The issue you are experiencing likely has nothing to do with the VPN. Network connectivity is not needed to unlock the car. I have been in places with no cell phone signal and it still works.

I do sometimes experience the same issue you are. If I wake up my phone, then it works. So it may be working for you not because you disabled the VPN, but because you woke up your phone and it then sent out the bluetooth signal to let the car know you were nearby.

Amazon has been progressively getting worse and worse. I was not a member of Prime for the video. It was a nice perk.

The combination of Amazon making it hard to search for things to buy, the huge amount of low quality crap for sale with confusing descriptions, and this most recent change of putting in place ads if I do not pay an additional fee has led me to cancel my subscription.

They have taken the enshittification too far. Good bye Amazon. Hello Home Depot, Target, et al.

My Mom says it does the same to her. Then she eats Dorito chips or uses a seasoning in it that has MSG and nothing happens. When I point that out she is still convinced that it gives her migraines and maybe those things just don’t have enough of it.

🤷

I used the .onion link using Onion Browser on iOS. The front page loaded fine, but articles were paywalled. This leads me to believe that it is not browsing through Tor that is allowing the paywall bypass, but rather something Tor Browser is doing.

One experiment might be to go to https://nytimes.com using Tor Browser and see if it also still bypasses the paywall. If my theory is correct, it just might…

I also used the link you posted. It loaded but was still paywalled. :( But I am using Onion Browser on iOS. So maybe it is something Tor browser is doing and not because their .onion site lacks the paywall.