I'd say the The Expanse fits the bill. It is a book series with a very successful television adaptation.

Mullvad doesn't have port forwarding, so that's going to be a factor.

Proton and Tutanota are both privacy-centric providers who have been around a good amount of time. I'd say both are a good option if you don't want to self-host.

You can upload potential threats to https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload

There are/were vulnerabilities that are zero click, but in this case I imagine they are just banking on people clicking it in this case. If you're not familiar xvideos is a porn site.

I think you are probably fine as you were running windows defender. It might be a good idea to do a manual full scan and perhaps refresh your browser.

Check out veracrypt. It's free and easy to use.

Every time this happens to me, the clerk/cashier just shrugs and is like, "okay". They get it, but are obligated to try anyway. The best you can do is be polite.

The primary reason free VPNs/proxies are not recommended is due to the high amount of abuse that flows through them. As a sysop, it's just easier to blanket ban all those IPs.

I have ethical concerns with your use of RiseUp as well. They are trying to offer a useful service to people on a donation basis, and you are funnelling a large amount of traffic through them.

What about codeberg? It is free and forgejo is easy to use.

Like many others, I switched to Jellyfin years ago. It is way, way better for me. It does what it says on the tin, sometimes more, but not less.

Don't buy into any site requiring money. There are plenty of good private trackers run by community members. Once you join and get your feet, feel free to donate if they are doing a good job.

Really any distro should be fine. It's more a matter of getting the bootloader setup correctly.

Do note that, depending on the configuration, Windows will randomly overwrite stuff and mess up dual boot.

If you can for your situation, I would suggest running a Windows VM inside Linux to get certain tasks done.

Like others, I had an account before this was implemented. I have a couple projects on there, also mirrored to self hosted gitea. Have had people refuse/unable to contribute to the gitlab project due to the kyc requirement, so I'm thinking I will migrate to codeberg soon.

You can get into private trackers and trust them. Not recommended, but some do.

Generally speaking, the copyright trolls only target public trackers and DHT. There have been some instances of them making way into TL and others. Your ISP could also identify torrenting on private trackers if they wanted to, even with mitigations. In my experience and from what I hear, most ISPs do not go to these lengths.

So, there a risk doing the above. Whether or not it's worth it until you can afford a decent VPN is up to you.

Aside: Please do not use a free VPN for torrenting (or tor, for that matter). They are either like RiseUp and run on donations for people who really, really need them, or Proton which is commercial and specifically try to block or slow down the traffic. Either way, if ruins it for everyone else.

Good question. I chose it initially because it was open source and way easier (in my eyes) than Apache. I don't recall the others being an option at the time, or I was not aware of them. nginx does what I need without complaint, so I haven't switched.

My basic check is: Are there investors / vc people involved? If so, then it will inevitably enshittify. If not, then requires further investigation. OSI-approved open source is a big plus

Even when choosing what seems like good software, I think it's important to consider switching costs. How easily can you move to another solution, say the second pick, if things go south?

I imagine that is due to plex cramming in their own streaming option. So the free stuff you see on the default home page (last time I used it). There is a setting in firefox to disable drm playback, but it looks to be a browser-wide choice.

Running any binary that you can't examine the source of (and confirm it was built from it without modification) is risky. It's mostly a balance of trust and risk. Even developers have been known to insert what we could malware.

That said, if you get your cracked content from a trusted source, I'd say it's generally safe. Otherwise, exercise extreme caution.

Is GMG an official reseller? Maybe I am out of the loop, but I thought they operated in the grey market.

I went through and built a license, then read through it.

I don't think most of the things contained would be legally enforceable. We barely even have traditional open licensing that works, much less one that tries to enforce an ethical framework. Instead of this, we should work toward wide-reaching law that protects people's rights, something that has teeth. Asking people to please not enslave someone with your library will never work, they will do it anyway or just not use your library, as they already do with copyleft licenses.

I would use the native version. For something like this, it makes sense that it should have less restricted/sandboxed access to the underlying system.

Gitlab uses a ton of resources and is a pain to setup. Once you get it going, it's fine.

Going to echo what others have said: Use Gitea or Forgejo instead if you can. Both have runners you can setup like gitlab, but they instead mimic github actions instead of gitlab ci/cd.

I run a semi-private gitea instance, and have not had any problems past the initial setup in 2+ years.