Well, been * ahem * told that a friend of a friend didn’t found any videos there were “Your friendly neighborhood geek goes into the house of a hot milf to upgrade her Windows 10 machine to Arch and she shows them how hot she found their Linux install skills and how thankful she is”, so that seems unlikely.

So what you’re saying is that there are more wankers on Linux nowadays!???

If you’re purelly seeding (as in starting to seed a torrent from scratch never having downloaded it from the bittorrent client you’re using or having done it a long time ago - days, weeks or longer), without port-forwarding it will simply not work and nobody can connect to your machine and downloade anything for that torrent because all those remote machines that are trying to connect to your client have no association with your machine on the Mullvad Router doing NAT translation.

If you’re downloading a torrent and then leave it seeding for a while after the download phase is over, then it will usually work fine because the Mullvad Router doing NAT Translation still remembers the various remote machines that your machine connected to in the swarm for that torrent during the download stage, hence when those remote machines connect back trying to themselves download stuff from yours, it will know that’s related your machine and thus accept those remote connection and forward them to your machine.

In practice this means that it if you leave your torrents seeding AFTER DOWNLOADING is over, usually (but not always as for torrents with very few peers the swarm is either too small or changes too fast) you can upload more than you downloaded, hence you’re not leeching.

So if you use Mullvad and don’t want to be a leecher, always leave your torrents active and uploading after you’ve downloaded them.

Personally I have mine set to 1.5 upload to download ratio and only seldom does it fail to reach it.

I don’t think your explanation of why it seems to work is correct.

I seems to work (works in a limited way, even), because any remote machines that your bittorrent client connected to during downloading are temporarilly recorded on the Mullvad router on the other side of your VPN doing NAT translation as associated with your machine, so when those remote machines connect to that router to reach your machine, it knows from that recorded association that those connections should be forwarded to your machine.

This is quite independent of people on the other side using port-forwarding or not.

Port-forwarding on the other hand is a static association between a port in that router and your machine, so that anything hitting that specific port of the router gets forwarded the port in your machine you specified (hence the name “port” “forwarding”). With port-forwarding there is no need for there having been an earlier connection from your machine to that remote machine to allow “call back”.

This is why at the end of downloading a torrent behind a Mullvad VPN will keep on uploading but if one restarts a torrent which was stopped hours or days ago (i.e. purelly seeds), it never uploads anything to anybody - in the first case that NAT translation router associated all machines your client connected to during download to your machine, so when they connect back to download stuff from you it correctly forwards those connections to your machine, but in the second case it’s just getting connections from unknown remote machines hitting one of its ports and in the absence of a “port-forwarding” static rule or a record of your machine having connected to those remote machines, it doesn’t know which of the machines behind it is the one that should receive those connection so nothing gets forwarded.

So it’s perfectly possible to share back when behind a Mullvad VPN but you have to leave the torrent client keep on seeding immediatly after downloading and it will only ever upload to machines which were in the swarm when the client was downloading (they need not have been clients it downloaded from, merelly clients it connected to, for example to check their availability of blocks to download, which give how bittorrent works normally means pretty much the whole swarm)

It is however not at all possible to just start seeding a torrent previously downloaded unless the download wasn’t that long ago (how long is “too long” depends on how long the NAT Translation Router of Mullvad keeps those recorded associations I mentioned above, since those things are temporary and get automatically cleaned if not used),

I think the point is that they can’t easilly track back to a specific client of a specific ISP instances of unlicensed downloading of copyrighted materials if they’re done behind a VPN.

Mind you, they can still easilly track it back to the VPN, so make sure you’re using a provider that puts privacy above all an is not based in countries like the US or UK.

That said, if they just throw an unsupported accusation at you and the ISP cuts you out, using a VPN or not makes no difference.

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Only if you believe the racist idea that a nation, any nation, can represent everybody who is part of an ethnicity, i.e. and specifically in this case, that Mathematically the group “Jewish People” and the group “Israel and its supporters” are exactly the same group.

If however the group “Israel and it’s supporters” is but a subset of the group “Jewish People”, then the actions of the subset of the larger group do not justify punishing the wider group, same as, say, the actions of the Ku-Klux-Klan do not justify punishing everbody who is deemed White or the actions of ISIS do not justify punishing everybody who is Muslim.

I think the idea that the actions or victimization of some who are part of a broader group defined by nothing else than the ethnicity they were born into justifies a different treatment of everybody of the broader ethnic group, is THE most common racist trope there is, to the point that even liberals defend that shit (whilst, with zero irony or self awareness, calling it “positive”).

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All those liberals going along with the idea that it’s possible to discriminate in a positive way only have themselves to blame when it turned out that their “positive” support of those they perceive as representatives of an ethnicity whom they (the liberals) view as “victims” as whole (i.e. all individuals of that ethnicity, rather than just the actual victims) was just racist prejudice and discrimination and stupidly easy to abuse to support ethnic cleansing (as long as those doing the murdering are from a “victim” race).

