My understanding is that the act of attempting/succeeding at escaping is not illegal, but any illegal acts committed during the process are, so basically if someone leaves the door wide open and you walk out that’s not illegal but it’s next to impossible to otherwise achieve

I only knew that Wikipedia list existed due to a reference in XKCD

This picture just makes me want an apple so badly

I tried Habitica, which at least when I tried it had a free tier or was free. But I found for me it just led to me trying to game it like I do video games (so it was too good at gamifying) and not actually making progress on the things I wanted to make progress on

I’m not OP, just a rando chiming in

Blocking VPNs isn’t really possible. You can block known IP ranges but ultimately there’s so many ways to encapsulate and encrypt traffic that no solution is 100%. I have specifically worked at places in which those in management positions are interested in sniffing DNS queries to “see what people are up to on company time” and those happened to also be the employers that were doing sketchy things that may or may not have been legal

I’ve seen a grand total of one influencer make a good argument for a VPN and that was Alan Fisher saying “have you observed your work skirting regulations that they shouldn’t be? Are you potentially reviewing legal materials on your work’s WiFi that your place of work might prefer you didn’t know about? To help avoid retaliation, you might need a VPN such as one from today’s sponsor…”

More like they operate a tollroad to the playground and are concerned about why there’s so many trucks of wood chips costing them much more to maintain the road to the playground. And OP freely admitted they’re taking truckloads of woodchips from the playground.

Except the analogy also doesn’t work because ultimately piracy isn’t taking, it’s just copying and sharing copies. There isn’t really a good analogy without directly describing digital distribution and piracy. Maybe an analogy involving a solar farm and a transmission company? Except that gets into technical details that are just as technical as just explaining it as it is

We are swiftly reaching a time where boycotting companies run by people you disagree with will negatively impact your ability to function. Consider abandoning this type of purchasing in the future.

Oh no please don’t boycott! The current boycotts are actually costing companies money and we can’t have people learning that boycotts can actually work!

Personally, I don’t trust 13th/14th gen chips period. I’m sure I’m overreacting but I’ve simply seen too many dead computers due to Intel’s CPU bugs in last 12 months that no amount of microcode updates will make me feel comfortable selecting one of those processors, especially when it’s my own money on the line

The town I live in would run the tornado/fire siren (it was the same siren but with a different pattern for how long it would be run for to call the volunteer firefighters to the station whenever there’s a really bad emergency) as a noon whistle every day. Around 2018 or 2019 they stopped doing the noon whistle, but never instituted regular testing so we’ve had super irregular tornado sirens when they are needed. During one really bad storm half the sirens failed to go off at all (fortunately the tornados jumped over town. There were tornados west of us, then tornados east of us but somehow none in town) then the following storm the tornados for half the town failed to go off. They’ve been testing irregularly since then but I’d really prefer if they performed monthly tests

Y’know what that was terrible writing on my part. Where I put “physical vlan” I just meant specifying each port be a specific vlan rather than a trunk port that has multiple clans on in

I should probably proofread more and write less when tired

Physical wire tapping would be mostly mitigated by setting every port on the switch to be a physical vlan, especially if the switch does the VLAN routing. Sure someone could splice an ethernet cable, which would really only be mitigated by 802.1x like you already said, but every part of this threat model makes zero sense. You ultimately have to trust something (and apparently in OP’s case that’s a third party VPN provider that charges extra to not block LAN access while connected and they remain entirely on the free tier of)

But at the very least, not trusting everything on the network is a very enterprise kind of threat model, so using standard enterprise practices of network segmentation, firewalling, and potentially MAC-binding and 802.1x if so desired isn’t a bad idea, if for no other reason than it might lead to a career in network administration. And honestly I mostly want to get OP to not think of VPNs like a magical silver bullet and see what other tools exist in the toolbox

Wait you’re seriously using a free VPN?

Sounds far more likely that either someone misunderstood that residential IPs change frequently/may be shared by multiple subscribers or the ISP made an error when responding to a subpeana and provided the incorrect IP. Unfortunately both are all too common with privacy enforcement

If you really think the ISP router is snooping and can’t by bypassed you could simply double-NAT your network with a trusted router and call it a day. Much less VPNing and much less unusual decisions of trust and threat model involved then

But supposing you absolutely do not want to tack on additional costs, then the only solution I see that remains is to set up a private VPN network, one which only connects your trusted devices. This would be secure when on your I trusted LAN, but would be unavailable when awat from home.

Traditionally this would be performed by creating a dedicated network of trusted devices. Most commonly via a VLAN for ease of configuration. Set the switch ports that the trusted devices are connected to to use that vlan and badabing badaboom you’re there. For external access using Tailscale or one of the many similar services/solutions (such as headscale, netbird, etc.) with either the client on every device or using subnet routing features to access your trusted network, and of course configure firewalls as desired

Isn’t that a screengrab from one of the muppets films? You can even see Kermit in the center

Link for anyone like me who’s one of today’s lucky 10,000

I give that a 50/50 chance that the sign is a prank vs the sign is actually necessary

It’s a direct reference to At The Mountains of Madness. The penguins make exactly that call in the book and are friendly with the Ancient Ones, and really only present in the story while the humans are in the domain of the Ancient Ones.

Although the choice of showing Cthulhu in the final panel rather than one of the Ancient Ones is inaccurate. Perhaps it’s meant to be a sculpture, since in Call of Cthulhu it was made clear that Cthulhu was specifically the shaman of the ancient ones, meant to wake them when the time is right

Anyways I’d highly recommend reading the stories since they’re quite a unique style and dripping with a mounting, growing intensity. You can even listen on LibriVox. Call of Cthulhu is about an hour long and At The Mountains of Madness is about 4.5 hours long, so one decent car trip’s worth of audiobook basically