Maybe with the intent to prove how overhyped it is? /s
Hahaha just kidding we all know it's actually because these companies are cheap bastards who don't care about how much energy and water they're wasting on a stupid fucking throwaway slop image.
I calls 'em like I sees 'em. I'm a whale biologist.
I'm in the desert so I can't comment because my environment is biased towards being dry anyway.
but they literally do seed torrents to get a list of all clients who connect to them and download
Actually, if I recall correctly they tend to seed only partial files because what they actually want to hit people with is distribution. If I understand the legal situation around it correctly, the act of downloading is much harder to pursue in civil court as opposed to damages for distribution. Because they need to prove that you're not just downloading it for yourself but distributing it to others, hence sitting in the swarm and logging IPs of anyone who sends data to them.
I went back and watched a little because it had been a long time.
I had forgotten that the animation was like a mixture of the animation styles of Batman the Animated Series and Animaniacs, which is a weirdly good mix.
By my math I average 15.26 comments a day (9674 comments / 634 days), which I would say is a good deal of commenting on Lemmy on a per-day basis.
Which is I why I used words like "usually" and "less likely." It's not any sort of guarantee of safety. For example, xFinity/Comcast owns NBCUniversal, and as such is technically the rights-holder for NBC content and as such they have a vested interest in potentially inspecting your traffic directly for torrents they have ownership of. In other words, I agree with your assessment here.
Mullvad stopped allowing port forwarding, sadly, which complicates torrenting. They had valid reasons for dropping support, but it makes it much harder to complete a solid connection via Mullvad.
Private trackers.
In the USA when you are caught torrenting copyrighted material it is because a firm hired by copyright owners sits in the public swarm logging IPs. They then send a warning to your ISP, who in turn sends you a warning.
Private trackers are by their nature a club that tries their damnedest to prevent people working for those kind of companies from joining the site to begin with.
It is still smart to use a VPN but your ISP isn't generally targeting your data in transit itself. It's usually a third party company hired out who cannot see your data streams directly. Thus a private tracker reduces the need for such measures since you are less likely to run into a hired hand logging your IP from a private tracker swarm.
My name is Snot Flickerman and I am a serial commenter. If you see me around be nice to me and pity me for my problem. If I annoy you I don't know what to tell you.
Unpopular opinion but setting up a whole recording studio and cutting a video without fucking up a bunch is a lot more fucking work than just writing a damn text document.