Grangle1

I'm just mostly commenting to vent frustration with what I'm seeing this past week as a sharp spike in captchas and sites straight up blocking Proton VPN IPs. Proton is slowed down, captcha'd and blocked at a far higher rate than any such behavior I encountered with Nord when I used them. You can do all you want to protect privacy but when you hold yourself out as the big "privacy" VPN service everyone's gonna be suspicious that you're gonna be the service that bad actors use and block all your traffic. I know I should also figure this will happen but I would also figure there would be more effort to prevent it from happening. I use Proton VPN because I enjoy Proton's other services but if this keeps up I feel it may get to be unusable for me.

When I connected to the "fastest server" this morning, it appeared at first to connect me to a US server in Chicago. Then I visited a sports site and got the European version. Odd. So I went to check browserleaks, and lo and behold, for some reason or another I was in Czechia (is it still called the Czech Republic?). Anyway, I tried a few others in that range and they all go there. Also, I've mentioned in a couple places before, but various US-TX servers also act like they're in Europe, even though they do initially appear to be in the US, because even though browserleaks shows the Texas ones as a US IP, the network shows some European company so some sites treat them like Europe.

Since I started using Proton VPN, I've been using it to watch my favorite baseball team in my area and get around cable blackouts. However, today it appears MLB.TV has been able to find my location and black me out. I tried using 3 different servers and checked the geolocation on Browserleaks to verify that my IP was not leaking. One note: despite being listed as in the US state of Georgia, one server showed on Browserleaks as being in the UK, so you may want to double-check location anyway. I'm trying a reboot and if that fails I'll also try again tomorrow to see if somehow it's a strange anomaly. I've found that to happen with another VPN I used in the past.

EDIT: a reboot worked and it works now at least on the Colorado server I'm on. I do remember when looking at Browserleaks before rebooting that even when the location was picked up as in the US, it mentioned something about Europe in the company, so maybe the site still picked it up as in Europe?

The updater extension keeps telling me that there is a new version of the browser available (122.1.0-2) but it's been over a week since the version's release and even though I have the .deb repo installed the new version has not been installed yet. I check for updates daily and there do not appear to be any errors in the repo. Has the new version been updated on the repo? If it has, any idea why it would not update?

EDIT: The update to v123 came through today. You can disregard.

I got this email earlier today in my inbox and wanted to be sure that this was not an attempted phishing scam. I didn't see anything about this on Proton's website, Reddit or Lemmy, so just wanted to cover my bases. Didn't click the link and just went straight to Proton's website to download the latest version and install (while also uninstalling the Flatpak I was previously using). If this is legit, Proton should probably make it more visible to the community by at least addressing it on their own website.

EDIT: I also checked the version number on the Flatpak and on the .deb versions I installed and it did indeed go up by one, so this does seem to lend it more legitimacy, but more acknowledgement would still be appreciated.

EDIT 2: According to comment below, this is indeed legit, thank you! If you're using the Windows or Linux version be sure to do the update!

I've been wanting to use the Falkon browser as my daily driver because I like the integration with the Plasma desktop and it works quite well for most things, but I've been hesitant to do so because there are so few extensions and the only privacy-focused one is the AdBlock. I've tried using GreaseMonkey scripts, but half of the few privacy-focused scripts I've found just don't work and I'm not good enough with scripting to really figure out why. I've set what I could in the Preferences menu for privacy, but I'm wondering if there is any way to access other settings to do things like disable WebGL and/or otherwise block trackers and prevent fingerprinting? If I can set it up to be reasonably close to Brave or LibreWolf privacy-wise, I'd be happy to use it more.