Here is the VPN setup page of Njalla. As you can see, it looks just as spartan as the public-facing parts of their website.

You do not need to set up port forwarding on the website. They give each customer a static IP, so as long as you configure your ip tables to allow port forwarding, it just works on any port. QBittorrent worked out of the box.

Since my airvpn test month expired, I’ve just bought a Njalla subscription. Here are my experiences:

Pro:

• Payment via PayPal or cryptocurrency
• Same price as Mullvad (5€/month)
• Static IPv4 and v6, allows you to forward any port
• Torrenting just worked (including port forwarding)
• No VPN application, just use vanilla OpenVPN or Wireguard
• Does not throttle my internet speed (I only have 50MBit/s, so I cannot really test VPN performance. Definitely better than AirVPN though)

Contra:

• Requires E-Mail address/XMPP to create an account
• Only one client. If you need to access your VPN from multiple devices at the same time, you need to buy multiple subscriptions
• Only Swedish servers

Conclusion: for my usecase (Raspberry-Pi-based torrent box) Njalla looks great. If you want to use it on multiple devices or need to circumvent geoblocks, you should look for a different service.

You can setup PiHole to block Samsung’s ad servers. Some routers give you the option to block specific websites, that works, too.

The site you have to block:

• samsungads dot com
• samsungtvads dot com

If the reason for the ban is massive server load due to content scraping for AI models, that could become an issue for the fediverse as well. Our infrastructure is funded by donations and has much less performance and resiliency than big tech companies.

We might reach a point where the negative impacts on the environment caused by AI outweigh the benefits, just like it already happened with blockchains.

I’m definitely not using this platform anymore, but Twitter being private also locks away a lot of valuable content (including government announcements, as someone mentioned).

Elon posted this on Twitter (quoted from an private blog since I currently have no way to access twitter):

Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users! Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.

Lets hope that they lift this ban soon.