To someone watching network traffic, a VPN connection looks like two machines exchanging encrypted packets. You can’t see the actual data inside the packet, but you can see all the metadata (who it’s addressed to, how big it is, whether its TCP or UDP, when it’s sent). From the metadata, you can make guesses about the content and VPN would be pretty easy to guess.

When sending a packet over the Internet, there’s two parts of the address: the IP address and the port. The IP address is a specific Internet location, blocks of IP addresses are owned by groups (who owns what is public info) and there are many services that do geo-ip mappings. So if you’re connecting to an IP address that belongs to a known VPN provider, that’s easy.

The second part of the address is the port-number. Servers choose port-numbers to listen to and the common convention is to use well-known ports. So, for example, HTTPS traffic is on port 443. If you see a computer making a lot of requests to port 443, even though the traffic is encrypted we can guess that they’re browsing the web. Wikipedia has a list (which is incomplete because new software can be written at any time and make up a new port that it prefers) and you can see lots of VPN software on there. If you’re connecting to a port that’s known to be used by VPN software, we can guess that you’re using VPN software.

Once you’re running VPN software on an unknown machine and have configured it to use a non-standard port, it’s a bit harder to tell what’s happening, but it’s still possible to make a pretty confident guess. Some VPN setups use “split-tunnel” where some traffic goes over VPN and some over the public Internet. (This is most common in corporate use where private company traffic goes in the tunnel, but browsing Lemmy would go over public.) Sometimes, DNS doesn’t go through the VPN which is a big give-away: you looked up “foo.com” and sent traffic to 172.67.137.159. Then you looked up “bar.org” and sent traffic to the same 172.67.137.159. Odds are that thing is a VPN (or other proxy).

Finally, you can just look at more complex patterns in the traffic. If you’re interested, you could install Wireshark or just run tcpdump and watch your own network traffic. Basic web-browsing is very visible: you send a small request (“HTTP GET /index.html”) and you get a much bigger response back. Then you send a flurry of smaller requests for all the page elements and get a bunch of bigger responses. Then there’s a huuuuge pause. Different protocols will have different shapes (a MOBA game would probably show more even traffic back-and-forth).

You wouldn’t be able to be absolutely confident with this, but over enough time and people you can get very close. Or you can just be a bit aggressive and incorrectly mark things as VPNs.

I wonder if the sleep-change fucks up our brains and that’s why more people aren’t upset about it.

Until this comment, I’d completely forgotten about how the most recent time-change messed up me and the puppy I’ve been training, because of course she needs to pee as soon as she wakes up at 6am every day…

But note that that’s about nudity and sex being the same, and the sex is pornographic (that is, the intent in showing it is to arouse the viewer). The OP is about non-sexual nudity. In fact, OP doesn’t mention sex at all, but I feel like it’s reasonable to extend the argument to non-pornographic depictions of sex.

The subtext of “anti-DEI”, though, is that it is not possible to have two competent candidates where one is a woman/minority because conservative Christian English-speaking white men from wealthy families are inherently superior.

It’s a funny post, but a serious point. The Europe of my childhood was different countries all very different from the US. But over time American media and algorithmic dominance are eroding things toward being America with accents. And what will you get for throwing away that cultural identity? Americans will still sneer at Europe.

I think a trickier question is: if Europe ought to retain its own identity, then shouldn’t each European country retain its own identity instead of banding together as “Europe”.

As a programmer, DST creates tons of bugs for anything using time and is annoying. But whatever, I guess I get paid either way.

As a parent, DST is miserable. It’s miserable as an adult, also, but multiplied misery when you have to get up early to ruin your kid’s sleep. And then that night they’re not ready to suddenly go to sleep an hour early so you lose an extra hour…

I hope Poland succeeds.

I have no idea how well it works in reality, but I can imagine the Lifetime Pass being a good business model for them: only the most enthusiastic user will pay for 3 years up front (lifetime currently costs 3x the yearly). So when they get a Lifetime pass they’re getting 3 years paid up front and an evangelist who will probably tell their friends about Plex. If that Lifetime subscriber gets even one person to sign up for a yearly sub who otherwise wouldn’t have, then Plex came out ahead.

Sure, I’m not saying Plex has to do a single-payment model. Just that it’s a think that’s been done successfully (and for longer than Plex has existed). Everyone’s pushing subscription models so hard that it’s easy to think “this is the only possible way that anything can work”.

I like my Shield TV: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/shield/shield-tv/

I did need to install a custom launcher on it when the standard AndroidTV launcher added ads.

Lots of businesses have and do exist without a subscription model. I’m fond of the Paprika Recipe Manager, for example, which asks a one-time payment for each major version. All commercial software worked this way in the 80s.

It’d be way less offensive if it was just present as an option, instead of dancing around flashing at me