i remember reading that tor maintainers don’t like it when people use the Tor network for torrenting, because it harms the network from a performance perspective

What do you think of all this?

I expected this from ExpressVPN and PIA, and I think Kappe was already known doing very shady things, but it’s a good reminder, and also there are most probably people who didn’t know yet

i don’t really think so. unplug the power to your PC and the lights will turn off soon

Also it is not great practice to totally shutdown at night as that’s the time when update happen.

updates can be installed when it’s turned on, though, and it well consume much less power.

It also could theoretically wear out hardware but chances are that’s not a problem on newer machines

what do you mean? I don’t understand.
if you mean the HDDs spinning down and up, then

• if it only happens at shutdown, it shouldn’t wear them out, additionally as I know HDDs (consumer models at least) don’t like endless spinning either
• windows probably shuts it down regularly when it’s not in use. this is a setting in the power profile
• as I know, frequent spindowns only increase wear out if it happens very often, like every 10 seconds and such because of the drive’s garbage internal power saving setting. that’s why I always keep it at least 30 minutes or more

from google play? on my degoogled phone?

its a relatively recent development. possibly it only applies to when you open it up, replace something inside but even if they are not searching for software modifications, the distinction is very small and you’re not likely to hear it in the news before experiencing it

does the USA have such a law? Honestly I would be surprised.

I’m talking with the EU in mind. Probably GDPR, but there may be other laws affecting it

wow this got to be quite long. sorry for that!

to the same note, you shouldn’t upload images of them anywhere. not facebook, not google (drive or any other service), not facebook messenger, but not even anywhere encrypted.

take the images with a regular camera, or a phone that does not give any apps storage access permissions, and have physical prints, which can be viewed every time they visit you. you will need to tell them they can’t take photos of the children nor the photo album. this has worked well forag es, they shouldn’t be so entitled to images.
if I were you, I would require all guests to leave all their phones on a shelf near the main door. It’ll not only prevent photos, but also increase quality time by them not scrolling facebook and such while there.
before you tell them this, let them know firmly that you’re not doing this for one, but for child safety and basic human rights, and that in your house it’s you who make the rules. and keep in mind, that even when you are the guest, you hold the rights to disallow making pictures of your children until they are old enough to make the decision fur themselves.

why don’t use even the private cloud services?
the reason is your relatives who you trusted, will probably download the videos, and reshare them with others through the services you wanted to avoid. also consider that most of them doesn’t have any information hygiene, they won’t even know they are doing something bad, they won’t understand and will hand-wave all your concerns away.
this is not just a technical problem, but also a people problem, which cannot be solved with tech.

if your wife does not cooperate, you won’t be able to protect your children to the level you want. of course don’t divorce over that or something, it’s not worth it, you can probably still do lots. maybe over time, going slower and you can be forming your family’s privacy habits.
but I also have to mention, I wouldn’t want to live with someone who is not intereinterested in any level about personal privacy. if you have got so far that you’re having kids, this is probably not the case for you.

as last words, don’t take this as a strong “don’t take any pictures” stance. yes, do take pictures, they’ll be very good to have later, but make sure that you can keep control over them, for your children’s safety.
and don’t get (too) mad if parents in the class will take group pictures on which they are there. that’s something else, and hopefully relatively rare. best you can do with that is teach your children about why they might not want it, the reasons you don’t want it to be uploaded to facebook and such, and that they agree on this they can request the parents to be more careful.

is it legal at all to have an email address at that age?