Re: How much latency do you add to torrents?

On Wed, 11 Dec 2024, Oliver wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Dec 2024 10:40:55 +0100, D <[email protected]> wrote 
>>> What if you happen to be gay, for example, and you downloaded gay movies.
>> 
>> In my part of the world, that's almost the default sexuality, so no one 
>> would blink if someone was known to be gay. 
>
> You're not supposed to argue the analogy in detail - it's just an example.

I think we can conclude that in that case, it was a bad analogy.

>> In terms of privacy, GDPR makes it very difficult to utilize IP-logs 
>> without evidence of a crime, so having companies or IP-lawyers just 
>> browsing the IP logs of ISP:s is a complete nonstarter and could at worst 
>> end up costing the ISP:s 4% of their revenue, and various other fines and 
>> penalties.
>
> If you feel that nobody (not even Google) is tracking you, then you are
> lucky in terms of where you live & how safe the government makes you feel.

I did not say that. Please be careful about what you assume I feel or 
think. What I am saying, is that given what I am browsing and reading, I 
feel that there is no problem and that the legal protection is adequate. 
This does _not_ go for all my online activity (see below).

> I'm not feeling as safe from tracking of my daily activities as you are.
> So I add latency between all my actions (where latency makes sense).

This is good. To each his own, and horses for courses. Everyone lives in 
different countries with different pros and cons. If I would like in the 
US, I would be more paranoid about torrenting than I am living in europe.

>>> It's not illegal but you'd still want to have some anonymity when doing 
>>> it.
>> 
>>> Anyway, the question has been fleshed out that there is value to adding
>>> random latency between the act of obtaining a magnet & the act of using 
>>> it.
>>> 
>>> The only question to be answered here is how much time most people wait.
>> 
>> In my case, what I am more worried about than someone snooping through the 
>> logs of my ISP is the increasing monitoring and surveillance of 
>> communication/chat and the ever increasing camera surveillance and the 
>> crack down on opinions that are no in line with the goverment.
>
> There are ways around that, one of which has been mentioned, which is to
> use a VPN, but other options exist that can be used on top of the VPN.
>
> Privacy-based proxy web browsers are probably the easiest way to do that.

I think this is the most user friendly option for regular people who do 
not have the state against them.

>> I do chat about sensitive topics on encrypted platforms, so there I do take 
>> measures. I also keep a lot of sensitive discussions to in person, private 
>> meetings as well.
>
> When chatting, latency can't easily be introduced, although the government
> has programs where they don't "chat" in real time - which employs latency.

Different threat model than torrents. This was to illustrate that for some 
uses I feel little need for privacy and for other uses I feel greater 
needs of privacy. Different tools for different use cases.

> The question always was never whether latency is good or bad (as it's very
> well known to add to your privacy). The question was only of how much.
>