kshade

Nah, just from my text editor, working on the formatting. Too bad reset formatting doesn't work. EDIT: Fixed

Trusted Net is selling three AV products that are virtually the same, TotalAV, PCProtect and ScanGuard. The first one is being heavily advertised with pre-rolls and banners on YouTube right now and I've just seen a moderately big channel take a sponsorship as well. But they don't appear legit. I do IT security and have never heard of them, but that doesn't mean that they can't just be sublicensing a good AV engine with their own UI and extra features. But no. They appear to be barely above scareware. First red flag is the 30 minuted count-down on the offer in your video description. That is a (kinda ridiculous) scare tactic no legitimate AV vendor should use, since AV is all about trust. They also have an affiliate program promising up to 70€ per user convinced. That is unrealistic and will no doubt lead to fake reviews and underhanded marketing by those affiliates. This appears to be why they have good ratings on some, terrible ratings on other sites. Third red flag are the many, recent complains about them on the US Better Business Bureau website. Malwarebytes, which is reputable, rates it as "potentially unwanted program", same as all the dubious system optimization programs that will tell you that there are 85 fixable issues but will only disclose them after payment. Some people have been saying that it's an outright scam, but I don't think that's quite true. Just almost. It also just flat-out isn't very good.

To and from the VPN server, yes, but that then has to send out the traffic you tunnelled to it in its original form again. The server you are communicating with doesn't know that the VPN is there. It's kinda like having another router out in the Internet, after your normal one, with a safe one-to-one cable between the two.

Usually, the scenario is that you don't trust the local network, not some connection between datacenters, so yes. But SSL is much better, of course.

Unless your ISP logs DNS traffic, which is usually unencrypted, yeah. But if they do that, then you might want a VPN for other reasons as well.

British educational youtuber Tom Scott has released a video about common claims made in VPN sponsorship segments. Video summary: You don't need a VPN to hide your password these days since SSL encryption is used almost everywhere. "Military-grade encryption" is what SSL uses as well. Not a wrong claim, but misleading. Your ISP can see what domain names you request, which is something you might want to hide with a VPN. But what they can't see is the whole URL. VPN providers can be compromised by hackers or governments as well. They are great for circumventing geo-blocking and piracy though, but you can't really advertise with that. Originally, this video was sponsored by a VPN provider, but they dropped it last second. tl;dr: VPNs are not a general necessity because of SSL I'm not posting this here as an attack on LTT or anything like that, and I'm aware that many of you will already know most of this. I'm just seeing a lot of channels with less of a tech-focused audience (and owners) do actual scare-mongering that it makes me glad that this easy to understand counterpoint exists.

I couldn't, since I don't have an older Ryzen CPU, but I was hoping that it would come with up-to-date firmware from the vendor, who advertised it as compatible. The box only says "2000 ready".

Hi, I have a MSI B450i (says ms-7a40 ver 2.0 on the PCB) and a Ryzen 7 3700X. I have both power connectors attached and RAM installed correctly, but the system doesn't boot. All it does is spin the fans and shine the CPU debug LED, which indicates a faulty or undetected CPU. I have tried shorting the BIOS reset pins already, that didn't help. Power LED stays dark as well. Does this indicate that I need an older CPU first to upgrade the BIOS, or could it be something else? The FAQ on MSIs site isn't really helpful. EDIT: Apparently this does not support flashing from USB without a CPU, so that probably means I have to ask AMD for a loaner.