@kkarhan Yeah good call, I’ve amended the original post with a warning.

@Fratm So far my experience the worst its got was buffering for a second or 2 at the start which i’ll take over an ad anyday. 1080p video streams fine one it gets started. Its always possible to get a slower exit node for one reason or another, but in general speeds on tor are normally fine for streaming video.

…which reminds me I neet to setup an onion address for my peertube instance.

@kkarhan @torproject @Waterfox Yes, Fair enough to say this is just not recommended in general, Its something i’m doing to test a specific use case and its easier then manually finding proxies for the given countries.

But here’s an interesting fact: #TorBrowser doesn’t use the same tor connection as the one that uses the systemwide /etc/tor/torrc . So while I’ll again stress this is not recommended unless you know what you’re doing, it won’t actually affect the standard Tor browser. (or at least this is the case when i test on my system, could differ on windows,mac, etc)

It’s not that slow but even if it was I’d use dial up before i put up with ads.

So Far so good, I have run into the occasional “not available in your country”, but not a single ad so far.

I’m not actually sure if this works but If anyone else wants to try it out and give me feedback feel free.

#Adblock #Tor

Using Tor to Avoid Ads on YouTube

Configure Tor to use only exit nodes from countries with few or no YouTube ads.

WARNING: Do not try this unless you understand the implications it has for your system wide tor setup. TorBrowser does way more than merely proxy Traffic through Tor, but also prevent #InformationLeakage and block tracking code. This is not a substitute for using the TorBrowser and does not improve your anonymity.

Tor Configuration

Edit /etc/tor/torrc:

ExitNodes {AL},{MD},{GE},{AM}{VN}
StrictNodes 1

Then restart Tor:

sudo systemctl restart tor

FoxyProxy Setup

1. Add a new proxy:

2. Set proxy mode to: Proxy by Patterns

3. Add URL patterns and assign them to the proxy above:

ytimg.com and googlevideo.com are required – without them thumbnails and video playback will fail through the proxy.

Notes

• StrictNodes 1 forces Tor to only use the listed countries – it will stall rather than fall back
• Ukraine and Romania will handle most traffic; Albania has decent exit node coverage
• If buffering is bad, try capping YouTube quality at 480p

Dear “news” services: GAMBLING PROMOTIONS ARE NOT NEWS. Online “Sales” ARE NOT NEWS!!!

I know @OregonLive is just an automated sync from their RSS,but this is a choice to include “articles” like this in your RSS feed.

I can’t allow this in my feeds, these are poorly disguised ads, its an automatic unfollow at this point.

Proton Mail is great for end-to-end encrypted emails, but as a recent story of an unmasked user highlights, it must comply with Swiss authorities — who may share user data with allies.

Read our newsletter to learn about what it can and can’t protect.

https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/proton-mail-is-not-for-anonymity/

The Iranians have clearly laid out their plan. They WANT this to be a long term war.

General Masoud Akhtari of the IRGC explains their plan is to collapse the world economy until regional and worldwide support for the US' warmongering president evaporates.

The General predicts that point comes after a few weeks of oil being over $150 / barrel.

#IRGC #MasoudAkhtari #Iran #KhameneiAssassination #oilwar

The other upside to this strategy is that the Dunning-Kruger geniuses that the right is so full of will totally fall for it thinking they will easily pass and it will mostly affect minorities instead of them.

This might be a really #unpopularopinion / #badtake but I think we should run with the narrative of making voting harder, but not by requiring two forms of ID, I think you should be able to pass a basic Civics test of some kind.

I know 100+ years ago it was used to mostly disenfranchise black voters, but in 2026 we all have access to pretty much the sum of all human knowledge, if someone wants to learn they can learn. You have to study for a license to drive a car, you should be able to study for a right to select the people who will be driving our country.

And before you come at me about how this would be more negative towards this or that minority group, I want you to watch (in entiretly) a complete video by the right wing “journalist” ‘Nick Shirley’ who brought you such stories as: going to a random daycare with a camera and demanding to be let in so you can see the children. When you see how incredibly dumb these people are,when you see that its not bad faith, they are actually just unable to think critically and are really that fucking stupid, i think you’ll see what im getting at.

Although if even the dumbest mouth breathers still have a “right” to vote, maybe we should just count their vote 3/5ths as much as those who can pass a civics test… I think that’d be fair.

If Trump gives up and runs away, it might make sense for #Iran to go harder on US bases (carefully) and Israel with the indirect support of Russia and China. Appeal to the people of Arab nations to rise up against their dictators. Embarrass the western empire. End it.

I’m not actually sure if this works but If anyone else wants to try it out and give me feedback feel free.

#Adblock #Tor

Using Tor to Avoid Ads on YouTube

Configure Tor to use only exit nodes from countries with few or no YouTube ads.

WARNING: Do not try this unless you understand the implications it has for your system wide tor setup. TorBrowser does way more than merely proxy Traffic through Tor, but also prevent #InformationLeakage and block tracking code. This is not a substitute for using the TorBrowser and does not improve your anonymity.

Tor Configuration

Edit /etc/tor/torrc:

ExitNodes {AL},{MD},{GE},{AM}{VN}
StrictNodes 1

Then restart Tor:

sudo systemctl restart tor

FoxyProxy Setup

1. Add a new proxy:

2. Set proxy mode to: Proxy by Patterns

3. Add URL patterns and assign them to the proxy above:

ytimg.com and googlevideo.com are required – without them thumbnails and video playback will fail through the proxy.

Notes

• StrictNodes 1 forces Tor to only use the listed countries – it will stall rather than fall back
• Ukraine and Romania will handle most traffic; Albania has decent exit node coverage
• If buffering is bad, try capping YouTube quality at 480p

Feishin really does a good job with auto DJ, its not perfect but it beats the hell out of using corpo streaming services.

