Ran into this as well when I was testing it out (using Mullvad). It seems plausible. Or for some reason Mullvad’s ip addresses end up in some black list regularly that sites like Kagi use to block bots/spammers etc.

I miss just being able to type 23 * 3 + 210 * 2 into the search bar and getting a answer.

Might be an unpopular opinion but your computer and phone has a calculator app for this. Using a search engine for this is just overkill.

Check out this video.

Mullvad has content and tracking blocking at dns level builtin (enabled in settings). Having it always on you don’t need to use private dns. If you use other profiles then set the private dns to one of mullvads. On my grapheneos install I use google play services only on another profiles then owner and have apps that require it only in those profiles.

Been using fastmail for over 10 years and it’s fantastic. Two thing you should be aware though: 1st Australia is part of the five eyes, 2nd they have their servers (last I checked) in new york.

The internet is what you get via your ISP. You’re talking about www which is part of the internet but not the internet itself. There are plenty of things to do on the internet that aren’t www e.g. email works over the internet and I’m not talking about something like gmail but the communication between email servers and between your email provider and you when you use imap or pop3.

email, calendar, contacts

Fastmail. Migration to some European provider is planned. K-9 for email on phone. For email/calendar/contacts Thunderbird on desktop. Contact and calendar sync Davx5 on phone. Fossify for contacts and etar for calendar on phone.

cloud storage

Filen. Zero knowledge e2ee service from Germany

maps & navigation

OSM-AND+

search

qwant (from France) and sometimes DDG or startpage

browser

LibreWolf + uBlock origin

notes

just a text editor (Pluma)

office

Latex & LibreOffice when needed

messaging

Signal, some contacts are still in TG

video calling

Don’t use

social media

Lemmy & Mastodon

music streaming

Don’t use. I get mine either on physical media if possible (cd) or in flac format (Bandcamp)

video streamming

Nebula, Odysee and FreeTube for youtube content

password manager

keepassXC. DB is synced via cloud to other devices

vpn & dns

Mullvad

firewall

Linux built-in (netfilter) configured thru Yast

android os

Graphene OS

app store

F-droid and some via Aurora store

photo gallery

Digikam locally on desktop. Fossify gallery on phone.

weather

Finnish meteorological institution

smart assistant

Don’t use

anything else

I ditched google mostly years ago. Graphene OS is the latest one and that was only this year. FreeTube is also fairly recent (sometime last year). Before that I used piped but that was nuked by google. More precisely they made it impossible to use. On software I’ve been FOSS first for over 10 years. Using OpenSuse Tumbleweed on my desktop and laptop (Thinkpad L580).

CloudBeats

Would have used sopuli.xyz but they weren’t taking registrations at that time.

Aurora is just an anonymous front-end to google play store.

Laughs in FreeTube.

Very good article. Thanks OP for posting.

“Microsoft is dedicated to strengthening innovation, competitiveness and cybersecurity in Europe”. So? MS is still an American company.

I would quit youtube immediately but there are some good content creators that don’t post their videos elsewhere and I do want to watch them. Gladly there’s FreeTube for that.

Curious choice to write a c++ program for this instead of doing the same thing in a powershell script.

One feature it should have: delete itself after running to leave no traces of such a tool.