Tech's broken promises: Streaming is now just as expensive and confusing as cable. Ubers cost as much as taxis. And the cloud is no longer cheap

I would argue it's easier just in significantly different ways - the Arr stack of applications take more effort to learn and setup initially, but once you have it's absolutely effortless.

Explain

Use Mullvad, $5/month prepaid and you can even mail them cash if you have no other way to pay. No subscription or other scammy stuff. Your entire login is a single auto-generated number, and if you use their app (Open source, 3rd party audited) you just punch it in and boom, VPN time.

I think from signup to using the service was under 5 minutes!

For the power users you can log in on their site and generate Wireguard keys, which you can use with Docker to wrap up all your piracy stuff inside a container that can only access the VPN connection for safety and convenience. But you don't have to do that, you can just run the app and put everything through the tunnel when you're downloading.

I take it you're in a country in which VPNs are stringently regulated or outright don't exist?

I've gotten dumb angry letters since from ISPs since Napster.

But I'm hard pressed to remember a time when so much content was so readily available so quickly.

And a $4/mo Proton VPN is downright trivial when the cost of a good laptop has fallen from the $1000s to the low $100s.