I’ve pointed this out on another account on this very community through KBin Social.
And I was talking about how lazy and entitled pirates across all ages have become overtime. That we were losing more and more sources that had withstood a long standing of time. And one moment everyone is going “RAH RAH! HYDRA! CUT ONE DOWN AND MORE COME UP!” but when we lose some of which that have yet to return or take it’s place, the attitude grows weak. Almost desperate.
And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”. There are few pirates out there doing the work and it’s just so that these lazy and entitled pirates can just take and take.
But when we lose sources, they scatter away like cockroaches and all that they can think about is asking where it is that they can get free shit. It’s almost like consumerism but for free shit, it’s annoyingly disturbing. It’s not about wanting the new product, it’s about wanting the source to mooch off from.
I sadly predict in time that the whole hydra ideology will just simply become the way the Pirate Bay has become, just a symbol, but will it mean anything? It’ll be so if this whole trend continues and all generations are just as guilty to doing it.
I agree with the sentiment that it’s very easy to underestimate the harm done by the loss of a major site or scene group, but I’m not sure I really agree with much else you’ve written here. In particular:
And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
The people making those posts have minimal exposure to piracy. This is getting your feet wet. For me, contributing my share is saying that I think these users deserve access. Yeah, they wouldn’t have a place on a private tracker, that’s not a problem because they’re not on a private tracker, and if they join one they won’t stay for long if they neglect seeding.
I’m sure a lot of these people will continue their lives without seeding or contributing. I won’t say I endorse that, but I’m cool with it, and even if I wasn’t I still don’t think an argument can made that the harms of any hypothetical injustice here outweigh the benefits from a single dedicated pirate that began their journey this way.
I care about uploader counts, about seeder counts, about the wellbeing of the people who maintain the infrastructure. I’m invested. I don’t care about download counts. Looking at an unseeded download as a loss in seeder count makes exactly the same amount of sense to me as looking at a download as a lost sale. I think it’s morally right to support pirates who will not end up contributing, and beyond that I think treating them with kindness a net plus for the cause, because less than 100% of them will just say “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
I remember learning the whole torrenting process after years of irc, newsgroups and p2p clients. It took a bit of time but, man, was I passionate about dumping everything I could on to SuprNova way back.
Anymore, I only package and share on private trackers, its just too much of a risk to seed out to public ones. And being completely honest, the majority of my dl’s are coming from newsgroups again. It’s just a simpler process and I don’t feel the leech anxiety.
That said, I also keep an eye out for requests and try to fill bounties whenever I can.
Yeah, Google Drive is huge because it just works and millennials are more comfortable going to a Google owned platform than doing something that seems sketchier.
the only people who know how to torrent are the ones that want to learn. the learning curve is gentler than a walk-in shower. I’ve shown people of all ages and all tech backgrounds, though recommending VPN connections and getting that going does throw a few.
anyway, it’s so easy, it’s crazy compared to the old days of usenet, ZIP disks, ftp sites, .is files, and sequenced RAR files. this is the golden age of piracy and I love it.
What’s there to learn? You just simply download a client, go into thepiratebay (if it still exists, dunno, havent torrented a thing for like 10 years), click download and wait.
thepiratebay still exists but is regarded as untrustworthy and infested with malware. I’d say knowing you’re getting something from a trustworthy source is harder than it used to be.
It is more difficult than a few years ago, especially if you don’t want to get sued or get a threatening letter from your ISP.
I would only torrent with a VPN and a private tracker. It’s certainly not difficult to learn, but absolutely requires some small amount of information to acquire.
The tools were annoying but the process wasn’t very hard. Unprotected FTPs were pretty common early on and IRC download bots were around before torrenting. Sharing applications like Kazaa, Scour, Limewire, and Napster were super simple. There were fewer roadblocks. I wouldn’t want to explain to someone how to get a private invite, understand the trackers rules, and ensure they do not get VPN leaks.
Zoomer here. The problem is really much worse than the meme suggests, and it isn’t really a generational gap at all.
The computer power user is a dying breed.
Today’s average computer user on windows, macos, or (heaven forbid) chromeos, knows nothing about software. They don’t even know what software is. They can’t install a program except through an app store. If you ask them which browser they use, they’ll probably say “google.” Furthermore, many perfectly functional people don’t use any computer except their phone.
The tendency toward user-friendly systems is fundamentally a good thing, in my opinion. It has advanced the democratisation of computing and its advantages. But on the flip side, it has left a huge swath of the general public totally reliant on systems they neither control nor understand in the slightest.
I use Arch, btw. I put my own computer together - I bought and assembled the hardware components, I performed a minimal, headless installation of my operating system, and I meticulously scripted every personalisation of my window manager (I use dwm).
