The ccTLDs of the EU member countries are a very good idea if you’re an EU citizen because they have built-in privacy for individuals (they don’t publish their info in WHOIS) and are also subject to GDPR.

Still overthinking, I found CZ NIC might be interesting for security, but definitely not privacy.
https://www.nic.cz/page/383/faq/

Protect your domain or contact from unsolicited changes. Block them at CZ.NIC Association and no change will be possible through the registrar. If you want to change anything first it will be necessary to unblock a domain or a contact with CZ.NIC. These blockings are confirmed by an electronic or certified signature. Nowadays it is possible to block or unblock a domain online in the Domain Browser (on www.domenovyprohlizec.cz) - this applies only for validated accounts mojeID

On that website, it also mentions possibility to use EU ID for that purpose, so I’d be fine. But it doesn’t allow hiding my address.
Indeed - “Why do you show my home address on your website? Can I disable it?”:

All personal information is automatically hidden, except for the name of the organization, the name of the individual and the postal address. It is also possible to hide the postal address information if the contact is registered to a natural person (the Organization field is not filled in) and at the same time is managed via the MOJEID service and the contact is validated.

But the requirement to validate is:

As part of improving our services, we have replaced the former validation process with a new one — linking the account with the National Point for Identification and Authentication (i.e. getting access to public administration services), which also includes identity verification.

Which is this thingy: https://portal.gov.cz/en

Finally, if trying to sign up there I get to a FAQ that states this for question if it can be used by foreigners:

Yes, you can if you have in the Czech Republic permanent or temporary residence, visa sticker, temporary international protection or granted international protection.

So it seems while I could get better security than with other registries, my home address would be made public.

Sorry, that seems to be a registrar, not a registry. What TLDs do you use? For example, Verisign operates .com, .net, .cc and .name.

why not host your own

I’ll first have to research how, but at no point will I consider myself as reliable as some professional provider like Cloudflare.
On the other hand, Cloudflare is kind of becoming the internet with all the centralization. Imagine if Cloudflare and AWS completely went offline at the same time. The internet would be fairly quiet.

This is good EU related info.

Wasn’t meant to be. I didn’t mention that .eu is only available for citizens, residents and companies in a European Union Member State, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway: https://cdn.eurid.eu/assets/terms_and_conditions-2.pdf

And history shows that (a country) exiting the EU means losing the domain name: https://eurid.eu/en/news/update-on-brexit-related-domain-names/

OK, now I am even more interested. dig doesn’t return an A record:

$ dig glauca.digital a

; <<>> DiG 9.20.27 <<>> glauca.digital a
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 11516
;; flags: qr rd ra ad; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;glauca.digital.                        IN      A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
glauca.digital.         3600    IN      SOA     ns1.as207960.net. 2bd17d47fafc43aa9be298a1cdfbd0ee.dns.glauca.digital. 1791925047 86400 3600 86400 3600

Somehow, it does work in a browser. I tried different DNS servers as well (including NextDNS which I use in a browser), none returns an A record (or AAAA). So, naturally, I am curios what IP the browser uses. Since it clearly works, I tried ping just so that I could see the resulting IP, and figure out where it’s coming from.

$ ping glauca.digital
ping: glauca.digital: No address associated with hostname

Great. That makes absolutely no sense at all. Where is Firefox getting the information from?
So I went to about:networking DNS tab. The address field is empty. I am just typing this as I test. It’s just cache in my browser.

I guess that would answer on reliability question. At least their nameservers still resolve to IP.

What happens when you try?

Step 2: CNAME it to techaro.lol

Wouldn’t that just resolve to IP of techaro, thus providing a “wrong” TLS certificate?

I plan to perhaps, just maybe, I am not sure, to try self-hosting an email server. But I’ll need a good uptime.
Although I am really scared about security.

I used to keep a charged spare on me.

There’s at least one Chinese brand that has smartphone with hot-swappable battery: https://rugone.net/products/xever-8

Removable battery. Swap within 2 minutes for zero interruption. After 2 minutes, the device enters a 60-second safety lock-out to protect your data.

Unfortunately, software from these brands tends to be shit. I feel like they just outsource it to the cheapest company. Especially following this recent thing:

As of March 4, Sophos X-Intercept telemetry listed over 500 unique compromised Android devices across nearly 50 models. The devices were mostly low-cost models produced by the following manufacturers: Allview, BLU, Dcode, DOOGEE, Gigaset, Gionee, Lava, and Ulefone. The list did not include Alldocube devices, despite Kaspersky reportedly observing Keenadu affect that manufacturer as well.

Source - Sophos
Report from Kaspersky

Problem with plain Wireguard is if you can’t open ports on some devices to get a direct connection. It should be just fine with hub and spoke model, but NAT Traversal of Tailscale makes a huge difference. I can get a direct connection between 2 devices connected to mobile data and behind CG-NAT.
And also the config management if you have too many devices.

Hub and spoke, you just add new devices to Wireguard on the main device, and the new peer. Full mesh, oof.

But as far as configuring Wireguard goes, that’s pretty simple. And then there’s the weird stuff with MTU and fragmentation… but that’s not something Wireguard-specific.

I went with Google.

Edit: I am just saying what I went with. I didn’t have another fitting option.

I was just looking if something like that exists yesterday, but got disappointed. Nice timing.

As a student, most things are more interesting than studying.

From a deal on racknerdtracker.com (so RackNerd as the name suggests).
But their panel is a bit limited. If you want a custom OS that isn’t provided, you have to open a ticket with them to get an ISO mounted. You can also boot into recovery environment, but that is outdated minimal installation of Debian 9 without working APT. I was still able to use it to install Arch Linux from bootstrap image though. I just had to decompress it on my PC, create a temporary partition for it and scp it over.

And I am again mentioning Arch. It comes naturally.

https://racknerdtracker.com/ keeps all the deals that don’t expire.

Not at all. And that’s without whois privacy.
.com .net .org .us .me are $24.95/year
.meme is $24.99/year
.io is whopping $69.00/year

OK, here’s a somewhat famous case of email that could only be sent within something over 500 miles, but no further: https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Touch it until it works, then never again while it still does.

Well, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_code#Computer_DVD_drives

Basically same as regions on standalone DVD players. Just a scummy thing to only allow you to play DVDs from your own region, perhaps so that you wouldn’t buy them from cheaper countries, or buy them earlier than you’re supposed to in your country.

If everything works correctly, then say you buy DVDs from UK, but something new just released in US, but haven’t even played in cinemas in UK yet. So you buy it from US… and it shouldn’t work.

VLC doesn’t care about this, but still, the drive firmware might.

BluRays also have regions

By the fucking way, BluRays have some DRM with revocable keys

This is part of the AACS protection scheme: editors are able to revoke old software player host keys that have leaked on the Internet and distribute the lists on newer commercial disc releases. This is irreversible and cannot be fixed even after reflashing the drive.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Blu-ray#Revoked_Host_key/certificate

So when do you truly own something? When you pirate it. No regions, no DRM, 4k on any device powerful enough.

Except the problem seems to be the said storage device.