Related feature on my wish list: I’d love a way to basically fork a feed based on regex pattern matching. This would be useful for some premium feeds that lump multiple podcasts together. For example, one of my Patreon feeds includes three shows: the ad-free main feed, the first-tier weekly premium feed, and the second-tier monthly premium feed.

I don’t want to filter them out because I DO want to listen to all of them, but for organizational purposes I don’t want them lumped together. I’d prefer to display these as two or three separate podcasts in my display.

Another example is the Maximum Fun premium BoCo feed. They include the bonus content for ALL their shows (which is…a lot) in a single feed. I only listen to about half a dozen, and even that is a bit of a mess in one feed!

They have a big IRL ad campaign in major US cities. See https://mullvad.net/en/blog/advertising-that-targets-everyone

These ads certainly aren’t the worst, but they’re still a bit misleading. Using a VPN is not going to prevent tracking in general. Your phone apps will still send GPS data to all the same places. Web sites will still use all the same cookies. Facebook is still gonna be Facebook. 🤷

That said, Mullvad does include domain-based ad and tracker blocking with their DNS server (which is free and available to the public, btw), and that’s also optional on the VPN, so it does help to a point.

(Pinging @countrypunk@slrpnk.net to avoid double-replying. )

Sure. I’m referring to the ones that run big ad campaigns, like Nord and Mullvad. They tend to overstate how a VPN can protect you, sometimes in ways that barely make sense. There is no epidemic of criminals stealing personal credit card information over insecure wi-fi, for example. The ads play into ignorance and fear.

That said, yeah, I’d rather be on a VPN when on a public wi-fi network. But I’m not really worried about someone sniffing my encrypted HTTPS traffic (which is pretty much everything nowadays; Firefox by default won’t even load unencrypted web sites).

Some VPNs allow multi-hopping, similar to Tor. I couldn’t give you an exhaustive list but most popular ones support this. Mullvad and Proton do, for example. There are also strategies to add noise into VPN traffic.

This is not a silver bullet, of course. Tor has similar problems as you describe if an adversary has visibility into enough nodes. As always, this comes down to your threat model.

On the one hand, I find the advertising of VPNs outright dishonest. On the other hand, I would trust any reputable VPN provider much more than I trust my ISP or cell carrier.

Great points, thanks.

Can you clarify what you mean by “local decryption”? I thought Proton and Tuta work pretty much the same way, but perhaps there’s a distinction I’m missing.

One thing I like about Tuta is that it has the option to cache your messages in localstorage in your browser so you can do full-text search. FWIW, I think Proton added a similar feature recently, though I have not tried it. I imagine neither would work very well with large mailboxes; probably better to configure a real email client.

Do they offer cloud storage now? From what I can see on their web site, it’s 500GB…just for email. I mean sure, that’s cool, but it would take me several lifetimes to accumulate 500GB of email so it’s not much of a selling point to me.

It’s a good email service, anyway. I’ve been using the free tier for a few years. Similar to Proton, and in theory Tuta is more private because they encrypt the headers as well as the message body.