or hi-hats smeared when I listen at work, doesn't mean I won't hear it with in an acoustically outstanding room with 5k worth of audio gear. This problem is very pronounced with Youtube material when there's a poor supply chain, so I won't add a bunch of random garbage from Youtube in a playlist on the tram and expect to actually enjoy it later as I'm leaning back in a proper listening room.

Spotify, on the other hand is relatively close to providing a universally sane way to access music on any device.

1 - https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...

Please don't underestimate the value of metadata.

While it's true that the big platforms dominate web use today, don't forget that the concept of metadata includes when you actively surf on the information superhighway. That's valuable information for advertisers.

So is every DNS lookup related to the API backends of specific apps you use. And every random website outside the massive platforms.

These might reveal tons of information about you. Like:

Are you doing research on politics (and which flavor)? Do you worry about health? When do you access online banking? Which banks? Any tax filing software? Invoicing apps? Do you use shitty payday loans? Are you looking for dates? Are you gay? Which games do you play? Which car dealerships do you consider? Do you gamble? And of course, any particularly.. specific porn sites? Do you access banking, travel/flight booking, investment, shitcoin trading, adult or gambling sites in a specific pattern that might indicate mania or other mental health issues?

With metadata alone, your ISP has a thick dossier on your habits, with stuff therapists don't know about their clients.

Looks cool, but feeling slightly twitchy about going anywhere near that with my Google account after last week's news https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247759

Yeah, Grammarly is creepy as hell. I've explicitly banned it (and similar services) at work.

As for Youtube music, yup, that's undeniably a good deal. The music services should watch out, especially in younger demographics (I'm already 30+, Spotify premium user since 2009). Apple will probably push Music even harder and bundle that with their new video streaming. Spotify's really trying to become the defacto podcast service, which sucks in its own right (unlike Apple Podcasts, no user facing RSS support for indie premium content etc. Podcasting is the last free rich medium on the internet, largely thanks to Apple).

As for music, I'm too deep in the Spotify ecosystem myself, with stuff like proper Last.fm integration, recommendations and consistent audio quality.

I can't really enjoy music with that mushy sound typical for content that has been lossy-lossy transcoded tons of times. Of course, I have to deal with that for all the awesome live takes[1] available on Youtube, and there I'm of course just grateful they exist.

Spotify's audio didn't use to be all that great, except with the normalization turned off. Now with their 'quiet' normalization option, that doesn't compress quiet tracks (a clear edge over Apple Music), it's starting to sound transparent to me, as -q 9 encoded (~320 kbps) Vorbis should.

Youtube doesn't allow disabling of normalization at all, and it's not super clear to me when tracks are clean encodes sourced from the proper music distribution ecosystem that stocks Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal et al.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4V66UP4aDs

Yes, on desktop. Harder to achieve with the mobile app.

And as it happens, I don't use a desktop OS to play stuff that helps me fall asleep.

I normally don’t mind YouTube ads all that much, and I don’t see them on desktop browsers anyway.

However, I was bombarded with ads for NordVPN and their crap made me so angry it pretty much sold me a paid YouTube membership.

Hard to relax with some totally not weird ASMR when my blood pressure is through the roof because some chirpy ad agency dude wants to show me how much a VPN is like an umbrella or whatever.

> Much of the web is moving over to https

Yes, but US consumer ISPs, to the best of my understanding, still have this nasty habit of tracking and injecting code whenever they feel like it. HTTP is still a thing.

Also, if the point is to avoid an ISP snooping on metadata for profiling, HTTPS adoption is good, because it encrypts real session data, but it does not stop data collection.

Remember that DNS goes in the clear, until browser and OS vendors decide to turn on DNS over HTTPS by default on consumer devices. The ISP industry, being assholes, have already started to make DoH appear somehow controversial, and they're probably going after google on antitrust grounds. [1] [2]

But even with DoH, we're still going to be stuck with SNI, which spells out the target domain of every HTTPS connection in the connection metadata. And whenever encrypted SNI is in place, services on the internet that aren't behind a CDN are still going to have identifiable IP addresses.

That's user data perfect for profiling and reselling.

So, to really give ISPs the finger, the user must use a VPN.

> VPNs are hit-or-miss on whether they route DNS requests

Major consumer VPNs, even clowns like NordVPN, have gotten pretty good at ensuring sane confs in their provided clients. I wouldn't rely on their kill switches etc for serious opsec, but it's enough to give the finger to an ISP.

On the other hand, the point of a VPN router is precisely to have everything go over a tunnel, including DNS.

It's not ideal to tunnel everything, but it's up to US consumers to make that choice. My suggestion would be to campaign to drive up VPN use on consumer broadband connections, just to fuck with the ISPs.

> That, and you're trusting the VPN to not sell your data.

This is an important point, and also why one would choose a VPN that relies on a reputation of not selling data.

> Browser fingerprinting is still an arms race, but if you're actually concerned about something, either do whatever Torbrowser does or use the most popular iPhone.

Yes, it's an arms race, and the point is to make life as hard as possible for the tracking industry. Nothing is perfect.

Tracking cookies don't go anywhere in a convenient to use browser setup, despite the shoddy claims from clowncar VPN companies.

While Tor is great, it's slow and not advisable as a daily driver browser connected to the user's normal online identities. For most users, sane use of Tor Browser would be special purposes, like researching medical concerns you don't want tracking companies to connect to you, and similar.

1 - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/isps-worry-a-new...

2 - https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN11182

I find NordVPN's marketing reprehensible. Too many claims and broad strokes about the "anonymity" their service can provide.

