I just cannot be bothered with going on IRC in 2026

This is the reason that private trackers make the interview process as annoying as possible. People think this way and filter themselves out without any effort on the part of the site’s moderation team. IRC has been core to the piracy world since the beginning, not being comfortable with IRC is a big indicator that a person is a newbie.

Because of the various hoops that you have to jump through: getting on IRC, reading the rules, being tested on the rules, etc. The people that make it through the interview process are pre-selected for being the kind of people who are willing and capable of finding the information that they need to know.

I didn’t have an invite for a large music tracker and so I had to take a ~2 hour test on audio codecs, formats, bittorrent configuration, etcetcetc. Yes, it is annoying, but there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, so to speak.

Of course, you could just skip all of that and just get an invite, but then the responsibility for training you on the rules is on whoever invited you… if you screw up then they get kicked too.

It’s a good system, everyone has to individually prove their competence and the result is a much higher quality community.

If you use keepass*

I mean if you use syncthing.

Syncthing is what has the ability to set untrusted hosts. You set a password and the files are encrypted with that password before sending it to the untrusted computer.

Keepass encrypts the database with AES-256 by default so there is already a layer of encryption protecting your passwords.

If you use keepass and want to use a third party service to store your files there’s a way to setup an untrusted mirror which will encrypt the files before sending it to that client. That way you still have your files elsewhere (often on a VPS, seedbox or other host) but that host doesn’t have the unencrypted sync folder just in case you decide to put non-encrypted files in there too.

Public key crypto is used to set up a secure network connection, but it’s not used to encrypt the data that flows on that connection. Quantum snooping would require an eavesdropper to intercept every bit on a connection, from initiation onward. And decrypting it would probably not be a real-time affair.

It depends.

The attack type that is currently being considered is what is called Store Now Decrypt Later (SNDL). The idea is that some hypothetical future attacker could have a copy of all of your Internet traffic data for the past decade and such an attacker could utilize a not yet invented, but theoretically possible, quantum computer to break the encryption.

This is why systems are changing over to post-quantum encryption, because even if there are not quantum computers yet. The assurance that factoring prime numbers will be hard forever is no longer the case and the difficulty of factoring prime numbers underpins a lot of classical encryption.

A way of encrypting data in the past was to use the RSA keypair to exchange a symmetrical key, which is a system where both parties encrypt/decrypt data using a shared key. This allowed for a secure connection from RSA and also fast and computationally cheap encryption using a symmetrical algorithm. An attacker that has recorded traffic secured in this manner only needs to crack the RSA keypair to obtain the symmetrical key afterwards they can decrypt the traffic as if they were a participant. This kind of attack only requires the quantum computer to factor a single key.

More modern systems use methods which would create ephemeral keys which are used and discarded. They use a system of key exchange that allows both parties to create a shared key even when a listening party has access to all of the traffic between them. The RSA keypairs are only used to authenticate the two parties to one another, afterwards they use Diffie-Hellman (or Elliptical Curve Diffie-Hellman) to generate the shared key to encrypt the next packet.

Crypto systems like the one Signal employs takes this concept a step further using a double ratchet system, if this kind of thing is interesting to you ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXv1boalsDI )

Both links are from Computerphile on YT, they do good videos on Computer Science and Mathematics topics.

Put the keepass database in a folder and use syncthing to sync that folder.

I just run syncthing on every device that needs my password and they all always have an up to date copy of the database.