In my experience, Yandex has always been better for piracy than any other search engine.

A true role model.

In Spain at least I have two small alternatives to this:

• Paypal (I don’t like it too much, but it works fine).
• A prepaid credit card offered through my bank. Good for sites that don’t look too trustworthy but I need to buy from. I just activate it, load it with whatever amount I need, I make the transaction, then disable it again. Even if it gets leaked no one can take any money out.

For everything else I have a virtual credit card number that’s not dynamic, but at least it’s something I use exclusively for online stuff.

Here you get a debit card by default with your bank account, and that one’s free. You might get a credit one, but credit limits are typically low. I lived in Canada for 9 years and by the time I left I had a CC with a limit of 26k CAD. Here my Spanish credit card has a limit of 1.2k euros, and I’ve had it for quite a long time.

In Spain at least there’s quite a lot of confusion with this. People call any card type a “credit card”, even debit ones.

I’m not completely sure. Sometimes I find stuff in one site I don’t find in any of the other two. Also, I don’t know how often catalogues are synced.

Yes. I combine libgen with Anna’s Archive and Z-Library and there’s very, very little I can’t find.

Combine that with KOReader and this is pure bliss.

I’ve been using Fastmail for a few years and I’m quite happy with the service. Being a semi-large organization I expect their security to be OK, but if anyone has comments on that aspect I welcome them.

As for privacy, I always consider e-mail to be a postcard. If I want to encrypt something, I use GPG locally.

In Spain (not sure about Europe in general) things are slightly different.

I have been living in Canada for 9 years, and there if you see a transaction you don’t recognize in your credit card statement you phone your bank and they take care of that.

Here in Spain you need to go do the police, file a report, then talk to your bank, then they’ll think about it.

So when I came back I was talking with some guys I know and they convinced me that, at least around here, it’s still a good idea to use Paypal. You also get faster refunds, etc (and that could be due to some European regulation, not sure).

I like it a lot, but sometimes I feel he’s going to get eaten alive by the character he’s created. He should tone it down a notch sometimes.

Just subscribed, thanks a lot.

The only question here is: why do European police chiefs want to help Russia and China intercept our communications?

It’s not yet proven that it was the US, no? I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised at all, but I still don’t know that’s a fact.

The situation in Malaga is going to be a shitshow pretty soon. There’s basically no water there anymore. This summer, hotels will be able to fill their swimming pools, but residential buildings will be banned from doing so. There are talks of bringing water in boats from Murcia. People that got rich planting avocados and mangos saw their crops fall 85 % last year. And of course there are already water consumption restrictions, with water flows restricted at night.

But at the same time there are talks of beating all previous tourism records. This is insanity.

I was listening to a podcast the other day (could have been “Rachman review”, which is typically very good) and the interviewee said that yes, there might be interest in this, but companies want to see long-term orders before committing. There’s currently no capacity, so they have to build it on their side, but they don’t want to do it if they think the orders are going to dry in a few months / years.

With the new EU’s interconnection laws I hope I can WhatsApp from Pidgin, or even from irssi!

But no, I don’t use pidgin anymore. irssi, yes.