Damned if they do, damned if they don't?

I kinda wish more people would look beyond the big email providers that rely on proprietary apps and tech. Email is a set of open protocols but it was never designed to be secure and never will be. Proton et al can only offer e2ee within its boundary (GPG works just as well if you really need it) - for everything else (most stuff), it's pretty pointless to try harden that.

For the last 26+ years, I've been hosting my email on simple cPanel, with my own domain name, 100% managed by myself. I have a catch-all / wildcard mailbox, get almost no spam (and can blackhole any address that leaks, as they inevitably do), and can access it in my own way (Roundcube, Thunderbird ftw.)

Right now, I use old-fashioned POP3 (so it's deleted off the server), but could if I wanted, set up a local IMAP server with something like fetchmail and chain it together for more privacy and convenience. (Remember, you're never gonna approach ee2e levels unless it's in a proprietary system.) The most important thing; since the hosting company is responsible for email delivery, they use reliable third parties (think mailgun, sendgrid, brevo etc.) as part of the package.

Total control, cheap, and don't ever have to rely on a big tech company (or a CEO getting political).

https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging-claims-proven-true-again-in-court-180606/

Yes to crypto, via Bitpay.

There's no point doing anything fancy like that - wireguard over Tailscale is pretty pointless, as Tailscale is literally wireguard with NAT traversal and authentication bolted on. Unless you enable subnetting, it can't get more secure than that.

And even if you do enable subnetting (which you might wanna do if you need access to absolutely everything), you can use Tailscale ACLs to keep tighter control - say, from specific (tagged) devices.

It's good enough for recent releases (note you may have to open a port for passive XDCC) but because it's not easy to automate, even public trackers + *arrs (w/ VPN) are just more convenient.

Occasionally you might find releases on IRC and not on public trackers, and visa versa, so it's good to have a backup. I prefer scene releases so it's easy to find specific stuff with the xdcc search sites (e.g. dot eu and sun), and maybe a 'lil help from srrdb to verify CRCs.

Suppose one way around it would be to rent a cheap VPS in the UK and piggy back off the connection?

Otherwise, there's a s2 'NORDiC' version going around which is actually in English audio - just with various scandiwegian soft subs, so it's defo out there. DM me if you still struggle to find it.

More people should use BiglyBT and its Swarm Merging feature. You get the ability to seed or download chunks from peers across separate torrent files.

It's a shame because if more people used it, the BiglyBT devs might add hash-based merging (with v2 torrents) instead of just size-based. Hybrid/v2 merging is still possible, but file size is less reliable and caters to files only larger than 50MB.

Some kinda auto v1/v2/hybrid private<->public torrent maker plugin for BiglyBT would be... bigly.

If qBittorrent/qb-nox is bound to your VPN interface, then 1) your VPN needs to support port forwarding, and 2) forwarding a port on your router is pointless and unnecessary. Your only way around it is to switch VPN or don't use VPN and then port forward.

Thank you for posting this, hadn't heard of it before.

Compared to the memory footprint of web browsers, a Java BT app is pretty tame on modern computers these days. Nor do you have to faff around with installing JRE manually. It just works.

Resource usage is pretty good tho and it can handle hundreds of torrents with ease.

Wish Ace Stream saw more recognition, it really is awesome - high quality, P2P (based on bittorrent), pretty robust and mostly no freezing/buffering (provided enough peers) and far superior to web site streaming coz there's no stupid ads to interrupt (even with adblockers there's always some javascript nonsense).

Interested in this topic, as having difficulty locating certain scene releases lately. Outside of public torrents (through the arrs), my usual fallback of xdcc and usenet trials for older stuff is failing me atm.

Now I'm wondering is it worth the extra effort and upkeep once again? Had TL back in '09 but let it get inactive, and darn missed the recent open signups fml.