I use airvpn for torrents but depending on your European country you might not be able to.

Why would it not be an option in some countries? Are you saying it’s illegal or impossible to encrypt any traffic through a VPN while being in some of the countries, or what’s the matter?

Wont they take your money before the VPN is disabled/undetected?

The very newly released Deepseek R1 “reasoning model” from China beats OpenAI’s o1 model on multiple areas, it seems – and you can even see all the steps of the pre-answering “thinking” that’s hidden from the user in o1. It’s a huge model, but it (and the paper about it) will probably positively impact future “open source” models in general, now the “thinking” cat’s outta the bag. Though, it can’t think about Tiananmen Square or Taiwan’s autonomy – but many derivative models will probably be modified to effectively remove such Chinese censorship.

Do you know, is this another tax additional to “blankmedieafgiften” (“blank media tax” or “private copying levy”), or is it the same tax under a different name?

My guess is it’s probably a national cultural tradition affected by previous or existing French laws and rightsholder practices regarding different common ways of “sailing”, making DDL from filehosts through debrid services a preferred choice over e.g. p2p methods like torrents, ed2k, gnutella etc. I’m pretty sure the filehosts+torrents products combo are a newer addition to debrid services without having used them myself. No idea about what their actual situation is and has been - but I know that some torrent trackers for French content currently exist today too.

Here are some alternatives to look into: https://slrpnk.net/post/15456722

Here are some other options to consider: https://slrpnk.net/post/15456722

Which is French too, and will probably go the same way as RD sooner rather than later…

The quality of content in /r/piracy is shit nowadays when compared to !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com