What are you using to auto connect to VPN when you disconnect from your home wifi?

Your proxy settings will depend on your provider but if you search for network.proxy you’ll see all the setting you need in there. You’ll connect either through http (ip+port) or socks. Socks adds an additional layer of authentication which is generally preferred but likely won’t be offered by free options.

Yes, your proxy service will absolutely see what sites you are visiting. None of these suggestions will protect you from a malicious proxy service. Https is still honored assuming the end point is using a valid cert and your proxy has not tampered with it in any way. If the cert gets altered you’ll get a warning from your browser, you then have to trust yourself to know when to back out.

Unfortunately container tabs are not yet supported for Android Firefox. FoxyProxy is by no means malicious, it certainly has good intentions and for the most part it does what it says it does. The problem is that due to many fundamental design choices it is too easy for information to leak. Plus the URL regex matching can be very finicky to work with. I used FoxyProxy for years but gave up on it after a while since I could never get a consistent and reliable experience out of it.

At this point I just alter the proxy settings in Android ff directly - no extension. Unfortunately ff profiles are also not supported on Android yet so if you don’t want your main browser to always be attached to a proxy you can install other releases of ff such as Nightly and just configure that with proxy settings. If I am recalling correctly, you can also configure ff to apply proxy to either normal or private browsing too.

Word of caution, If you are actually staying within the Onion network then sure Tor is a great option… The problem is most users just use the exit nodes to reach the clear web. This is a convenient feature of Tor but it’s also the least secure use case. There are a very limited numbers of exit nodes so they are often overused and the majority of them are maintained by government controlled entities since it takes a certain level of legal protection to operate an exit node.

FoxyProxy has many DNS leaking bugs associated with the extension, especially when using SOCKS5 proxies. That extension has not been a recommended choice for a while now.

As others have said, a free proxy is not a good alternative, they are harvesting just as much data as your ISP, if not more (and possibly selling the info back to your ISP). Free proxies also have little incentive to be honest so there is a higher chance they could also be manipulating your traffic in various ways.

A better solution for mitigating data harvesting from your ISP is to just simply adjust your personal DNS settings. This can be configured globally on your router sometimes and/or each client device. Change your default DNS to a more privacy conscious provider such as Mullad, Quad9 or even Cloudflare. Those DNS providers also offer the option of making encrypted DNS requests using DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) which can be configured in your browser and sometimes your router.

At the end of the day, your ISP will still know you connected to a specific end point but they can’t determine what exactly you are doing there, they only know you connected to something like Lemmy.world but would not be able to determine which communities you are visiting.

If a proxy still feels like the only solution then just buy a VPN subscription from a reputable source, its usually pretty cheap and way more effective at preserving privacy and security than any free proxy that is available. Mullvad is generally a pretty good and inexpensive choice plus they also have pretty decent proxy support.

As an alternative to FoxyProxy, check out the extension Container Proxy which allows you to containerize a tab and route all the traffic through a configured proxy which can also be configured on a site-by-site basis. Still, not perfect, but certainly a step above FoxyProxy.

Yeah if there is no physical damage then it’s a level 1 recovery which tends to have better results. A “cooked” drive doesn’t explain anything about the failure type but I have worked in computer repair for a number of years and it was very common for people to believe their HDD was fried when in fact it was not, sometimes misbehaving software can behave very similarly to a failing HDD. In those cases it’s very simple to do a full data backup off the drive with folder structure still intact, coming from someone who’s been behind the counter at BestBuy, they probably just did a regular data backup (while charging you for a recovery) if your data was still perfectly intact. They love to sell their data recovery service because it’s expensive as hell and techs are actually told not to spend time on renaming and restructuring the data so the techs literally just run some freeware, walk away from your PC and then just hand you a USB (that you also pay for separately) with whatever results got spat out when it’s done. Don’t let them fool you though, Level 1 recovery pretty much anyone can do with some freeware (plenty of good options out there) and spare time. If the drive failed from too many bad sectors and you caught it early then yeah level 1 recovery is still possible but you may still experience some file structure corruption depending on how early you caught it. It becomes a game of luck depending on where the bad sectors exist and how many there are.

If your drive is experiencing mechanical failure, and it’s bad enough, you can hear it very clearly if you put your ear near the drive while it’s spinning. If you hear a grinding and/or clicking noise that’s usually a pretty solid indicator the the drive is experiencing mechanical failure and a level 2 recovery will be necessary which usually requires a clean room and some very specialized knowledge and tools.

