Why does this TechRadar link come with a reference to some weird russian website? ( slrpnk.net )

Disclaimer; I'm not looking for a VPN service, I already have one. I know TechRadar is not a great source too. I am simply doing research around VPNs in general.

I am just wondering why DDG is suggesting this link over a link without a reference? Is this "the blame" of DDG or Techradar? Trying to understand why this is the link being served over others. Appriciate any suggestions.

Big_Boss_77 ,

I'm about to get into the market for a new VPN, who's the top dog privacy wise nowadays? Been using TorGuard, but the bulk subscription I purchased will expire this fall, and they have since on-shored their operations.

Use cases at the moment:
General/Adblock
Occasion p2p/torrent

Sunny OP ,
@Sunny@slrpnk.net avatar

As someone writing his master thesis about vpns, I would hands down stick with independent VPN providers, such as Mullvad(MozillaVPN - is WL of Mullvad), Windscribe, ProtonVPN and IVPN.

Don't buy into the Vpns with sketchy parent companies such as Kape Technologies who owns Express VPN, PIA, Cyber Ghost to mention a few..

Big_Boss_77 ,

Mullvad appears to have been review bombed lately due to removal of port forwarding and people say it has back slid recently... any opinions on that?

Proton VPN looks solid though

Sunny OP ,
@Sunny@slrpnk.net avatar

Mullvad remains top dog when it comes to privacy. You can still torrent without port forwarding, it's just more limited. If you need port forwarding, then is give Windscribe a go. While most people will recommend ProtonVPN, with good reason, I personally prefer to stick with the underdogs.

Big_Boss_77 ,

This is a fascinating topic for me, I would love to hear your reasoning for sticking with the underdog. Is it just a "stick it to the man" scenario or is there some more practical reason?

Sunny OP ,
@Sunny@slrpnk.net avatar

It's basically the same reason for why I choose to shop locally rather than buying things online. I despise monopoly and will always, if still practical, choose the second option. Also sometimes you can tell there is more passion coming from smaller Devs and communities, I feel like that's the case here too.

Windscribe has hilarious marketing, seriously, check it out. But their products are also just solid, and works on Linux. They also make the service called ControlD, which is also a great service.

Gork ,

Looks like a pretty benign Ukrainian website. An easy way to distinguish the Ukrainian language from Russian is to look for the letter i. It doesn't exist in Russian Cyrillic. If you see both i and ë somewhere in the same sentence it is Belarusian since that language has both letters. Russian has ë, but not i, instead they have и for that sound.

There are probably better ways to tell based on grammar and whatnot but this is how I as an ignorant person distinguishes them.

Sunny OP ,
@Sunny@slrpnk.net avatar

Ah sorry about that, I could have double checked what language it really was. I closed it 2 secs after it had loaded and assumed it was Russian.

TragicNotCute ,
@TragicNotCute@lemmy.world avatar

My suspicion is that DDG’s crawler looks similar enough to other crawlers and that’s the URL the crawler was provided.

best_username_ever ,

I agree but this thing could be cleaned on DDG’s side.

hemko ,

Very interesting. I could get the same result in ddg, but not on bing. Also with quick testing around, couldn't get the ref with searching other techradar article. Very alarmingly, it looks like shufliada dot com is some Russian website?

Edit: apparently it's Ukrainian, not Russian.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/d0623746-5ffe-4b7e-97fe-e151914f5952.webp

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/bf35f47c-692b-45e0-b68b-ef08279981ac.webp

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