My machine can't handle that upgrade and I've not gotten any popups, thankfully.

Interesting. Newsgroups are literally what i used last century for my piracy. But back then you got newsgroups (and other services) included with your internet.

Windscribe free doesn't support P2P anymore? Hmm, that's an interesting development.

I check my srt files for that kind of thing and just remove it. But i don't download as much material as many people, perhaps.

I mostly listen to jazz, blues and classical. I use rutracker which has everything I want and in lossless formats. Mp3s too but I'm more interested in lossless.

I have no idea what uncles have to do with this especially but I've heard lots of people, young, old, male, female say these kinds of things.

Well unless their ideology is baked into the programming I'm not sure why it would matter. It certainly doesn't matter to me.

I use a free VPN (Windscribe's free 15 GB) from time to time if I'm torrenting something very new. Otherwise I don't use one.

I use torrents almost exclusively because of the price (free) and convenience. That is, I can get them easily where I live for no additional cost beyond my low speed internet. I have no extra money at all, at this time in my life, unfortunately.