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!!!”

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.

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.

If it is tied to a phone number then any information connected to the phone account will be connected to the signal account identity. And any identifying information attached to the method used to pay for the phone account will be attached to the phone account and consequently the signal account.

Typically people pay using credit or debit cards, so the identifying information of those bank accounts become attached to your signal account.

Airvpn doesn’t require any personal information. I mean… I guess it asked for a name or whatever, but it doesn’t verify any of it. I certainly didn’t give it anything legitimate, and I paid with mixed crypto so it certainly has as little personal information on me as would be possible with a vpn.

What gives ivpn, mullvad and nym the advantage for the personal info section?