windy.com with a VPN in a private browser window. They can’t track you if they don’t know where you are!

I want people to be able to report bugs without any trouble.

Thank you for being aware! I’ve experienced this on github.com. I’ve tried to submit issues several times to open source projects, complete with proposed code to solve a bug, but github shadowbans my account 6 hours after creating it (because I use a VPN? a third-party email provider? do not provide a phone number? who knows). I can see the issue and pull request when logged in, but they only see a 404 on their project page even if I give them a direct link. I ended up sending them a screenshot of the issue page just to convince them this was even possible. Sad to hear gitlab does it even worse now by making phone mandatory.

far more maddeningly, some sites tell me that my username and password combo are incorrect when I’m using a VPN

Brb, gonna wiretap the judge’s house. It’s not a crime as long as I don’t act on the information I hear so there is no injury.

*Yawn!* Wake me up when they stop requiring phone numbers to sign up.

The list of tor exit ips is publicly viewable. Some IPS block the entire list contrary to Tor Project’s request not to do exactly that.

I assume this “VPN Server” that they can see is the “entry node”, and not the “exit node” (i.e. my IP as seen by the world) - but never got a clear answer to that

Traditionally, the entry node and the exit node have been the same VPN server/ip. In that sense, your ISP does know the IP of your exit server, since they are the ones connecting you to it.

For example, your X ISP’s logs could show “At 15:00, user #123 connects to IP 1.2.3.4, which lookup shows is assigned to “CheapVPNs Ltd”. At 15:01 our email server received 1,000,000 emails from IP 1.2.3.4 all angrily complaining about how “X ISP sucks”. Correlation implies user #123 is responsible for the mail bomb attack against our servers.”

At the moment, Mullvad specifically does use different entry and exit IPs, but they are all still located in the same datacenter and subnet. That is, you could be connecting to a Mullvad VPN server 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, or 1.2.3.6 in London, and they all exit out through 1.2.3.1 in London. This is just something Mullvad does. Other VPN services may not do it and Mullvad hasn’t done it in the past. Someone analyzing ISP logs could correlate these IPs if they really wanted to.

Mullvad also offers “multihop”, but the way they have it implemented currently (changing the destination port number), an ISP could still deduce your exit IP if they bother looking up records of Mullvad network structure (which are publicly available), since they know the IP number and the port number of your entrance node.

The only way to hide your VPN exit IP from your ISP currently is to use multiple VPN services and nest them inside each other (or use one service and nest it inside itself using the “multiple devices” perk). Then only a state-level actor could hope to correlate your traffic by monitoring the ingress/outflow of multiple IPs simultaneously.

The US bans all of it, while Japan has an exception for drawings

Absolutely incorrect. You are thinking of Canada or UK. In US, drawings are fine. Rather it is photorealistic depictions “indistinguishable from that of a minor” that are prohibited, almost presciently pre-empting techniques like deepfake and stablediffusion by 20 years, a rare win by legislators.

I think another problem is that the “dialog dropdown box with multiple selectable options” is a very rarely used feature on modern web. It is not obvious that multiple selections are possible (I have to ctrl-click them for example), and it is not clear which color is “selected” or “de-selected” (especially with multiple color themes available to us), leading to OP situation where everything BUT english got selected. It should be an unrolled list with individual “show/hide” ratio boxes, but that’s a problem for lemmy web interface developers to solve.

Are you using the same account on website and in the phone app? Do you have any special app options enabled, like nsfw filters, or “hide posts on read”?

There is also a link to Instances at the bottom of any page.

Here’s my solution to Newcomb’s Paradox: the predictor can be perfectly infallible if it records your physical state and then runs a simulation to predict which box you’ll pick. E.g. it could run a fancy MRI on you as you are walking through the hallway towards the room, quickly run a faster-than-real-time physical simulation, and deposit the correct opaque box into the room before you open the door. The box, the hallway, the room, the door are all part of the simulation.

Here’s the thing: a computer simulation of a person is just as conscious as a physical person, for all intents of “consciousness”. So as you are inside the room making your decision, you have no way of knowing if you are the physical you or the simulated you. The predictor is a liar in a way. The predictor is telling the simulated you that you’ll get a billion dollars, but stating the rules is just part of the simulation! The simulated you will actually be killed/shut down when you open the box. Only the physical you has a real chance to get a billion dollars. The predictor is counting on you to not call it out on its lie or split hairs and just take the money.

So if you think you might be in a simulation, the question is: are you generous enough towards your identical physical copy from 1 second ago to cooperate and one-box? Or are you going to spitefully deprive them of a billion dollars by two-boxing just because you are about to be killed anyway? Remember, you don’t even know which one you are. And if you are the spiteful kind, consider that we are already making much smaller time-cooperative trade-offs all the time, such as the you-now taking a breath just so that the you-five-seconds-from-now doesn’t suffocate to death.

What if the predictor doesn’t use a MRI or whatever? I posit that whatever prediction method it uses, if the method is sufficiently advanced to be infallible then somewhere in the process it MUST be creating conscious observer instances.