BakaBT is a private tracker that has lots of high quality anime/manga artbooks, soundtracks and extras like that. That’s all I use aside from Nyaa, but my needs are pretty basic in general

https://newpipe.net download the apk on GitHub or F-Droid

He was the developer working on Bromite with csagan, and he was likely not the cause of the delays, since the builds on his repo have been keeping up with Chromium all year. I’ve been using it since Bromite stopped getting updates and it works really well. Brave was my second option because of the fingerprinting protection and adblocking, but they don’t disable JavaScript JIT like Bromite and now Cromite. User script support is also really handy for me

They index results from five sources and update the main ones (two LibGen forks) monthly. They mirrored the Z-Library database before the website was seized (end of November 2022), indexed the new .onion addresses and haven’t updated the dataset since because they’re waiting for the situation to stabilize in order to figure out a way to regularly fetch new stuff from there too, as far as I know

Remember to check the Internet Archive library, you can easily borrow lots of amazing quality books for free and even rip the files. The Standard Template Construct has lots of stuff too, especially recent scientific articles Sci-Hub hasn’t published yet

Here are the official links: https://zlibrary-global.se/z-access#useful_link_tab. I would recommend just opening the .onion link (last tab on the page) with the Tor Browser in Safe mode and logging in with an anonymous e-mail and random password. Nowadays I’d rather use Anna’s Archive, though, it has most of the Z-Library database indexed anyway

Yeah, for now I’m skeptical because they’re Meta and they have to find ways to monetize this service, but on one day they’ve already overshadowed the rest of the fediverse easily. Even if they can’t profit as effectively off other instances, their instance is already ridiculously big and profitable regardless; the scraping thing really sounds like fear mongering. So if the only downside of federating with Threads is that my federated timeline would get cluttered with business accounts posting ads, I’d be alright with it, as long as I can get more content on my Home timeline from LOTS of people I want to follow who are not willing to interface with Mastodon, Pleroma, etc. Unless they force regular user accounts to publish advertisements to people outside the Threads instance, I’ll take it

On their app that should be harder to skip because the timeline is based on their algorithm and ads should be unavoidable, but how the hell would they force a user on another platform to see it? And how would they even directly target this person with a specific ad? If what people on instances federated with Threads see on their federated timeline are regular posts from business accounts placed in chronological order, I’m guessing there’d be no problem just blocking those “profiles” and moving on

Agreed. I have an account on Fosstodon and I like how they handled it. Not too friendly with Meta, not jumping on the bandwagon when we don’t even know how it works yet

No problem! You can find admins and users talking a lot about this by searching for the #p92 and #fedipact hashtags, lots of instances are preemptively defederating from Meta domains, although the software hasn’t implemented federation yet

Yeah, and they’ve been contacting big instance admins already: https://hub.fosstodon.org/facebook-fosstodon-fedi

They meet the criteria for Privacy Guides, at the very least: https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/pull/1312

One of the biggest public trackers for the last 10 years that recently closed down: https://torrentfreak.com/tag/rarbg/

Even worse:

The identity and location of the activist was already known to the French authorities (they had already been evicted once before for squatting, and the nature of squatting means that their location is known).

So they were probably not using a VPN to connect to Proton Mail, which was the specific target, since e-mail and VPN providers were treated differently under Swiss law until Proton and Threema fought the government on this issue. Tutanota had a similar issue. If you’re gonna rely on these services to break their jurisdiction’s laws, you should be covering your own ass with bulletproof opsec, because businesses with millions of accounts are not gonna shut down and burn evidence in order to protect one user. In the Proton case, the activist apparently connected to a known Proton Mail account with no VPN or Tor; in the Tutanota case, only e-mails that were not end-to-end encrypted would pose at risk

Yeah, they fixed things and owned up to it, best you can do when you fuck things up: https://blog.windscribe.com/ukrainian-server-seizure-a-commentary-and-state-of-the-industry-e71e8d205b26/. I feel like people give them too much shit for this, just like with that Proton climate activist case

Yeah, that’s why I pointed out that I haven’t used it in a couple years, I have no idea about the direction development took after that, so maybe some folks that work on the development of Chromium and its many forks can give us some insight. Personally, I just decided to stick to Firefox tweaked with Arkenfox as my main browser on desktop and I have Brave with all its annoyances turned off as a backup option

I’ve been using ephemeral port forwarding on a Windscribe pro account, hope they keep the feature. It’s a pretty good service

Haven’t used Ungoogled Chromium in a couple years, but I’ve seen some criticisms of it even compared to regular Chrome: https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/

For my personal use, the only drawback of mat2 is that for PDFs it turns pages into PNGs (https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2/-/blob/master/libmat2/pdf.py), so you lose the OCR layer/searchable text from the original file. Since ExifTool changes to PDF metadata are reversible if you don’t linearize them (https://exiftool.org/TagNames/PDF.html), now I just use this script to safely clean and keep the output file searchable: https://gist.github.com/sneakers-the-rat/172e8679b824a3871decd262ed3f59c6.

I guess you could compare the output files from mat2 and ExifTool using the fc or diff commands, to find out what’s the difference