Here’s the exact post that got the Proton CEO in trouble:
Maybe Gail Slater really is a great pick for Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division. Frankly, I have no idea. But I won’t do business with any company that carries any water whatsoever for Trump.
I’d recommend AirVPN. Here’s why I’d recommend them, in their own words:
No traffic limit. No time limit.
No maximum speed limit, it depends only on the server load
Every protocol is welcome, including p2p. Forwarded ports and DDNS to optimize your software.
However, it’s worth mentioning that WireGuard is UDP only.
That’s a very good point, which I completely overlooked.
If you want something that “just works” under all conditions, then you’re looking at OpenVPN. Bonus, if you want to marginally improve the chance that everything just works, even in the most restrictive places (like hotel wifi), have your VPN used port 443 for TCP and 53 for UDP. These are the most heavily used ports for web and DNS. Meaning you VPN traffic will just “blend in” with normal internet noise (disclaimer: yes, deep packet inspection exists, but rustic hotel wifi’s aren’t going to be using it ;)
Also good advice. In my case the VPN runs on my home server, there are no UDP restrictions of any kind on my home network and WireGuard is great in that scenario. For a mobile VPN solution where the network is not under your control and could be locked down in any number of ways, you’re definitely right that OpenVPN will be much more reliable when configured as you suggest.
I use WireGuard personally. OpenVPN has been around a long time, and is very configurable. That can be a benefit if you need some specific configuration, but it can also mean more opportunities to configure your connection in a less-secure way (e.g. selecting on older, less strong encryption algorithm). WireGuard is much newer and supports fewer options. For example it only does one encryption algorithm, but it’s one of the latest and most secure. WireGuard also tends to have faster transfer speeds, I believe because many of OpenVPN’s design choices were made long ago. Those design choices made sense for the processors available at the time, but simply aren’t as performant on modern multi core CPUs. WireGuard’s more recent design does a better job of taking advantage of modern processors so it tends to win speed benchmarks by a significant margin. That’s the primary reason I went with WireGuard.
In terms of vulnerabilities, it’s tough to say which is better. OpenVPN has the longer track record of course, but its code base is an order of magnitude larger than WireGuard’s. More eyes have been looking at OpenVPN’s code for more time, but there’s more than 10x more OpenVPN code to look at. My personal feeling is that a leaner codebase is generally better for security, simply because there’s fewer lines of code in which vulnerabilities can lurk.
If you do opt for OpenVPN, I believe UDP is generally better for performance. TCP support is mainly there for scenarios where UDP is blocked, or on dodgy connections where TCP’s more proactive handling of dropped packets can reduce the time before a lost packet gets retransmitted.
I think you’re referring to FlareSolverr. If so, I’m not aware of a direct replacement.
Main issue is it’s heavy on resources (I have an rpi4b)
FlareSolverr does add some memory overhead, but otherwise it’s fairly lightweight. On my system FlareSolverr has been up for 8 days and is using ~300MB:
NAME CPU % MEM USAGE
flaresolverr 0.01% 310.3MiB
Note that any CPU usage introduced by FlareSolverr is unavoidable because that’s how CloudFlare protection works. CloudFlare creates a workload in the client browser that should be trivial if you’re making a single request, but brings your system to a crawl if you’re trying to send many requests, e.g. DDOSing or scraping. You need to execute that browser-based work somewhere to get past those CloudFlare checks.
If hosting the FlareSolverr container on your rpi4b would put it under memory or CPU pressure, you could run the docker container on a different system. When setting up Flaresolverr in Prowlarr you create an indexer proxy with a tag. Any indexer with that tag sends their requests through the proxy instead of sending them directly to the tracker site. When Flaresolverr is running in a local Docker container the address for the proxy is localhost, e.g.:
If you run Flaresolverr’s Docker container on another system that’s accessible to your rpi4b, you could create an indexer proxy whose Host is “http://<other_system_IP>:8191”. Keep security in mind when doing this, if you’ve got a VPN connection on your rpi4b with split tunneling enabled (i.e. connections to local network resources are allowed when the tunnel is up) then this setup would allow requests to these indexers to escape the VPN tunnel.
On a side note, I’d strongly recommend trying out a Docker-based setup. Aside from Flaresolverr, I ran my servarr setup without containers for years and that was fine, but moving over to Docker made the configuration a lot easier. Before Docker I had a complex set of firewall rules to allow traffic to my local network and my VPN server, but drop any other traffic that wasn’t using the VPN tunnel. All the firewall complexity has now been replaced with a gluetun container, which is much easier to manage and probably more secure. You don’t have to switch to Docker-based all in go, you can run hybrid if need be.
If you really don’t want to use Docker then you could attempt to install from source on the rpi4b. Be advised that you’re absolutely going offroad if you do this as it’s not officially supported by the FlareSolverr devs. It requires install an ARM-based Chromium browser, then setting some environment variables so that FlareSolverr uses that browser instead of trying to download its own. Exact steps are documented in this GitHub comment. I haven’t tested these steps, so YMMV. Honestly, I think this is a bad idea because the full browser will almost certainly require more memory. The browser included in the FlareSolverr container is stripped down to the bare minimum required to pass the CloudFlare checks.
If you’re just strongly opposed to Docker for whatever reason then I think your best bet would be to combine the two approaches above. Host the FlareSolverr proxy on an x86-based system so you can install from source using the officially supported steps.
He was a raging alcoholic who hid his illness from the medical professionals who examined him as part of his Super Size Me “experiment.” A lifetime of booze did way more damage than 30 days of McDs possibly could.
I’m not convinced that Valve will go down the tubes when Gabe shuffles off this moral coil (praise gaben may he live a thousand years). It would require a strong company culture that believes as he does that piracy is a service issue and is thus willing to adhere to his vision in his absence, but that can happen in a privately held company if there’s a strong succession plan in place.
Now, if Gabe dies and Valve goes public, then it’s pretty much over. Platform monetization, proft-taking and short-term thinking would enshittify Steam in short order.
Commerce conducted in a capitalist economy is inherently capitalist. Being publicly traded is not strictly required, though it might be the most common form of corporate structure under capitalism. Individuals, partnerships, privately-held and publicly-traded companies can all own capital. Valve’s assets are not owned by a government, its business decisions are made privately and it operates in a free market. Those three factors are pretty much the definition of capitalism.
To be honest, I didn’t either but I wanted to know where all these names come from. So I did some Googling and that’s what I found. Apologies if I’ve mangled anything, but I think I got the broad strokes right. Etymology (the study of the origin and evolution of words) is neat!
Essex comes from Old English Eastseaxan, literally “East Saxons”. In other words, this is the part of England that was invaded/settled by the Saxons and they divided their lands into east, south and west regions, plus a middle region (middle Saxons, modern-day Middlesex).
There’s no Norsex because at that time the lands to north of Saxon territory were held by the Angles. They also divided themselves into East Angles, South Angles, etc., but those names don’t seem to have survived into the modern day. Interestingly though, the Kingdom of East Anglia was divided into “North Folk” and “South Folk”, which is the origin of the modern-day names for Norfolk and Suffolk.
If you’ve heard of the Anglo-Saxons, yeah, that’s these guys, the Angles and the Saxons. The Angles came from parts of modern-day Denmark, the Saxons from parts of modern-day northern Germany. They shared a lot of common Germanic culture but were also rivals.
I switched to AirVPN about 6 months ago and I’ve been really happy with the service. Was previously using NordVPN, which was fine, but I was looking for a VPN provider that offered port forwarding and AirVPN does that. I don’t have hard stats on this, but I do feel that having access to port forwarding has improved my overall torrent speeds since switching.