As soon as they became a publicly tradable company they are obligated, by the Dodge v Ford ruling, to only maximize shareholder value. Being not evil isn’t an option.

Not being five eyes isn’t nothing :P

Of course, any traffic leaving the US is going to be hoovered up by the NSA for their SNDL program so make sure your VPN is using something quantum resistant. That being said, I wouldn’t be too worried about law enforcement from the perspective of pirating digital media for personal use. As long as you’re not selling pirated media then LE has more important things to worry about.

If you’re in a country that has criminal ‘contempt of corporation’ laws where they actively pursue personal-use piracy, yeah you’d probably want both a VPN and a seedbox. Of course, now you have the problem of paying for it without linking it to your person. Unfortunately, a big part of the online digital surveillance push in western countries has been expanding KYC and AML laws that make it much harder to pay anonymously without linking your identity to a seedbox.

Big brother is always expanding his reach :/

Tree? What kind of nature loving hippie do we have here? We use concrete blocks like a real 'murican

I think it’s because we here in the technical nerdy spaces know the value of a cooties shot…

If you’re only interested in torrenting don’t use a VPN, just get a seedbox. You can get one with minimal stats (1TB storage, 2TB/mo upload on a 50Gb connection) for like $6/mo. You use it to run all of your torrents and handle seeding (handy for getting access to private trackers) and then just download everything via SFTP/rsync/whatever. Or, you can spend a bit more and have them host the *arr suite and Plex/Jellyfin so you have your own private streaming service. Split between a few family members, this is a very affordable alternative to commercial streaming services.

If you’re looking for a VPN for privacy concerns, don’t use a US-based provider. You have no guarantee of privacy, just a flimsy ‘guarantee’ from the company. Use a provider located in a place that has strong privacy and secrecy laws, like Switzerland.

It’s not the eggs that you should worry about, salmonella is largely controlled by the egg processing company. The wheat used to make flour can be contaminated by rat feces, which is then ground into the batch.

If you want to eliminate the risk, and still eat the raw cookie dough, you can brown flour in the oven before making the cookie dough. It won’t work well if you try to bake it, but if you want to use raw cookie dough (like, in a batch of ice cream) but don’t want to contract e.Coli then brown flour is the way to go.

I mean, I still taste the raw cookie dough before I bake… but just in case someone needed to know, there’s a safe way to do it.