While I certainly would recommend that US consumers use a VPN router to prevent their ISP from selling data, I think NordVPN really overplays the role of changing IP addresses in the age of browser fingerprinting.

This could spice up the next Tame Impala[1] or St. Vincent[2] tours.

Mentioning them because both Kevin Parker and Annie Clark tend to be interesting in their guitar engineering, while creating popular, accessible and increasingly synth-driven pop/rock.

1 - https://youtu.be/E2mNdT43M8o?t=366

2 - https://youtu.be/3I89orRWN7I?t=153

Mm, I referred to 'fluency' as a sliding scale, which I think is a thing.

But anyway, there we probably have it, your vacations as a child. No lifehacks can beat exposure to language at a young age, I guess. SAD.

Waiting for the day when some drug can trick the brain into some semblance of a kid's language learning skills.

...or hot potatoes.

Anyway, add the Vigesimal system for numbers above 49 and you're really off to the races https://www.kbh-sprogcenter.dk/en/blog/learn-danish-numbers/

For the sake of hilarity, let's add that Icelandic people are forced to study Danish in school Because Reasons. Icelandic is not mutually intelligible with the major Scandinavian languages, even in written form. The argument for studying Danish is of course that everyone benefits from Nordic countries sticking together.

But Danish is the most cumbersome way to get some of that benefit of a common language.

Some Icelandic professor character actually recently dropped a hot take, suggesting that Icelandic schools could switch to teach some form of Finland Swedish, because it'd be remarkably easy for Icelandic speakers to pronounce and probably the easiest option for most people in the Nordics to grasp relative to effort. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

Being a Swedish speaker from Helsinki, Finland, I kind of don't like the nasality of my own dialect. I'd prefer to listen to dialects from the Swedish west coast around Gothernburg all day, because those are very soft sounding. But the suggestion likely makes some sense. Formal/common institutional spoken Finland Swedish is indeed overly articulated and devoid of slang.

Informal Finland Swedish tends to be hyperlocal and may carry loan words from Finnish, which is a non-starter in the other Nordic countries, and very much frowned upon by Swedish schools in Finland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_Swedish

Out of curiosity, how did you go about picking up this fluency in Estonian? Are there any good sources of particularly easy Estonian to get started? I'm semi-interested.

Granted, I'm also super lazy, but Finnish and Estonian should be close enough to just have some threshold to get over until it's pretty smooth, I guess?

Fwiw, I'm native in Swedish, but I speak and write Finnish daily.

To go on about my earlier comparison, I can really visit the site for a Danish or Norwegian Bokmål newspaper like Politiken ( https://politiken.dk ) or Verdens Gang ( https://www.vg.no/ ) and start reading with a feeling of just moderate confusion. Academic text would require some extra effort. The "voice in my head" or mode of reading doesn't really even change, because I've never attempted to communicate in either Danish or Norwegian per se.

For Estonian Postimees (https://www.postimees.ee ) I'm stuck pretty much immediately. I can pick up words and some context, but that's it.

At my first job, at an internal IT Service Desk for a certain Nordic energy company, I dealt with Norwegians and Danes. But it was a business context where everyone just seemed to agree to just make a polite effort at having a maybe slightly "clear in a Swedish way" common Scandinavians language, because switching to English would feel a little silly. I guess some of the older dudes working in the field somewhere in Norway might not have spoken English.

well, you're not wrong

What, will you refuse to help me if I call you in deep distress and said that "xcode command line tools is failing to update because of the nginx 503 errors clearly visible in Safari"

As a Swedish speaker, I get this deeply rooted feeling of righteous indignation about not understanding spoken Danish. I'm only half-joking.

As a Finnish speaker, I don't get that feeling with Estonian. The written form is different enough to warrant a deeper look before I start whining about how annoying I find language studies in general.

Long-term vise I think this is a dubious solution to "set up and forget", or advise people with few resources or limited Linux skills to use.

Mail in a Box makes it seem passably easy to someone with basic skills to get everything up and running, but then don't support in-place upgrades of the underlying operating system. This might be fine, but I really hope people realize what they're getting themselves into. https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/mail-in-a-box-version-v...

This critique is somewhat shallow, if the backup/restore option is easy enough. But I just have a hunch there's going to be a lot of non-upgraded boxes running fullstack-EOL everything.

Of course, a system that does in-place upgrades and then fails is going to leave no-one any happier either.

I guess that my point really is that appliances requiring "complicated" upgrades by moving to a new OS install aren't all that mature. But I acknowledge I have a hard time determining who this product really is for.

Finn here. Finlandization is absolutely a thing, it's even mentioned OP's Fine Article on Finnair Flight 915 ;)

National-level Finnish politicians still weigh their statements on matters such as the imperialist endeavors of our beloved eastern neighbor. Other institutions are gradually becoming less self-censored.

Someone better informed, or just older than my 30-or-so years can probably be more precise and offer more and better examples.

But I have the sense that internationally renowned journalist Jessikka Aro's reporting on Russian disinfo ops wouldn't have been encouraged, yet translated to English and Russian by Finnish state-owned broadcaster Yle before, say, 2005 https://kioski.yle.fi/omat/jessikka-aros-prize-winning-stori...

Aand my Mistape is refreshed for this week now.

That seems like a dream setup indeed. What can I say, try to get as many people as possible to enjoy it!

Oh, Genelecs are professional tools and an acquired taste for anything outside the studio.

I really hope no-one runs out and buys Genelecs for living room use based on this thread, without understanding what they're getting themselves into.