A VPN is a great start, but there’s a few things you can do to make yourself a bit safer.

I like Mullvad for it’s client that allows me be in a lockdown mode where access to the internet can only go through a VPN. It’s a killswitch and you’re going to want one no matter who provides your VPN. The reason you want a kill switch is because your computer may otherwise connect to your home or office network and leak your IP address.

If you torrent you’ll want a torrent client like qBitTorrent because under advanced settings in that program you can set it to only work on your VPN’s network interface. This adds a second wall of protection to make sure you don’t leak your IP address.

At this point your ISP isn’t going to know any much more than you’re using a VPN and torrenting, but that’s all. And you’re probably good right here, but there’s more you can do if you’re really worried.

By tweaking some wireguard settings in the Mullvad client you can even obscure your torrenting traffic altogether. At that point your ISP won’t have much more to report than that you’re using a VPN.

You’ll then want to test your VPN is working well with your torrent client by using Torrent Tracker IP Checker or something similar. Verify that your IP is what it should be.

And if you’re feeling extra motivated, doing all of this on a separate computer running linux would be ideal so that you can ensure no software running on your rig deanonymizes you, and can keep it locked when not in use.

The author states that she’s been a tech writer for 10 years and that she thinks AI is going to ruin journalism because it gives too much power to AI providers.

But, have you seen the state of journalism? AI killing it would just be an act of mercy at this point. How much SEO optimized, grammatically correct, appropriately filtered, but ultimately useless “content” do I really need to sift through to get even something as simple as a recipe?

The author can bemoan AI until she’s blue in the face, but she’s willfully ignoring that the information that most people get today is already controlled by a handful of people and organizations.