BootlegHermit

“as well as — scarily — diseases such as COVID-19, hepatitis, herpes and more.”

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“Hackers”.

I find that most VPNs are so heavily shilled that by that very nature, makes them suspect. Since the days of Napster, WinMX, Bearshare and the like, I’ve gotten exactly 2 “Hey, knock it off” letters from my ISP. And they were both from new-release, mouse-affiliated movie releases from a public tracker.

Get in with some of the private trackers and 99.9% of the worry disappears. Try not to upload terabytes of data, and the majority of ISPs (I mean, two of the 3 that seem to have the monopolies at least) wont even bother sending the notices.

@Sordid

Even then, there’s the theory/circumstantial “evidence” that Google’s indexing is a big farce. Forgot where I saw the video, but someone pointed out that the average person only relies on the 1st page or two of search results. To try to go beyond that, most searches very quickly drop from “millions of results” down to a few hundred/thousand at best. Going beyond the first couple of search result pages, the page count seemingly drops off a cliff.

However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.

If you’ve got some time to kill, check out some stuff related to the “Dead Internet Theory”. While I cant say how accurate the information presented may be, it certainly opens up the idea that there’s something funky about the internet and how we perceive it.