It went dark after the judicial review process found that the law was constitutional.

The important thing to recognize is that the site stopped operating in the us (which it said it would do in reaction to this decision) after it was clear that it would definitely be violating a law with explicit consequences if it continued.

One unremarked-upon aspect of the events between Saturday and Sunday was the arson of a representative’s office in retribution for the ban.

Combined with the crappy algorithm after the shutdown (indicates they gotta actually rebuild all the recommendations), it’s likely that the company shut the site down to be in compliance, intending to go back up if possible once the law was reversed or the new administration was in power, and was offered assurances against legal action and protection against the law after the representatives office was set on fire.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/(your drive)

You can do status=progress if you want like someone else posted and if you pick a block size go with either the physical block size reported by the disk in smartcontrol or some multiple of it that coincides with a big even division of your controllers memory. The drives physical block size will be “easy” for the drive, bigger blocks are faster.

People saying physical destruction are operating in a different world than you and people saying urandom or shred are operating off old (>30 years) information. The same technology that makes ssds unrecoverable black boxes was originally developed and deployed in spinning drives to eek out speed gains because the disk itself can be expected to know better than the operating system where to put shit and makes techniques (which were postulated but never actually implemented successfully in the wild) to recover overwritten data infeasible.

Alternately just reformat it and don’t worry. No one doing drive rmas cares about your data. They’re already on the razors edge with feedback and customer trust, you think they’re gonna burn their above board bread and butter to run a harvesting operation for a few bucks on the side? That’s usually the purview of your local pc repair shop…

When you use mullvad you create a sixteen digit id. You don’t tie an account or email to it, just your secret code.

If I wanted to answer your question I’d make an account, put five bucks on it using whatever means are functional and quick (a credit card or something) and see how it works. Mullvad is €5 no matter how many months you buy in advance so it’s not a huge deal or commitment to find out.

Once you’ve bought a month using the least privacy respecting (this is debatable) method you can figure out if it will work for you.

You may find out that you need to use mullvads encrypted dns service and/or their browser proxy setup. Using the encrypted DNS doesn’t require the use of mullvads vpn servers so you might be able to resolve the isp blocking tor that way without needing to buy mullvad.

If you find out in that month that everything is working right, re-up another month in your low privacy way then make a new account and select the use cash option. They’ll give you a code to write down. Send a big bill with that use cash code to Switzerland and in a few weeks you’ll have relatively private vpn access.

E: since the barrier to entry of €5 and some way to transfer it might be too high, you can also try to contact mullvads servers. Make an account and don’t fund it, but create a device profile and a configuration (or install their software). If your error is that the account isn’t funded as opposed to that the servers are unreachable then you’re probably fine.