I know they require them, it’s is the way that they’re implemented that I’m referring to. Like they made it deliberately frustrating. Some of them one a few websites even pop up twice or even three times and you have to click them multiple times to get them to go down.

I think it might have something to do with the fact that much of Europe has privacy laws that protect their citizens and also makes it so people running nodes there don’t have to kiss up to US companies. Hence why they block those nodes or just give them a huge amount of challenges to solve in hopes to frustrate them. Same with how they put annoying privacy pop-ups on the website in European locations which re-appear every time you login or visit the site.

In my experience it’s a bit slower but not by much, I usually only access text based websites over Tor though with minimal images, streaming over YouTube can be horribly slow but it’s generally worked okay for me.

Might also be a good idea to use something like Ublock origin and Portmaster as well, don’t just try to curate ad targeting, block them, if you want to still support websites you can use something like adnauseam which clicks the ads.

I’m not trying to say that Tor isn’t a good idea because they should be blocking ads, I think more people should absolutely use it for better anonymous browsing, I only bring up ad blockers because if people don’t want to be targeted ads they should be blocking them.

Bonus: Add anti-adblock filters to ad-block, it helps significantly with sites that try to detect them, also spam and malware filters are essential.

Hate to burst your bubble but many of the stories are just that, stories. Vast majority of the onion sites out there are either forums like 4chan or hobbyist sites like the old days of the internet.

Illegal websites do exist but they’re rare and hard to find, they also are subject to being taken down. They’re nothing like the stories though. In fact majority of the websites that exist when you search for these topics are just bitcoin scams, i.e. a livestream website that asks you to pay $200 in bitcoin to enter, almost certainly a scam because livestreaming over Tor is terrible due to low spead and it breaks the anonymity due to generating tons of unique traffic.

TL;DR Tor is a tool that can be used for privacy on the clearnet it can also be used to host your own onion sites. Dark web stories do have a small element of truth to them but are mostly scary stories to tell in the dark.

I use it, it’s a bit slow and you sometimes get lots of captchas but overall I think it’s pretty good.

Yeah people when they discuss Neworking and VPNs I’ve noticed are either illiterate to the existence of https or are deliberately not mentioning it for the purpose of misleading people in some way (in the case of VPN sponsorships it’s to get people to buy them).

Reddit also has a .onion as well. Funny considering their pride on Ban evasion detection they should outright block Tor.

I’ve also found that many ones that are blocked aren’t completely blocked, I can access them by using a new circuit (lots of these sites seem to really hate European Exit nodes but anything else has typically worked).

I never tried using WIndows on my Chromebook before, heard that it really performs badly on Chromebook hardware. You might have better luck with Linux if the error is happening in Windows so it might be worth giving it a shot.

Aren’t most Chromebooks out there Intel CPUs and essentially PC hardware? I know there are a few arm ones but it’s not most of them.

I would agree that if you’re looking to buy a cheap computer an older Thinkpad beats a Chromebook by a long shot. Main benefit to Chromebooks is that if you get lucky you can obtain them for free, mine was permanently loaned to me by my high school (I didn’t technically steal it from them, they just never asked for it back). I would’ve much preferred an old Thinkpad with Coreboot but the Chromebook was free so I can’t really complain.

Light bulbs aren’t planned obsolescence though, he even said as much in the video, light bulbs more akin to dish-soap which eventually runs out then a device made to be obsolete faster. They are consumable items, which run out or burn out, they are not expensive appliances with long lives, hell he even pointed out that some utilities gave them away for free.

FYI Most Chromebooks are Intel CPU computers, there are a few arm based ones but majority are Intel x86_64.

(prevents unenrolling and prevents sideloading Linux)

Should note that it’s not completely foolproof, I know because I bypassed it. It’s just not easy and technically you can get in trouble for it. Never got a ‘vacation’ for it though 😕

Yep I did that to my school Chromebook, they never asked for it back when I graduated and being a broke college student I decided to UEFI flash it and use it as a cheap Linux Computer, still using it now. It’s not the fastest laptop but it’s certainly good enough. It’s really dumb that they enforce software expiration dates on these PCs when they’re probably fully capable of running the next version perfectly fine.