Tello gives you a real (US though) number, E911 and all, for 5 USD a month. You get an eSIM you can activate from anywhere in the world via Wi-Fi Calling. Send and receive unlimited texts and get 100 minutes a month for the odd service that insists on verification calls rather than texts. I’ve had zero issues.

Session disables forward secrecy for no reason.

Personally, I assume it’s a honeypot.

Like basically all cloud providers, Oracle publish their public-facing IP address ranges.

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/General/Concepts/addressranges.htm

Many services block these because, as you are pointing out, standing up VPN tunnel routing on a cloud instance is sort of trivial. Cloud providers publish these ranges specifically so anyone can block them easily. If lemmy.world is not blocking Oracle Cloud already, it’s only because they just haven’t come around to it.

Mullvad has a 30-day money back guarantee.

Apart from that, some payment methods (like crypto) allow transmitting arbitrary amounts. At least, paying for years in advance works without issue. You could pay a few cents and try it out, but be mindful of fees.

Almost all extensions will weaken your security posture. In fact off the top of my head there are basically only two kinds of extensions that could improve it:

• ad blockers
• (maybe!) password manager integrations

Anything else is questionable at best. Maybe you could create browser profiles where you install extensions somewhat more liberally, with decreased expectation of safety.

Two necessary components for friendship are extended presence and shared struggle.

That is, you need to be around the same set of people for a non-trivial amount of time. Relationships need time to form.

But that is not enough. Just being around people doesn’t tell you much about them, or tells them much about you. There’s no basis to bond over. You need to experience the same hardship as someone else.

In 1v1 games, that’s surely harder but not impossible, if you’re e.g. struggling to improve yourself, or trying to succeed in spite of the game being a bit shitty. Try thinking of a shared objective. Only ever wanting to defeat others is ultimately alienating.

When Squadron 42 finally comes out, it’ll just be considered commentary on contemporary issues. Basically like Job Simulator… in space