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With the rise of privacy threats and constant internet restrictions, using a VPN has become the norm for many users. However, behind the simplicity of connecting lie technical features that can significantly impact

the user experience. One of the key factors is the choice of VPN protocol, which determines the speed, stability, and security level of the connection.

This article will provide a detailed breakdown of the most popular VPN protocols, their features, advantages, and disadvantages, and will also offer examples of how to use each of them.

By the way, I took all the pictures from those, you know, the internets, but I analyzed and explained them myself, just for you :)

A good way to improve product communication is to use special characters for their intended purpose.

In Russian typography, there is a rule for using quotation marks depending on the context.

Having your own VPS for a VPN is quite advantageous. There are no limits on the number of clients; you can provide a VPN connection to all your relatives, friends, and acquaintances. And you can pay 160–300 rubles a month for it. And while public VPNs are being actively blocked by DNS and IP, personal VPNs have so far avoided this fate.

There are downsides: server administration and a lack of geographical diversity.

A VPN requires a foreign server, and for over a year now, there have been problems with paying for foreign services in Russia. But there are Russian companies that provide foreign servers, and you can pay them with a Russian card.
I registered with a dozen providers and got as far as purchasing a VPS with five of them. And after testing, only three remained.

Hack Time, Habr!

The other day, I came across a high-profile investigation by Dmytro Tarasenko (aka iTaysonLab).

He was the one who decompiled the APK of the new 'Telega' app, identified links to the VK and Catogram infrastructure, and published the details on the BruhCollective Telegram channel.

My colleagues uncovered many alarming facts, but as someone who loves to dig into the guts of applications, I wanted to go further, confirm their findings, and find what dynamic analysis missed.

I decided to conduct a full static analysis of the APK, deobfuscating the code to create the most complete and technically supported picture possible.
What is really hiding behind the promises of an 'improved' Telegram?

Let's take a look.

Spoiler: it's not secure, not private, but it's damn interesting. Let's go!

A quick guide on how to enable the new Google AI Mode and set it as the default search in Chrome. Now, queries from the address bar open directly in “AI Mode”.

Hi, I'm Dima and, like many, I've been using neural networks to create images for many years. But over the last year and a half, the market for generative models has changed so much and become so huge that it's impossible to try all the models. However, the question of which neural network is the best still remains. Benchmarks are poorly suited for a real assessment of creativity and cost, so I've gathered 10 models in one place, what they are best suited for, and what the price is (or rather, the free limit). I hope this helps you choose the most optimal neural network for your tasks.

Below is an honest rating based on quality, realism, convenience, and price.

It's been two years since I posted a video and a post about how I recovered my friend's Telegram account using JavaScript. Since then, I've helped over a hundred people regain access to their accounts. Then the method stopped working

I decided to gather the important security aspects of your Telegram account in one place.

In this article, we take a detailed look at Ollama — a tool for running large language models (LLMs) locally. You will learn how to install the program, choose a suitable model, understand formats and quantization, configure the system for your hardware, and work both via the CLI, and via the API. Practical tips, configuration examples, and VRAM recommendations will help you use Ollama as effectively as possible for dialogues, text generation, code, and other tasks.

Hello everyone, today we'll talk about Android TV. Bypassing the throttling on a TV seemed to be the most problematic and difficult for me. Since I have several TVs at home deprived of YouTube, and even more are waiting to be set up for friends and acquaintances, I decided to collect all the bypass methods I could find.

In this article, we will not only install a local (and free) alternative to ChatGPT, but also review several open LLMs, delve into the advanced settings of LM Studio, connect the chatbot to Visual Studio Code, and teach it to assist us with programming. We will also look at how to fine-tune the model's behavior using system prompts.

What do we have at the end of 2025?

Mass layoffs, tightening of the screws by the state and marketplaces. An increase in VAT, which means a rise in store prices. The SMO continues, leading to high government spending, a high Central Bank rate, and consequently, a business freeze.

I spoke with the owners of manufacturing companies, an IT company, and an analytical agency who have already been through crises, and I asked:

'What are you going to do in 2026 to survive?'.

In short: in the year of the horse, you'll have to work like a horse.

Hello everyone!

I want to note right away that this article is written exclusively for people who are just starting their journey in learning SQL and window functions. It may not cover complex applications of functions or use complicated definitions—everything is written in the simplest language possible for a basic understanding.

