They’ve been failing for a while. It’s capitalism failing, not some magic tech entity concept like AI.

Privacy is so atrocious that their damn private key was compromised

US-based is really a no-go for me privacy and piracy-wise. Paranoid, prejudiced, but true more often than it should be.

A friend of mine has something like 64% blocked. That’s what blocking telemetry does to ya! Every piece of tech, especially Samsung phones, Google TVs and various game clients phones home with such persistence that you’d think they’re DDoSing themselves.

No public audits - I don't trust. Italy is also not exactly a privacy (and personal rights) haven.

It can also run directly on lower powered machines. GL.iNet routers are a good example, they’re based on OpenWrt and come with AdGuard Home support out of the box, so no need for a whole external computer to handle DNS stuff. Sure it’s limited by ram about how many lists you can have, but still. Pihole is much more “substantial”

Personally I don't trust Proton. I know I'm paranoid, but can't be too sure about anything these days. To my knowledge MV and IVPN are the only ones with a nice privacy reputation. Shame they are cutting port forwarding

Can’t they just log your account? You have to have an account with Proton to use their VPN. They can absolutely log your activity such as logging in, when you connected/disconnected, to which servers, and, more importantly, where from exactly (your original IP address)

Audits check that too

Sure, shoot. I’ll research anything. Just that everything so far has either been a privacy disaster or “oh don’t worry they only leak your entire data when you break the law! it’s your bad opsec!”

How is that ghetto lol. Now, I’d understand if you were like me with a crusty ass laptop in the corner of my room 2500km away from me, running some Linux and 4 external hard drives, but Xeon and ghetto?

Docker is the way to go. More often than not self-hosted stuff already has docker instructions, and by design it doesn’t mount your entire drive or give access to really anything on your system unless defined explicitly, even networks are isolated iirc. OP, get educated on what docker is and what flags it has so you can easily see what has access to what before even spinning something up.

No offense but I find the "worse than the US" statement kind of insensitive, and I hear it all too often. Not to delve into politics, but let's just say the US at least HAS meds, like, at all. If you're filthy rich, you can get it, and ADHD is a recognized and treated disorder. Back home it's just illegal and unrecognized...

I can confirm, I’m running the exact same scenario OP described (GPT-4 Telegram bot), on Oracle Cloud, and it works great. I found this implementation to be robust, easy to spin up, and easy enough to patch changes in.

Bad opsec? It’s a bad VPN if it needs an email at all. Look at what IVPN does, they don’t even have a requirement for emails to register. I’m pretty sure Mullvad just recently was raided by authorities seize whatever they want they said, won’t find any user data they said. And they didn’t. Also proton redirects or used to redirect from onion to clearnet when you signed in. It simply isn’t up to par with IVPN and Mullvad. What’s the point of a VPN where a government can just request them to leak your data? No matter how, AT ALL! What constitutes a big enough crime for them? What if next day it’s downloading Frozen II.mkv?

At least personally to me it goes to show that it’s not out of the question

Personally I don't trust Proton. I know I’m paranoid, but can’t be too sure about anything these days. To my knowledge MV and IVPN are the only ones with a nice privacy reputation. Shame they are cutting port forwarding