rhythmicotter
Short answer: no, they were owned by a Chinese company and then were recently spun off into an independent company. Here is the latest news on management.
I use AirVPN. It’s reliable and I like their vpn client Eddie, but there are a few things you should know. Google blocks traffic from all of their Dallas servers, about 20% of their us based servers. Also, a few web hosting companies block AirVPN traffic, at least on the servers I use, including GoDaddy. I can’t access the Linux Mint forums while on AirVPN either. Every day or two I have to disable the VPN to access a site, which defeats the purpose, IMO.
One good thing about AirVPN is that they have sales often. But I would try a week now before committing. Reliability has been top notch and they have a lot of servers.
Edit: I use port forwarding for bittorrent and it was easy to set up. You log in on their website and choose a port to forward for your account. I’m honestly a novice at networking and I figured it out using these instructions.
Lamarckian evolution mixed with racism, wow. I’m not surprised.
It’s very irregular for a country to take back top level domains. Even refusing to renew registrations is unheard of.
ML, tk, etc broke ground by offering free country code TLDs starting 10 years ago. This was possible until Meta sued Freenom this year for issuing domains to the majority of all sources phishing traffic.
Basically, the internet got used to getting TLDs for free, and that was great, except the issuers of said domains (African countries with not a lot of money) have no obligation and no incentive to keep doing that forever. Especially after it became a liability.