sparkling

Jup, if you are using any mainstream VPN provider (the ones shilled on every tech YouTube channel) or anything that results in a datacenter IP, it is trivial to discover and block.

The detection tech has been around forever: https://focsec.com/

Add to that that half of these companies are registered in obscure offshore locations where it is practically impossible to even find out who are the ultimate owners.

To be fair: all hosting providers deal with A LOT of abuse happening on their systems. Malware being hosted, people abusing trial periods ands free plans etc.

No sure if requiring a ID upfront is the perfect solution (if i recall, i never had to provide a ID on my private or business Hetzner accounts) but it isn't just there to annoy you.

>Airbus isn't ditching Microsoft any time soon because there's nowhere to go. Likewise Google productivity apps because the only place to go is Microsoft.

[x] doubt

There a perfectly suitable office and productivity suites, but if your requirement is that every obscure feature from a .doc file created in 2003 needs to work... well then yes, you only have one provider to choose from.

Thank you, this is the type of hands-on experience report i was looking for.

How has your experience been so far? Did you previously use Opus? Im curious how the overall "feel" of it is.

What is your motivation? Privacy and/or data protection?

I currently don't see a world where it makes sense to run a local model that will eats up 60% of my RAM, 20-30% of my disk space while providing worse quality output than a $20/month subscription.

>Our testing confirmed that many less capable models—including Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7—could identify the same vulnerabilities as Fable 5 did in the report.

That is nice advertising for Kimi, huh?

DNS4EU have also blocked archive.today in the past. I i remember correctly, they claimed it was part of some automated malware-protection system. So i would give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

In any case, plenty of other free EU DNS services available: https://eualternative.eu/categories/public-dns/

Harley Benton is "extremly popular"? I don't think so and the upper price ceiling for HB seems to be at ~400-500 USD right now. Decent hardware for anyone just starting out with their first instrument, sure, but i never heard of anyone buying a HB as a second or third guitar.

502 Bad Gateway, the HN kiss of death

Archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260624025836/https://www.thoma...

Both parties having a VAT ID is actually a requirement to be able to use reverse charge: https://vatdb.com/reverse-charge/

The Hetzner price increase was brutal, but the reality is: Hetzner VPS prices are still a fraction of comparable AWS EC2 instances.

>many European companies aren't as competitive as their US counterpart.

I don't think any serious Enterprise account would go with Hetzner today, the service range and depth is simply not comparable to the 3 big clouds. Saving $20 on a VPS is not going to be a deciding factor for Enterprise accounts, they want mature, manage services.

The few EU clouds that do have a comparable range of managed services also have AWS-like pricing: https://eualternative.eu/eu-cloud-comparison/

They have a $1 minimum spend across all services. You can effectively host unlimited static sites for $1.

Dual-booting SteamOS for gaming and some regular Distro for daily work would be neat.

Post once, read never

Super shady.

The german public broadcaster gave them a 5 minute feature on yesterdays evening news, that felt more like a paid ad than journalism. The report made it sound like it is some kind of semi-official EU-endorsed project, but its just... a closed source, for-profit social network? I guess the folks behind it are just well connected in Brussels.

Thank you but no thank you.

Even if i had such a machine, im not sure i would be willing to sacrifice 80% of my RAM and 50% of my disk to run a semi-okay model locally.

That may be true, but the Irish corporate entity (Stripe Payments International Holdings Ltd.) is ultimately owned by Stripe, Inc. in the U.S.

If you are looking for payment processors that are ultimately owned and incorporated in the EU: https://eualternative.eu/categories/payments/

>llms.txt is supported by 0 of the relevant ai providers

True, but it serves a other purpose, especially when the website is offering developer-oriented services. It's a single link you can give your AI agent and ask to "read this, understand it does, implement it".

Sure, you could just point it at docs.<service>.com but there might be bot protection, authentication, JS-heavy content etc.

So i feel llms.txt still has a purpose.

Its unfortunate you didn't go for a EU-native stack right away. Bunny.net offers similar compute/serverless on the edge, close to Cloudflares offerings.

My first impression was "oh no, not another generic, vibe-coded service clone". But this is actually really good stuff under hood, and it's clearly coming from someone who has a deep understanding of networking.

Nice work, good luck.

As someone who has never owned a iPhone... what is the appeal of using iMessage? What can iMessage do that SMS/RCS can not do? Apart from the fancy iPhone-to-Mac handoff features i've seen folks use ;)

Regardless of the ToS violation... isn't this trivial to detect?

Even if they keep the message volume low, detecting a swarm of accounts that are sending duplicate/similar messages seems rather trivial? The entire business model depends on Apple turning a blind eye, i'm quite amazed they got any VC money at all.

After Sendgrid got acquired by Twilio and retired their free plan, i also went with Brevo and am quite happy with it. No deliverability issues on the major email operators (Google, MS365) at all, decent delivery speed.

In a world full of endless AI slop, wouldn't original recordings become more valuable over time?

Check out Scaleway (France). They have by far the broadest range of managed services with full permissions/IAM integration etc. - it is the closest EU match to AWS. Yes, if your entire existing setup depends on once specialized AWS service (i.e. DynamoDB) you still will need to go with AWS, but when building from scratch it's a different story.

The AWS Sovereign Cloud is still owned 100% by Amazon Inc. in the US. Not saying that rules it out for all use cases, but something that should be mentioned. "Sovereignty" is a somewhat vague term.

What made you choose Litestar over fastapi (which seems to be the most popular choice right now)?

When they talk about detection, they are most likely referring to protocol level detection by ISPs forced to block VPN traffic, hostile local networks, corporate firewalls and such.

The actual service you are connecting to (example: website, game server etc.) most likely uses a IP-based detection service such as https://focsec.com/ or similar. In such cases, the protocol will not make a difference.