Also, I should mention, this only applies to mechanical hard disk drives, solid state memory is a completely different beast and data recovery is oftentimes impossible on these types of drives.

They definitely charge more than $100, data recovery is one of the most expensive services at Best Buy. Level 1 data recovery, depending on the staff there they may try and perform that in house but level 2 always needs to be shipped out to a clean room and will easily push $1,000+. Also, the reality of data recovery is unless the data being recovered is highly important, it’s almost never worth it. During file recovery, file structure and naming gets destroyed so the results are hundreds of folders with nonsense names filled with hundreds of files with nonsense names and sometimes even missing an extension type, it’s a total mess with no guarantee that the data you need was actually recovered.

qBittorrent I have not tried personally but I would think that if you have i2p set up on qbit already then enabling the setting “automatically add these trackers to new downloads” and add in a few open i2p trackers. Postman requires an account so unless the exact same torrent has already been posted there you won’t be able to bridge.

For Prowlarr, it’s a little more complicated. You can add Postman just like any other indexer but you then need to configure your proxy settings in Prowlarr for it to be reachable. If you are running your i2p router on the same machine you can just enter your local address (127.0.0.1) with port 4444 and it’ll connect. If your router is on a remote machine the easiest solution is to then use ssh port forwarding (autossh is handy here). Ssh forward the remote 4444 port to local and then use the same address and port. The final step is setting your ignored addresses, I have a bit of a list but the idea is to filter out all non .i2p addresses so an example would look like: *.com, *.net, *.info, …

EDIT: I should also add, if you are sticking with I2PD and are more concerned with just downloading and not incorporating the *arr suite there is a standalone Snark download that’s floating around somewhere that can plug into I2PD. I haven’t used the standalone personally but I do know that Snark is by far the most optimized client exclusively for i2p torrents. Snark is also baked into the standard i2p install by default.

Others have summarized it well but I’ll add my perspective also.

I2P is a decentralized network of peers. All traffic gets routed through multiple peers before reaching its destination. Traffic is also encrypted by multiple layers of encryption and each connected peer can only decrypt one layer, that layer will only contain further routing info so that peer knows the next place to hand off your data. The encryption gets stripped layer by layer until it finally reaches its destination.

What this ultimately means is that by interacting with a website or service through I2P it is virtually impossible to identify any information the user is sending or receiving and it is also impossible to tell where the connections are going or coming from.

To make things even more interesting all I2P routers by default also contribute resources back into the network so while your I2P Router is handling your communication connections, it’s also volunteering to be a connection node in someone else’s connection. This adds further security because now you’ve got many Peer to Peer connections going in and out of your network, all encrypted so any prying eyes will have an exceedingly difficult time trying to make sense of any of your internet traffic.

Tor relies on the good faith of its community to contribute resources to the network and it’s not very well incentivised causing its resources to be far more limited and bogged down. For this reason, Tor cannot sustain heavy torrent traffic without easily being overwhelmed. In I2P, every user is a contributor so the more people who use I2P, the faster and better it becomes.

The big advantage Tor has over I2P are outproxies and the beautifully prepacked Tor Browser. Tor has a lot more influence and money backing it so there are some large and well protected entities that can afford all the legal trouble that outproxies can bring. Unfortunately there just isn’t enough money or legal support in the I2P community to reliably support outproxies even though I2P already has full support for it.

I2P is a fantastic tool for private communication across the Internet and the true ELI5 here is I2P natively supports “anonymous” torrenting (even encouraged it as it strengthens the network further) and will do so privately and securely without any need for a VPN. Adding support to QBittorrent makes it even easier to access I2P torrenting with very minimal set up required.

The only catch here is you can’t go around downloading any old torrent from the Internet on I2P, someone needs to actually be seeding that torrent on the I2P network for you to get any data. There are fully functioning tracker sites exclusively within I2P that have a huge catalog of content but all is not lost for “clearnet” torrents either. Software like BiglyBT and now QBittorrent, allows users to “bridge” or “cross seed” torrents across the two networks, that way content is shared no matter what network you’re a part of.

BiglyBT has been doing this for a while now but I’m so happy to see QBittorrent finally embracing this as well.

EDIT: https://geti2p.net/en/