brickfrog

I have never done any kind of manual port forwarding my current VPN provider does not do that at the price I have it for right now.

If the VPN provider does not support port forwarding then it is normal and expected to always be firewalled. Toggling random ports doesn't change that fact.

Not sure why you would sometimes see your status as fully connectable, guessing either it's a Windscribe misconfiguration when you initially connect (?) or qBittorrent gets confused during the intitial connect. Or there's some other misconfiguration.

You might want to see if other people using that VPN provider have more insight, maybe they are doing something strange with the ports when you initially connect & eventually close them on you.

True, wouldn't be too different vs just using a VPN. You're choosing to trust the Tribler tech and the Tribler exit node operator vs choosing to trust the VPN provider. Granted most VPN connections are going to have much better performance vs anything Tribler related.

There is a nice side effect of running an *arr stack against Tribler, even in 1 hop mode - Your Tribler node is much more easily pulling in new content into the Tribler network for other users to access afterwards without needing an exit node. Ideally it's just one Tribler node/user needing to pull data through the exit nodes while the rest would just pull it from you and share with other nodes in-network.

Torrents over I2P work the same way. If the torrent data isn't found within I2P and you have outproxies configured you could pull torrents from the clearnet & afterwards other I2P users just share amongst the I2P network.

That's pretty cool, thanks for sharing! Been a while since I tried it out but last I looked Tribler's own automation features were quite lacking so something like this helps a lot.

I was not able to download anything with more than 1 hops in between - ie it does hide your real IP address, but only uses one relay in between.

Hmm I don't think there's any relays at all in that configuration, unless you're counting the exit node itself?

https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/3067#issuecomment-325367047

One thing to keep in mind is that to download torrents from outside Tribler's own network you would need to download through an exit node.. not sure on the exact stats but last I tested exit nodes were only like 5-10% of the Tribler user base. For a while I tried volunteering my own VPN connection as an exit node for Tribler just to see how it went but the Tribler client kept locking up/crashing after a few days so the experiment did not go well.. hopefully works better nowadays.

But, regardless, blocking any registrars that size the way you’re describing would break way more businesses and hurt the recipient provider’s own reputation.

Yeah I thought that too but when speaking with the email admin that was blocking Namecheap while figuring this out they had already decided it wasn't worth trying to allow the 1% of valid emails vs the 99% spam emails they felt they received via Namecheap domains.

This honestly starting to sound more and more like a smear campaign

Smear against whom? I'm a Namecheap customer, just relaying my own experiences using them. Besides that quirk I like them fine as a registrar.. I know it sounds dumb but I even renewed my domains there even after those email issues.

It's fine, you don't need to believe me as I said it's just my own experience using Namecheap domains for emails. But you could just google around, you'll see plenty of people discussing Namecheap & looking for solutions to block them (or solutions to successfully send emails with hem).. it's not something I randomly made up if that's what you're implying.

e.g.

https://community.spiceworks.com/t/blocking-emails-based-on-registrar/816565

https://tacit.livejournal.com/608386.html

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/why-do-scammers-love-namecheap/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/13t6fvm/namecheaps_private_email_is_blacklisted_by/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/wlb6vp/namecheap_making_it_too_easy_to_register_domains/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/tz4mkb/my_emails_are_always_going_in_the_spam_folder_of/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/ye358x/i_am_getting_a_ton_of_spam_scams_from_namecheap/

etc.

If you’re using Google Workspace, Google will give you the appropriate DMARC, DKIM and SPF records to add to your DNS. The NS themselves should resolve the records and provide the recipient server with the values you’ve entered, thereby ensuring delivery.

Sure. But why would that matter when you're dealing with hostile 3rd party email providers that intentionally want to blackhole all email domains at Namecheap? But yes, just to clarify I do configure DMARC/DKIM/SPF and that works great for most cases.

I'm just describing what worked for me though in truth I don't know exactly how these hostile email providers actually determine the domain is hosted at Namecheap. My hunch is that they are using a lookup & finding the nameserver for the domain & have already blacklisted Namecheap's default free nameserver IP addresses. For whatever reason those same hostile email providers don't seem to be blacklisting Namecheap's paid nameserver but I think that sort of makes sense...

The larger issue is that Namecheap is known for cheap domains that scammers/spammers tend to buy in bulk & then use to spam with. Those same scammers/spammers aren't trying to spend extra money so they only ever use the default free Namecheap nameservers.

If you use Namecheap for email domain(s) you may want to consider also splurging for their PremiumDNS to keep your domain(s) off spam blocks at other email providers.

I help maintain some emails at Gmail/Google Workspace but the domains themselves are at Namecheap. For a while there were complaints that some emails never landed in other people's inboxes... this led me to talk about the issue with one of the email provider recipients based in the UK & apparently they were null routing anything coming from Namecheap since they felt a lot of spam came from them. But after some experimenting I figured out their system (& probably others) were figuring out they were Namecheap domains via the default FreeDNS they use. On a hunch I switched those domains over to PremiumDNS and after that all our emails were landing in other inboxes correctly. I guess maybe it makes sense, a typical spammer buying a cheap domain at Namecheap isn't going to splurge for the higher end DNS service for it.

I'm not saying all email providers treat Namecheap domains as spam but just be warned there definitely ones out there that do.

Nice, I was pretty sure my Pixel 7 already had hardware AV1 decoding and this app seems to confirm it.

It's not, whatever you're looking at is just some site re-using the name.

Futurama also did their own version https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/V-Chip

Tried it, Too heavy for my usecase

That's fair, Kodi is way more feature rich. I love it personally but realistically don't need to use everything Kodi is capable of.

Also I cannot use MPV to watch my videos.

Been happy with Kodi's internal player but they do have configurations for external players including MPV https://kodi.wiki/view/External_players

BTW you should also look at Jellyfin, slightly different use case but it too is designed to manage local media including TV/Movies.

https://jellyfin.org/

And since you mentioned MPV that also exists with Jellyfin https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-mpv-shim

Kodi (https://kodi.tv) does the same thing & more. People think of it as a sort of streamer but its original/main purpose is to manage local media downloads including movie/tv series.

Bummer, the formfactor / specs look okay but it's kind of a dead end if I can't just install & use a vanilla Debian OS or similar.

With all the NAS OS options probably Synology has the best one but even there I don't actually want to get locked into that. I doubt this UGOS software can match Synology's let alone Debian.

If it's any consolation it looks like UGREEN is responding to comments about installing other OSes at their kickstarter page https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/urgreen/ugreen-nasync-next-level-storage-limitless-possibilities/comments