hagezi/dns-blocklists is the closest thing to a plug-and-play DNS ad blocker for self-hosters, and in a weekend of testing on a Pi-hole we kept coming back to it. The repo ships five tiers of blocklists — Light, Normal, Pro, Pro++, and Ultimate — that range from roughly 41k to 269k domains, so you pick the trade-off between coverage and false positives yourself. For most home setups we’d point you at the Pro tier first. ...
On July 20, 2026, Mullvad — the VPN that built its entire brand on being above suspicion — published a blog post about its founder’s private donation to a Swedish political party. And the privacy community lit up. For a company that refuses ads, refuses affiliate marketing, and refuses to ask for your email, even the appearance of a political lean felt like a crack in the porcelain. That single event is a sharp entry point into the comparison nobody on the English web has done: CyberGhost vs Mullvad. Not because they are alike — they are opposite poles. CyberGhost is the streaming machine: 100+ countries, one-click Netflix profiles, $2.19/month countdown pricing, a 45-day refund. Mullvad is the privacy purist: anonymous 16-digit account, flat €5/month forever, no marketing budget at all. We tested both on the same 1 Gbps fiber line, ran the same leak checks, and priced out a three-year hold on each. Here is the data. ...
Most WireGuard clients are written for the person who set up the server. WireGuide is the rare one built for the person who just got handed a .conf file and told to get online. That positioning is the whole pitch. A cross-platform WireGuard VPN client running on macOS 15+ and Windows 11, it’s a Go 1.25+ app wrapped in Wails v3 with a Svelte frontend. Young at 75 stars with an MIT license, it’s still actively shipped — v0.4.2 dropped on July 27, 2026. ...
Picture this: a household with four people, two laptops, three phones, two tablets, a smart TV, and a gaming console — 12 devices that should probably be on a VPN. With NordVPN, that’s two subscriptions. With ExpressVPN, two subscriptions. With ProtonVPN Plus, two subscriptions. With Surfshark, it’s one. (affiliate link) But that single difference — unlimited simultaneous connections at $2.49/month on the long-term plan — is Surfshark’s headline advantage. But a VPN isn’t worth any price if speed, privacy, or streaming reliability fall short. So we put it through a 10-server speed benchmark, a 5-platform streaming test, and a full privacy stack check to see whether the unlimited-device pitch holds up in practice. ...
What if you could encrypt a file and the ciphertext looked like a cat had a keyboard tantrum — but with actual secp256k1 elliptic curve math underneath? That’s exactly what PurrCrypt does. After testing it on two operating systems, we found it surprisingly usable for a project that takes itself this unseriously. What Is PurrCrypt? PurrCrypt (622 stars on GitHub, MIT license) is a Rust CLI tool that encrypts files using elliptic curve cryptography — the same secp256k1 curve behind Bitcoin. It then encodes the output as sequences of cat or dog vocalizations. So it’s steganography meets public-key encryption: the ciphertext looks like pet-sound spam to anyone who intercepts it. But only the intended recipient can decrypt it back to the original file. This approach is a different angle on privacy — similar to how multi-hop VPN tunnels add layers of protection to network traffic, PurrCrypt adds them to stored data. ...
If you have ever tried to encrypt a file with PGP, you already know the problem — the command line is a wall of arcane flags, and the existing GUI options (GPA, Kleopatra) feel like they have not been updated since 2010. But GpgFrontend changes that. It wraps the same GnuPG engine you trust — plus a modern Rust rPGP backend — inside a clean interface that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. ...
When your VPN connection drops for half a second, your ISP sees your real IP. But that’s enough time for a DNS query to slip through, a WebRTC request to expose your location, or a site you’re visiting to log your actual address. So we tested 8 major VPNs across three real-world dropout scenarios to find out which kill switches actually hold the line. But first — the short answer if you just want the one that works: NordVPN’s kill switch passed every scenario we threw at it with zero leaks. We’ll get into the data below. ...
A hands-on look at Sniffnet, the 40K-star open-source network traffic monitor built in Rust. Real-time charts, 6,000+ protocol detection, completely free.
Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Last week, a patent filed by Meta appeared on r/privacy and racked up over 480 upvotes in under 12 hours. The patent — published by the USPTO and fully public — describes a system that analyzes voice characteristics to infer the emotional state of the person speaking. Not from a specific app’s recording, but from raw microphone data across the device ecosystem. ...
Last week we reported Chat Control was dead. But it turns out that was only half the story. On July 10, the European Parliament passed Chat Control 1.0 — a limited version of the mass surveillance proposal that had privacy advocates up in arms for the last two years. But here’s the tricky part: what got rejected on July 8 was an alternative, more aggressive draft. What passed on July 10 was the final, narrower bill. Two different texts, one massive information gap. ...