P.S. If the author didn't cover or write about something, it means they considered it non-essential for this article)))

For the examples, we will use a small table that shows student grades in different subjects. In the database, the table looks like this:

Hello, Habr!

I've been putting off writing this article for a long time, but the time has come.

There are quite a few materials on the internet about how to run macOS on regular, IBM-compatible PCs. Their problem is exactly the same as with Wine, which I also wrote my own article about - they are too... vague on the details of how to create an installation media and what to do after installation.

In this article, I will be following the guide from Dortania. There is a Russian version, but it's always older than the most current one, so I will use the original. I will also be taking some screenshots and links from there.

Before we begin, I'd like to enlighten those who are not aware of what a Hackintosh is.

A Hackintosh is the process of installing macOS on regular PCs. What's the difficulty?

All MacBooks use their own hardware (at least now, in 2025). They used to use different processors - in classic Macintoshes they used processors from Motorola. Later models featured processors from IBM PowerPC (during this period they were called PowerMacs). And in the early 2000s, Apple switched to Intel processors. It was during this period that the system we are most interested in appeared - OSX, later renamed to macOS.

When the question of describing a system's architecture arises, there are several main solutions for where and how to do it. Among the popular notations for visualizing architecture diagrams, one can choose C4, developed by Simon Brown.

In this article, I want to show an example of applying the C4 notation, which you can use as a guide in your work, as well as tools for creating it. In particular, I highlight Structurizr.

This article is useful for system analysts, architects, developers, project managers, and anyone involved in creating and making decisions about project architecture.

Since I'm a fan of self-hosting, I have a home infrastructure:

Orange Pi - a media server;

Synology - a file dump;

Neptune 4 - a 3D printer with a web interface and a camera feed. And I'd like to have secure access to it externally via my phone and PC, while also having internet access outside the RF. I used to use OpenVPN for these needs, but it's no longer reliable. So I started studying the documentation for an excellent tool from our Chinese comrades - Xray!

What you'll need:

A server with an external IP for the infrastructure. In my case, it's an Orange Pi, hereinafter - Bridge

The server you want to access - Server

A server outside the RF for internet access. Hereinafter - Proxy

A client of your choice. Hereinafter - Client

Client and server on Linux - Xray-core, which can be installed via the official Xray installation script

Client for Android - v2rayNG

More clients can be found in the Xray-core repository

Let's take the VLESS-TCP-XTLS-Vision-REALITY configuration file as a base and start reading the Xray documentation

Routing is done on the client. For example, if the client accesses the xray.com domain, we route the traffic to the Bridge, and for all other connections - to the Proxy. Then the Bridge routes the traffic to the Server if the client accessed server.xray.com.
It looks like this:

My second article—an analysis of MAX's network requests and why this analysis is my biggest disappointment! I certainly didn't expect this, but I described everything as it is.

Under the cut: my story of how I decided not to pay for a VPN, but to deploy my own instead. Then I thought: why not make a full-fledged service? And then... well, the rest is business as usual.

I set up servers, hired a designer, launched ads, and tried not to get disappointed. Spoiler: I haven't gotten what I wanted yet. But the hope for ships sailing the vast expanses still warms my heart.

Programmers, sysadmins, DevOps engineers, and testers are often united by the use of some common technologies. For example, the ability to have remote access to a server would be useful to anyone in the aforementioned anecdotal company. Therefore, in this article, we will cover the basics of working with the SSH protocol at a fundamental level (without generating keys, signatures, moms, dads, and credits). We'll look at 'advanced' usage separately next time. This material was prepared by Max, the author of the YouTube channel PyLounge. Let's go!

This weekend was all about 'Connection Reset.' While news channels vaguely reported that 'users are complaining about outages,' we were in chats and on test servers trying to understand the physics of the process.

On November 18, 2025, Google introduced a new combination: the Gemini 3 Pro model and the Google Antigravity IDE. The first is about controlled reasoning, long context, and multimodality. The second is about multi-agent development with artifacts and "transparent" steps. Headlines immediately flooded the feeds: "Cursor is dead.".

In this article, we break down what exactly Google has launched, why the words "the smartest model" are an exaggeration, how Antigravity differs from Cursor, which development scenarios are already changing, and where it's still too early to abandon your familiar stack.