I haven’t used Soulseek in 2 decades. IMO, this sort of behaviour is not legit.

Thanks for the suggestion. This looks like a very powerful tool. Curious to see how well it works.

For movies/TV shows, try rutracker.org. The interface is in russian, but the torrents almost always include english audio tracks for US/UK movies. Movies from other countries typically do include the original audio track and english subs.

They have a tone of older torrents, with some relatively rare content. There are some strange nuances such as SD rips are often posted with Xvid encoding (even new ones) and HD releases have a rule where they need to include all known russian Dubs/MVO/DVO/AVO audio tracks, so a large part of the file is audio.

But the good thing is that, even low health torrents often eventually have a seed appear. They have a massive networks of seeds/peers that are actually “federated” with lots of other trackers).

For relatively high seed/peer content you can also basically stream the release via “Download in sequential order” and “Download first and last piece first”. I regularly essentially stream movies via this method.

They are decent for music too. Video games will likely be challenging if you don’t speak russian and many releases actually don’t include the original language.

I did have occasional issues with using a VPN and it was clear services were somewhat suspicious about me (very aggressive use of CAPTCHAs, additional login validation etc.).

That being said, outside of netflix (circumventing region-lock), I never had any issues with outright loosing access to tech oligopoly services.

Maybe, maybe not.

Google does have PR considerations to manage.

Not saying they are better, but it is one constraint on their behaviour that doesn’t apply to system1/privacy one.

The fact that they are not very open about the acquisition of Startpage also doesn’t inspire confidence.

Is it really that bad? I let my NordVPN subscription lapse as I didn’t need it due to personal matters, I’ve heard a lot of good things about Mullvad and was considering them as my VPN provider.

Hmm, I’ve only seen it on desktop, guess the mobile view is messed up. :(

Thanks for the list!

One point I will add is that Startpage is actually owned by an American spamming company:

https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group/

I used to use them a lot before the system1/Privacy One acquisition, but then decided to switch back to google (never liked DDG’s results, but might have to try them again).

Read this via another source.

This is how you know Google (and other gigantic companies) are little more than criminals. Not every criminal is a street gang member.

I would say a good base assumption is that all content on the public internet is scrapped and used for AI schemes.

It’s the other factors that matter.

Assange isn’t merely a journalist. He collobarated with russian security services and was on their payroll during his work on their “RT” initiative.