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
My use case: I like to have all my emails stored locally just in case some disaster happens with the copies in the cloud; I also get to have both personal and work email addresses, from different providers, in one organized and unified interface, and the same goes for tasks, calendars and contacts; and some features from big web clients are sometimes too nosy for my taste (suggested replies, pushing their calendar, messaging, tasks and contacts products, etc)
You beat me to it, so let me recommend what I check when Anna’s Archive and LibGen don’t have what I need (usually recent articles that are not on Sci-Hub): Standard Template Construct, here’s their GitHub repo
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/
Their privacy policy and data flow have been the same since the buyout, they were transparent about any implications and the mitigations put in place to protect users, so I’m alright with it. The biggest problem I have with them is sometimes getting rate-limited because of a VPN or Tor, but that’s it. Alternatives like DDG and Brave Search are usually bad for results in my native language, so I’ve been using Startpage for a couple years now and it’s nice
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
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