Support for any kind of ethnic-wide assumptions about people and different standards of judgement and actions towards them based on their ethnicity, is the very same kind of view of one’s fellow human beings as the Nazis had, just with different “good” races and “bad” races.

People should be judged on and treated based on what they support and what they do, not the ethnicity they were born into.

This kind of shit is a carbon copy of how the Nazis used claims of people being “against the Aryan race” to deflect criticism of the actions of the Nazis.

I think this is religion being weaponized to support the extreme depravity of an ethno-Fascist ideology, rather than an inherent drive in that religion.

In other words, the problem with Religions is not them having an inherent tendency for this kind of thing, is that they are extremely easy to capture and use to support even the most depraved behaviours, being capable of excusing actions well beyond what most other prepackaged belief systems are able to successfully excuse.

In summary, I don’t think Religion is a driver of this kind of shit, I think it’s an enabler.

The greatest antisemitism there is, is trying to link the most depraved nation state of the XXI century (so far) and its actions, to all Jewish People, both by its implying that any actions commited by that nation state no matter how depraved and violent are How Jews Behave, and because such “representation by a nation state” would only be possible if “all Jews are the same”, both things which are extreme racist takes.

Holocaust admission AND Holocaust denial have now both been deemed antisemitic by the ethno-Fascist nation state that claims to represent all Jewish People.

I had the exact same experience: been doing Linux since the 90s, both for fun and professionaly - the latter mainly in pure server configurations - finaly got around to moving my home PC (which is mainly for gaming) to Linux (using Pop!OS, since I have a Nvidia graphics card and it just supports it out of the box) and it just worked.

Only problem I have with it is that on startup of X I usually get a blank screen and have to switch my monitor OFF and back ON again.

Oh, and startup times are a fraction of Windows startup times (my Windows 10 work machine literally takes longer to wake up from hybernation than my home Linux PC takes to cold boot, and they have equivalent SSDs.

I think I got more hassle with Windows than I do with Linux.

That’s a perfect example of a typical interaction between a Technology Management Consultant and somebody from a STEM area.

Techies with an Engineering background who are in Tech and Tech-adjacent companies are often in the receiving end of similar techno-bollocks which makes no sense from such “Technology” Management Consultants, but it’s seldom quite as public as this one.

Funnily, sometimes the pirate version of a game works whilst the official one does not…

Avoiding the shit from enshittification isn’t hardcore, it’s just the normal adult thing to do.

Which generally comes with “I am more important than those forigners and hence should be treated better than them” which is just another form of “what’s in it for me”.

Certainly my experience from living in Brexit Britain is that the kind of people who couldn’t accept criticism of Britain were also the kind who though they were superior to foreigners because of being Britons and expected to be better treated than foreigners for it, and that wasn’t just in their own country but also for example when on vacations abroad.

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Yeah, I think I get what you mean.

My own country, Portugal, has issues and around here there is a big tendency to look to Britain for inspiration, yet Britain in many ways is even more broken than my own country (certainly it’s a far less fair society, more stratified, way more violent amongst the lower classes and more fake amongst the upper classes, plus significantly more calcified and less daring in many ways) and which wealth-wise is mainly is just using the pile (of both money and infrastructure) accumulated during their time not that long ago when it was an Empire, rather than in the present day being a more productive country,

People look up to Britain, copy what’s done there under the impression that it works, and then end up with similar problems but none of the good things because the “success” of Britain isn’t the product of what they do now, it’s just accumulated wealth and structures from almost a century ago.

That said, I think the circus that was Brexit has taken the shine out of Britain in most of Europe, including Portugal, maybe more strongly so here because Portugal used to send a lot of emigrants over there and many came back following Brexit and the consequences of Brexit with a far worse opinion of Britain than they went there with, and they certainly shared that opinion with family and friends.

Oh, I don’t at all think that Brits themselves see any of that as ghoulish.

In fact the local culture has a huge thing with a heavilly classist social hierarchy, “knowing your place” in the social hierarchy and looking up to the upper classes and seing them as more capable.

(Their Monarchy is the wealthiest and most powerful in Europe and you’ll find plenty of fawning coverage of them in the local media and a vast majority of Brits love the Monarchy)

In my experience people traditionally tend to see it as the natural order of things and there really was only this period between the post-War times and maybe the 80s when amongst the working class there was this idea that the working class was as much entitled to rule things as the upper classes and a lot of that has been crushed along with Labour Unions, Industry and Mining in Britain and as most of the workers became white collar workers (who see themselves as Middle Class and look down on the Working Class even though de facto they’re Working Class) rather than blue collar.

(Though I supposed some of it was transformed into support for the most extremist far right movements there of the present day, since they get a lot of support from retired working class people who feel themselves rich because the house they own is now worth a lot of money due to the massive house price bubble over there - in a way it’s funny that the most Fascist people of all are actually Working Class pensioners)

Most don’t really recognize that stuff as unusual or strange because that’s all that they’ve known, same as for everybody everywhere all over the World - mostly it’s only people who have actually lived and worked abroad and hence seen things done differently, who can spot the quirks and negative aspects of society they grew up in.