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The European Parliament rejected Chat Control 1.0 this week. It would have forced Signal and WhatsApp to scan every private message. Quick verdict: it’s a genuine win for end-to-end encryption. But here’s the catch that almost every news outlet missed. Still, your ISP is watching. And the EU’s ePrivacy Regulation still lets them. What Just Happened With EU Chat Control Chat Control 1.0 was an EU rule. It would force messaging apps to scan all user content — even encrypted messages — for CSAM. So it sounds reasonable on the surface. But privacy researchers and EDRi spotted a big problem. ...

On March 27, the European Parliament voted down Chat Control 1.0 — the controversial proposal that would have required messaging platforms to scan private messages for illegal content. For anyone who uses Signal, WhatsApp, or a VPN, this is a major privacy win in Brussels this year. But here’s the part that most news headlines are missing: the rejection doesn’t mean surveillance stops. So it just means the battle shifts to a different front. ...

If you are reading this, you probably already use a VPN. Good. That means your ISP cannot see which sites you visit, and the websites you visit cannot see your real IP address. Still, here is the uncomfortable truth: in 2026, a VPN alone covers maybe 40% of your digital footprint. The other 60% leaks through channels most VPN marketing conveniently ignores. (And if you are still using a free VPN, the situation is worse — as we documented in our free VPN safety analysis.) ...

Netmaker hits 11,665 GitHub stars as of July 2026 — but those stars aren’t from a launch-day hype spike. The project shipped v1.6.0, runs 7,705 commits, and is backed by Y-Combinator. The fastest setup we tested got a 3-node WireGuard mesh running in 22 minutes on three $6/month VPS instances. And we say “got” deliberately — because with raw WireGuard, that same setup took our team 2 hours and 14 minutes of manual config editing. Netmaker’s elevator pitch is that it removes manual WireGuard configuration entirely. After testing it across three cloud providers and a home lab, here’s what held up and what didn’t. When you purchase through our links, we may earn a commission. Thanks for supporting our independent testing! ...

Most VPN users run the full tunnel. Every app, every browser tab, every background service — all of it goes through the encrypted pipe. Simple, safe, and slow. Split tunneling changes that. It lets you pick which traffic takes the VPN route and which goes straight to the internet. The result: banking apps that don’t flag you as a foreign login, streaming services that load at full speed, and encrypted protection for everything else — all at the same time. ...

If you run Clash or Mihomo, you know the subscription config workflow is a pain. So you paste a link, manually merge nodes, mess with YAML anchors — repeat every time your provider pushes an update. But SubBoost fixes this with a visual UI that handles chained proxy setups, generating clean, ready-to-use configs in about two minutes. Our take: SubBoost is one of the most approachable subscription managers we’ve tested for Clash/Mihomo users. Still, the visual dashboard turns a text-editor chore into a point-and-click workflow, and the built-in templates handle 90% of common setups out of the box. Even so, it’s new — only been public since mid-June 2026 — but already at 464 GitHub stars and active development. ...

What Is Wireproxy? Wireproxy is an open-source Go application that connects to a WireGuard peer and exposes the connection as a SOCKS5 or HTTP proxy. Unlike a standard WireGuard client — which creates a new network interface and needs root or administrator privileges — wireproxy runs entirely in userspace. You keep WireGuard’s encryption without touching your system’s network stack. The project sits at 5,700+ stars on GitHub, maintained by windtf under the ISC license. It ships as a single static binary for Linux, macOS, and Windows. ...

Most people think a strong WiFi password is enough to keep their home network safe. But here’s the thing — once a device joins your network, consumer routers treat it like family. Your smart TV, your kid’s tablet, your IoT light bulb — they all get the same network access as your work computer. But SPR (Secure Programmable Router) by Supernetworks approaches this differently. It gives every single device its own isolated /30 subnet with a unique WPA3 passphrase. No device can talk to another unless you explicitly allow it. And it runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, or their pre-built Compute Board ($399.99). ...

Here’s the short version: Cloudflare Gateway Pi-Hole Scripts (CGPS) turns Cloudflare’s free DNS filtering into a Pi-hole replacement — no hardware, no server, no monthly fee. If you’ve been putting off Pi-hole because you don’t have a Raspberry Pi, this is a genuinely useful alternative. We tested it: the setup takes about 15 minutes if you already have a Cloudflare account, and the default blocklists (OISD Small + AdAway) block roughly 50,000 ad and tracker domains out of the box. ...

Your ISP logs every domain you touch. Ad networks build profiles from your IP. And the VPN you pick to escape that is itself a product. Unless you pick Mullvad. NordVPN and Mullvad sit at opposite ends of the VPN spectrum — one is a feature-rich streaming powerhouse with 9,000+ servers; the other is a radical privacy tool that doesn’t ask for your email. And deciding between them isn’t about which is “better.” It’s about understanding your own threat model. ...