Basically, your VPN just replaces your ISP. So for example, if I want an ISP that’s okay with piracy a VPN can be3 a good option.

Your IP address is not how you are spied on for the most part. It’s more browser fingerprinting. So a VPN can offer a false sense of security when really enhancing your privacy is a lot less passive than that. Overall it can help but it’s not a magic privacy button.

Also entities like the NSA with a “god’s eye view” can just track you anyways. Even if the VPN service wasn’t compromised, they can just watch traffic going in and coming out and correlate it to you. It offers basically no protection from high-resource adversaries.

I think the effect that generative AI has had on the ability to steal from hardworking content creators is worth more than $5 billion to these demons.

Searx is an alternative meta-search engine that can include google results. If you don’t want to host an instance you can find one here: https://searx.space/

I like https://searx.work/ personally.

What is the mistake?

Basically Nexus/STC is an attempt to recreate sci-hub but in a decentralized manner. Everything is mirrored on IPFS which in my opinion is not that great but it gets the job done. Sci-hub has been frozen since 2021 so new papers are not available. As time progresses, sci-hub becomes less and less useful.

Scientific articles are crowd sourced instead of scraped. If the article isn’t on there it can be requested. They also mirror libgen databases.

Also it’s named Standard Template Construct as a Warhammer reference.

Here is a link on how to use it.

Z-library is no good. They basically mirror libgen’s database and then add additional books without feeding them back/maintaining public databases. It appears to be a for-profit enterprise.

Libgen, annas archive, and nexus are much better for liberating knowledge.

What about notepad?