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Joined 25 days ago
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Cake day: February 9th, 2026

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  • Take this with a grain of salt since I haven’t done much scraping (yet; I have a project I just started planning)

    I’ve heard you’re more likely to get blocked for using a VPN since some sites will block requests originating from data centers, which is less likely to happen coming from a residential IP address. (Although if you’re already using a VPS, the right proxy may help)

    This might be useless advice, but it might just be best to increase (and randomize) the amount of time between requests.

    And to answer your question, Mullvad is what I use, and it’s what I see reccomended (from both Reddit, and The Wirecutter) the most often because they store so little of your data, and you can even pay in cash.










  • I suspect they came up with a process for doing the conversions / redactions that worked for the documents they tested it with, and then applied the process to documents in a slightly different format and just didn’t notice. The Verge looked into it and couldn’t get a more specific answer than this:

    With MIME, the “=” is used to signal either that a string of text should be broken for transmission and rejoined — a “soft line break” — or, when followed by two other characters, that it should be converted to a particular non-ASCII mark.

    it doesn’t fully explain why the “=” sometimes replaces letters, like the “J” in “Jeffrey.” No one I spoke to could definitively answer this question, except to say that email is hard and converting it to PDF is harder, and the DoJ was converting a lot of documents in a hurry.

    https://www.theverge.com/policy/879016/epstein-files-emails-text-errors-encoding







  • Here’s what I’ve done:

    • Delete your advertising ID in the system settings
    • Disable the other ad-related settings
    • Disable tracking in the keyboard app (long-press , to get to settings, then click “Privacy”) or switch to HeliBoard
    • Avoid the Google Play store when possible
    • Use F-Droid and Obtainium instead
    • Install the DuckDuckGo browser and enable DuckDuckGo App Tracking Protection (I only use the DDG app for app tracking protection and email protection; I don’t browse the web with it)
    • Install Firefox with uBlock Origin
    • Set DuckDuckGo as your search engine in Firefox
    • Make sure your next phone supports GrapheneOS and install that instead of normal Android
    • Wait for real Linux phones to become viable and use that in a couple years

    Stuff I haven’t done yet but probably will eventually:

    • Replace the default home screen app (your home screen is an app, btw)
    • Replace the Google keyboard app

    I haven’t looked for good alternatives for these yet so if anyone has suggestions, I’m listening!