And the ads on Android have gotten worse — full-screen popups in free games, trackers embedded in utility apps, and video ads that buffer for 5 seconds before they even play. You can install AdGuard or Blokada and they work … up to a point. But they drain battery running as persistent services. Here’s the short answer: BlockAds is a free, open-source Magisk module that blocks ads at the system level without running a background app. And it uses curated host files from OISD and 1Hosts to catch ads and trackers before they even reach your phone. ...

ExpressVPN still unblocks Netflix US on the first try. It still runs on RAM-only servers confirmed by annual PwC audits. And it still belongs to Kape Technologies — the company whose predecessor built adware that landed on millions of machines. Yet all three statements are true at the same time. And that tension is what makes an ExpressVPN review in 2026 different from a ProtonVPN review or a Mullvad review. ...

Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. ProtonVPN — starts at $0 (free) to $12.99/mo with 4,700+ servers in 100+ countries Mullvad has no affiliate program — all Mullvad recommendations in this article are unbiased. Two VPNs dominate the privacy conversation in 2026, and they couldn’t approach the problem more differently. ProtonVPN builds a Swiss-protected ecosystem — 4,700+ servers across 100+ countries, streaming optimizations, and a genuinely unlimited free tier funded by paid subscribers. Mullvad takes the opposite path: flat €5/month pricing, anonymous signup with no email required, and a server network of roughly 800 machines it owns outright. ...

Firezone: open-source zero-trust via WireGuard with Docker self-hosted deploy. Quick review of features, pricing, and comparison to Tailscale and Netbird.

Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. ProtonVPN — Swiss-based with audited no-log policy, starting at $4.99/month Here’s the thing: Most VPNs want your email, your payment method, and a 24-month commitment to qualify for a “discount” that doubles at renewal. Mullvad wants none of those. It charges a flat €5/month — the same price for every user, every month, no tiers, no upsells, no “limited time offer” countdown timers. In January 2026, Mullvad became the first major VPN to go WireGuard-only, removing OpenVPN from its desktop apps entirely. This quick review covers what actually changed in 2026 and who this VPN is for. ...

ProtonVPN’s Swiss jurisdiction has been audited three times for no-log compliance since 2020 — zero violations found. And Surfshark runs 4,500+ servers across 100 countries and doesn’t cap device count. And one prioritizes verifiable privacy at the architecture level. The other prioritizes feature breadth and unlimited connectivity. But these are two different philosophies competing for the same user. And depending on what you actually need, the wrong pick costs you either more than you should pay or more privacy than you intended to give up. ...

So you love what Tailscale does — the zero-config mesh VPN that connects everything. But that control plane? But closed source. And your network routing, ACLs, and device inventory all live on someone else’s servers. And for a homelab or client infrastructure you own, that’s a hard no. Here’s the short answer: Netbird fixes that. And it’s an open-source WireGuard® mesh VPN where the full stack — client, management API, dashboard, relay servers — is yours to run. Still, the project sits at 25.9K★ on GitHub with 2,946 commits, and it shipped two new versions over 72 hours (v0.72.3 and v0.72.4). So this is the most complete self-hosted alternative to Tailscale today. ...

You know the scenario. So you’re deep in a security assessment, and something about the HTTP traffic feels off. The response body looks different from what the frontend expects, or a third-party API call is silently failing. You need to intercept it, inspect it, maybe replay it — but spinning up BurpSuite just for a quick look feels like overkill. Here’s the short answer: Proxify is the lightweight alternative. It’s an open-source MITM proxy from ProjectDiscovery (the team behind Nuclei, 22K★) that captures, manipulates, and replays HTTP/HTTPS traffic — all from a single Go binary. The project sits at 3K★ on GitHub, ships in under 15MB, and has Docker images ready to go. And because it’s from ProjectDiscovery, you know the tooling DNA is solid. ...

Every time you visit a website, that site learns a lot more about you than you probably realize. Your IP address, browser fingerprint, DNS queries, the whole chain of redirects — it’s all visible on the other end. But what if you could flip the script and see exactly what you are exposing? That’s the idea behind Web-Check — a free, open-source OSINT dashboard built by Alicia Sykes (lissy93) that analyzes any website from the outside in. So drop in a URL, and within 20-30 seconds you get a full breakdown of what that site reveals about its infrastructure, its users, and you. ...

WireGuard is fast. But it’s also being actively blocked by Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in China, Russia, Iran, and the UAE. Standard WireGuard packets follow a predictable pattern — fixed header size, no padding, no traffic obfuscation. DPI systems fingerprint that pattern and drop the connection. So what happens when you take the WireGuard kernel protocol and add random headers, packet padding, and protocol imitation on top? So you get AmneziaWG 2.0 — and the AmneziaWG Installer is one of the fastest ways to put it on your own VPS. ...