I think NaviDrome is whats actually doing the work, unfortunately Jellyfin doesn’t do nearly as good a job.

I got a theory, but you’re not gonna like it.

I take a lot of guff for openly saying that I think most people are dumb. Whenever you say this, someone inevitably pops up and says “50% of people are below average by definition.”

While that’s not really how it works, it also dodges something I’m starting to think we need to admit:

In this modern world, totally average human intelligence is actually kinda goddamn stupid.

The more complex the civilization, the more intelligence is required to navigate it.

By “intelligence” I mean:

• capacity to absorb information
• process it
• contextualize it
• make connections
• do useful things with it

This was not always the case.

Up until relatively recently, you didn’t need to know much to be perfectly happy and functional. If you were born to a farmer’s family, you learned everything you needed from helping the old man and old lady around the farm. When they got too old or sick, you took the reins, prospered, had a family, and taught your kids the same way. You had a place in the order of things. Nobody asked you to answer hard questions or shape the destinies of strangers.

In the West, that changed in the eighteenth century when we invented modern democracy (not the ancient Greek version—don’t be tedious).

Suddenly people were expected to understand complex systems involving people nothing like them doing things they knew nothing about—but those things still mattered.

A Bavarian woodsman had no clue how the fishing industry worked, nor did he need to. That didn’t make him an ignoramus; it just wasn’t his world.

But now you were asked—allowed, even—to vote on what society did. Considered progress, sure. But it also placed a new burden on the proletariat: responsibility for anything beyond feeding their family and paying taxes to whatever inbred idiot made the decisions.

At the same time, we shifted from feudal agrarian → mercantile → industrial → post-industrial. All new, all fast-changing.

For millennia the amount of genuinely new information needed in a lifetime was near zero. Maybe one big idea per generation.

Suddenly entire industries were replaced every couple generations… then every couple decades… now every couple months.

Why? Because information became the currency, and information is defined by novelty (thanks, Claude Shannon).

Being skilled no longer meant apprentice → journeyman → master. It meant keeping up with relentless change and innovation. Civilization rewarded those who could—and left everyone else behind.

When you look at Americans who make the dumbest political decisions (aside from bigotry and religious fanaticism), the #1 reason is: they don’t want to learn things.

Every election, politicians pander to dying industries: coal, oil, old-school manufacturing. The workers are proud their parents did the same job… and apparently can’t grasp that the world has changed so much since their parents bought a house at 25 with overtime at the plant that they might as well have time-traveled here.

They complain about being left behind, but they ignored roughly everyone warning them to adapt. You can’t keep voting for people who only benefit capitalists and still expect solid ground under working-class boots. You can’t demand cheap goods while removing every limit on what capitalists can do.

Yes, it’s complex. It requires reading and critical thinking.

But for nearly twenty years everyone has had instant, free access to all the information all the time.

And here’s the counter: “People don’t know how to access it, process it, contextualize it, or think critically.”

Exactly. That’s my entire fucking point.

Our civilization has hit an inflection point where merely average intelligence is no longer enough to understand how almost anything works.

People still grasp what their great-grandparents did: their job, their hobbies, their local community, whatever mass media is trending. Not much else.

That’s simply not enough anymore to make informed decisions or even hold informed opinions.

Yet this is precisely when social media encourages everyone to not only have but share uninformed opinions—and expect to be heard, respected, taken seriously. Not because it’s wise, but because engagement makes rich people richer.

People are simultaneously told it’s their right and duty to participate in democracy regardless of preparation. That idea collapses the second you think about it—unless you see it as a well-meaning attempt to fix historic discrimination against minorities who were barred from education and voice.

But at some point: do we really want to encourage participation from people who don’t know how anything works—when one dumb vote in Nowheresville can rain bombs, starvation, or ecosystem collapse halfway around the planet?

I’m not saying ditch democracy. It’s still better than autocracy.

But maybe it’s time to revisit the idea that you should at least understand what kind of government you have before voting on what it does.

Literacy tests were white-supremacist garbage in the 19th century when Black people were deliberately kept uneducated. That’s not today’s world. We could design gatekeeping that doesn’t discriminate on race or class.

Or we can stay committed to absolute freedom with zero responsibility: that people too unintelligent to understand society should not only be heard but allowed to dictate taxes, policy, and killing done in our names.

Maybe that really is an inalienable right.

But look around.

If enough people are so easily confounded by modern life that they elect a mentally unsound psychopathic con-man game-show host as emperor—and the system is so broken it allows this, allows him to run amok, and singlehandedly torches America’s stability and global standing—

maybe we’ve spent way too much time talking about freedom and way too little about responsibility.

Can we really keep a functioning society on vibes only?

i am disconcerted by how many techies who saw through crypto *immediately* have fallen for AI krokodil

Congrats to @pluralistic for coining the word #enshitification [☜ this is my mistaken misspelling] (See footnotes 2 and 3) — as something that is named is more easily discussed, weighed, and planned about than a concept that exists only as vague concern. And the government of #Norway has thoughts and words on it and thinks they can help make it stop. 100 page PDF

https://storage02.forbrukerradet.no/media/2026/02/breaking-free-pathways-to-a-fair-technological-future.pdf

Correction: The preferred spelling is #enshittification https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/enshittification

If banks and governments insist on checking devices for security they should define actual standards. It should be possible for any tiny project to be certified at no cost and the standards should be fairly enforced so a mainstream device without current patches is disallowed.

International Women’s Day: The cis women who are fiercely fighting transphobia

https://www.thepinknews.com/2026/03/08/international-womens-day-trans/

#transgender #trans #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA