Taxes aren’t collected for a specific purpose. Any tax can be used for any purpose a state sees fit (e.g. income tax may be used for infrastructure, schools or defense).

The “Rundfunkbeitrag” is a purpose-bound fee which can only be used for the public service broadcasting.

Edit: It’s a mandatory fee like you’re forced to pay for waste disposal. Not a tax.

There’s a few german torrent sites with open applications.

https://www.sb-innovation.de/showthread.php?35824-Liste-aktueller-deutscher-Torrent-Tracker-V2

Great comment!

There’s similar legal issues with the “right to a private copy” many European countries have. Those laws were made to allow people to make a copy of their media, in case the original breaks. Important to note is that those private copies weren’t allowed to be distributed to anyone, not even lent to a friend.

This worked well at the time for cassettes and VHS, which did break occasionally.

But at some point most CDs came with copy protection, which got broken pretty quickly. But at least in Germany, they are still considered “working copy protection” and thus are illegal to circumvent, even for a otherwise legal private copy.

The same is the case with Switch games: Copyright owners use copy protection to make otherwise legal use cases illegal.

E.g. Nintendo made it so that Switch games can only be played by decrypting the ROMs, which is illegal for anyone except Nintendo.

At least that’s their standpoint which was never tested in court but it’s not unlikely that it’d be accepted.

You’d need a second Signal instance. There’s only global privacy options.

Good point. I’ll have to stop using immutable and stay with atomic (and declarative).

Interestingly /bin and /usr/bin are not in PATH by default, so /bin/chewy can only be executed by its path directly and won’t affect the systems reliability.

Fully agreed. On almost any atomic distro, /home/user is writeable like usual, so any attacker is able to persist itself by editing ~/.bashrc and putting a binary somewhere.

NixOS is immutable and atomic, but it isn’t image-based.

Immutable simply refers to how the running system configuration can’t be changed by simply putting a file somewhere (e.g. copy a binary to /bin, which is a bad idea).

For example, Fedora Atomic and derivatives are image based, although they are more flexible than the A/B types like SteamOS.

OpenSUSE MicroOS uses btrfs snapshots to apply updates atomically, and is more flexible than most image based immutable distros.

Edit: But I don’t think those terms have a single definition, so how would you differentiate these terms?

MPV also supports pipewire.

There’re a few open german torrent trackers. [1]

Immortuos is application only, but they have an english language interface, so if your on other private trackers already, I recommend applying.

[1] https://www.sb-innovation.de/showthread.php?35824-Liste-aktueller-deutscher-Torrent-Tracker-V2

Your points about torrents being set to private and enabling/disabling DHT are good.

Semi-private content is available publicly

Do you mean the content pages on the tracker are publicly available? Because there’re private trackers with no original content, so I don’t think this is a differentiating factor between semi-private and private trackers.

As you’ve written, there’re trackers categorized as semi-private on prowlarr where an account is required to view anything besides the login page.

It depends on what trackers you’re on and how much storage you have, and how risk averse you are.

First of all, binding your torrent client to the VPN interface should prevent all leakage.

Additional precautions like running your torrent client behind a container like gluetun should make it pretty much impossible to leak your IP to adversaries. Or if you have a plain Linux server, running the torrent client in it’s own network namespace also achieves the same result.

The other big reason to get a seedbox is to be able to maintain your ratio. This depends on your tracker.

E.g. I have enough storage for a large enough seeding size and enought torrents to get sufficient bonus points. Combined with a bit of upload here and there, I get enough upload/buffer to snatch what I want.

On many trackers, large enough torrents are often freeleech, so they don’t count towards the download stat anyway.

tl;dr

If you bound your torrent client to the VPN, I’d seed with your NAS unless you don’t get enough upload to maintain your ratio on your specific private trackers. Storage is way cheaper on your NAS.

Semi-private just refers to how easy it is to join them. E.g. rutracker is considered a semi-private tracker, because it requires an account, but always allows registrations and does not enforce any ratio.

In that sense I was wrong in calling TL a semi-private tracker, because TL does require maintaining a ratio. But given it is possible to simply join via their seedbox offerings, it is not as private as some other trackers, which require proofs of good behaviour on other trackers and/or an application process.

Edit: Public: no registration required
Semi-private: registration required, but always possible; lax ratio rules
Private: registration required, mostly through invites/applications; anti-leech ratio rules

There’s a continuously updated list of german private trackers [1].

AnimeWorld is the best german anime tracker and is currently open until the end of the year.

Immortuos is the best tracker with continously open applications, but they require solid proof of known good trackers.

TFA does not require as much proof and requests get filled quickly.

BTF, WoT are impossible to get into. TS has really strict requirements, but they do take applications.

Also, there’s no invite route like on many english “cabal” trackers.

Otherwise, usenet has more german content than TFA (and other lower tier trackers). The usenet board FileLeechers will be open from 2024-12-31 16:00 to 2025-01-01 02:00. For automation (arr*) SceneNZBs is the german usenet indexer.

PS: Remember to bind your torrent client to the VPN interface, if you want to use one.

[1] https://www.sb-innovation.de/showthread.php?35824-Liste-aktueller-deutscher-Torrent-Tracker-V2

Semi-private trackers like TorrentLeech are a great step up from public trackers and they are relatively easy to join (e.g. seedbox promo). More content is available and well-seeded for longer periods of time.

It’s not difficult to keep your ratio, even with a 50MBit/s connection (torrents > 15GB are freeleech anyway), as long as you seed 24/7. Or buy a seedbox for a while, build a few TB of buffer (autobrr) and never worry again.

Edit: Usenet is great because it’s fast, and depending on your (non-english) language, it’s a completely different league than public trackers. But I’d argue for english content TL (and a few others) is good enough.

With I2P each user is a node/router, so it does not rely on central nodes like Tor.

The only issue is it’s slow, because most users don’t allocate/have much bandwidth. Because of it’s garlic routing (similar to Tor’s onion routing) traffic is encrypted multiple times with multiple hops which also impacts throughput and latency.

The good thing is it’s already suppported by qBittorrent (and BiglyBT), but setting it up is a manual process.

Also, qBittorrent doesn’t support DHT over I2P yet, so it’s necessary to use an i2p tracker like tracker2.postman.i2p.

But that would be pretty easy to squash, wouldn’t it? I mean a network only set up for piracy, it will get it’s main operators taken down pretty fast.

As long as there’s reasonable doubt that i2p is only used for piracy, it shouldn’t get blocked. Similarly, Tor isn’t only used for trading drugs, so it mustn’t get blocked by democracies.

Yes, that’s how it is. If you look at the commit history of yuzu, there’s basically only documentation changes. [1]

The joke about the Hydra many heads is just not true for software projects where only actually capable developers are able to meaningfully contribute. And those most likely already have a well paying job. Getting sued by Nintendo isn’t on anyones bucket list.

[1] https://git.suyu.dev/suyu/suyu/commits/branch/dev

Yes, ~/.local/share/flatpak includes all user installed flatpaks, while /var/lib/flatpak includes all system wide installed flatpaks. Both include repository information and required runtimes (i.e. dependencies).

This does not include user data, which is stored in ~/.var/app.

Make sure to test your backup just in case on another system/VM.

Piracy is a large community on Reddit, and it is one of the few subreddits which officially created a community on Lemmy. So it does make sense that it’s also gotten big in terms of subscribers.

But I think monthly active users is a way more ueful metric than total subscribers. Creating new accounts is easy, so total subscribers tends to only go up, compared to the fluctuating MAU.

Also, it seems there’re communities with more subscribers, altough they aren’t listed on Lemmy Explorer. E.g. Lemmy World’s Technology has nearly 60k subs.

Lemmy Explorer for context: https://lemmyverse.net/communities

Many encodes of their internal groups are also on TL. Other content is likely shared with TL.

Idk about fake YTS, but it not being fake is an advantage.

Their internal groups focus on 3-8GB x265 1080p movie encodes. Altough with fewer seeders, they also have other larger torrents. E.g. there’s also a few remuxes.