They index results from five sources and update the main ones (two LibGen forks) monthly. They mirrored the Z-Library database before the website was seized (end of November 2022), indexed the new .onion addresses and haven’t updated the dataset since because they’re waiting for the situation to stabilize in order to figure out a way to regularly fetch new stuff from there too, as far as I know
Remember to check the Internet Archive library, you can easily borrow lots of amazing quality books for free and even rip the files. The Standard Template Construct has lots of stuff too, especially recent scientific articles Sci-Hub hasn’t published yet
Here are the official links: https://zlibrary-global.se/z-access#useful_link_tab. I would recommend just opening the .onion link (last tab on the page) with the Tor Browser in Safe mode and logging in with an anonymous e-mail and random password. Nowadays I’d rather use Anna’s Archive, though, it has most of the Z-Library database indexed anyway
My use case: I like to have all my emails stored locally just in case some disaster happens with the copies in the cloud; I also get to have both personal and work email addresses, from different providers, in one organized and unified interface, and the same goes for tasks, calendars and contacts; and some features from big web clients are sometimes too nosy for my taste (suggested replies, pushing their calendar, messaging, tasks and contacts products, etc)
You beat me to it, so let me recommend what I check when Anna’s Archive and LibGen don’t have what I need (usually recent articles that are not on Sci-Hub): Standard Template Construct, here’s their GitHub repo
Good article about this: https://seirdy.one/posts/2022/02/02/floss-security/
One of the biggest public trackers for the last 10 years that recently closed down: https://torrentfreak.com/tag/rarbg/
Their privacy policy and data flow have been the same since the buyout, they were transparent about any implications and the mitigations put in place to protect users, so I’m alright with it. The biggest problem I have with them is sometimes getting rate-limited because of a VPN or Tor, but that’s it. Alternatives like DDG and Brave Search are usually bad for results in my native language, so I’ve been using Startpage for a couple years now and it’s nice
Even worse:
The identity and location of the activist was already known to the French authorities (they had already been evicted once before for squatting, and the nature of squatting means that their location is known).
So they were probably not using a VPN to connect to Proton Mail, which was the specific target, since e-mail and VPN providers were treated differently under Swiss law until Proton and Threema fought the government on this issue. Tutanota had a similar issue. If you’re gonna rely on these services to break their jurisdiction’s laws, you should be covering your own ass with bulletproof opsec, because businesses with millions of accounts are not gonna shut down and burn evidence in order to protect one user. In the Proton case, the activist apparently connected to a known Proton Mail account with no VPN or Tor; in the Tutanota case, only e-mails that were not end-to-end encrypted would pose at risk
Yeah, they fixed things and owned up to it, best you can do when you fuck things up: https://blog.windscribe.com/ukrainian-server-seizure-a-commentary-and-state-of-the-industry-e71e8d205b26/. I feel like people give them too much shit for this, just like with that Proton climate activist case
BakaBT is a private tracker that has lots of high quality anime/manga artbooks, soundtracks and extras like that. That’s all I use aside from Nyaa, but my needs are pretty basic in general