To me, computing comes easily, as second nature. I used so many systems from such a young age that I simply intuit the design language of user interfaces, whether I’ve used them or not. To me, they seem painstakingly designed to make this easy. Yet, because of my computer literacy, I am often called upon as tech support for my family and friends, from zoomers to boomers, and most of them seem like helpless infants when it comes to technology.
This is because the average user doesn’t have to know or care what their system really does or how it really works. So, by the path of least resistance, a user learns the bare minimum to get what they want from their system. I’m not sure of anything that could change this reality.
As I said, it’s not a bad thing that most of the population can now access the advantages computing delivers. But I do see this state of affairs as brittle and concerning, where people depend utterly on software they don’t understand. This is often propriety software made by profit-driven corporations. The average user doesn’t know or care that they don’t actually control their software - because they don’t need to. They don’t know or care that their data is being tracked and sold, that their computer will update itself without permission or install programs they can’t vet, and that alternatives to this exist.
FR, younger generations don’t have to fix anything / solve any problems on their PC; any problem they’re likely to run into is an abstracted error within Google Docs, within their browser.
Not exactly, first of all, this is pretty divisive which I dislike, a lot of late Gen z can and has torrented and used ddl sites. It’s early Gen z and Gen alpha that is hopeless.
Honestly as a German, torrenting seems to be way too risky. Internet providers will immediately cave when they are contacted about an IP adress they control and there are multiple law firms whose only business model seems to be sending out c&d letters.
Hats off for our poor German friends. It’s definitely not easy over there, but if you do the private torrent tracker + VPN combo, you can be relatively safe.
Rightsholders have seeders sitting in public torrents to grab IPs to sue about. Private trackers are essentially a “club” that only invites known users, (friends of friends) and as such, fewer (not zero) rightsholders are able to join, and as such, fewer instances of being referred to a lawfirm simply because there isn’t anyone in the swarm who is a rightsholder who only wants your IP… because they don’t invite those kind of people most of the time.
Rightsholders like how hanging fruit like public torrents. Private trackers help take a lot of the stress away.
However, I don’t know how it works in Germany so maybe rightsholders over there are more zealous.
Yikes :( that’s brutal. You could use a seedbox and encryption? I think that would mostly circumvent that issue. If storing it locally isn’t a concern, then just hosting it on the seedbox and connecting services like Plex to it works as well.
as a high schooler with a special interest in computers, it’s genuinely surprising how poor most of my peers computers skills are. most of my peers don’t even know the very basics of folder structures.
that’s basically how I felt after as well, it’s such a confusing but interesting series. I want to rewatch it though after really starting to grasp it, it’s such intriguing show
I’ve tried watching it about 5 times and get to different points before I burn out.
It has sparked an interest in the works of R.D. Laing for who Lain is named in reference to.
A Psychologist who was active in the 60’s and is famous for their work with schizophrenics; I’ve been curious if their work may give a bit more context to understand Serial Experiments Lain
Directories predate them however per Windows a directory is a type of folder that points to a location on the file system - a list of network printers are a folder but not a directory
Twenty years ago when I was 13, I started doing web stuff. This was back when everything was super simple, so everything to get a webserver up was super manual. I’ll mention port forwarding at my current job and there’s this slice of people that are 28-40 years old that know what I’m talking about.
I love doing homelab stuff! it seems like at my school either you don’t know what a port is, or you actively maintain 3 web servers
(the latter being the significant minority, with a total of like 3 of us)
I’m slightly younger than that even, currently finishing up my master’s but have been working as a backend dev for a couple of years.
I’ve learned an order of magnitude more about networking from just being in the vicinity of my girlfriend (who is a network technician) than from uni, and it’s definitely already paying off.
When I spent a few years teaching in the local school, one thing I taught was a class on Design and 3D printing. The VERY first thing I always had to teach was “how to use a mouse” before I could even begin to start teaching CAD modeling.
I swear, smart phones and touch screens are a curse and pox on humanity.
I blame google for the demise of well-organized folders. Their approach to email was “chuck it all in one big folder named Archive, and you can search for it using keywords that you will definitely remember when you need to find it again!”
It’s a useful tool, but paved the way for the current state of affairs where people get overwhelmed by their email because they have 150,000 unread emails in their inbox and as a result, don’t read an email until you tell them the entire contents of their email via the inferior messaging platform known as texting.
Idk. I blame Apple, and Android hasn’t done much to really bolster the need for file folders (not a bad thing, just lack of opportunity for learning).
But Apple actively prohibits its user base from engaging with folders, and has been for well over a decade - plenty long enough for my (millennial) generation to phase it out and for the generations after to never need them in the first place. Plus, emails aren’t dependent on file paths, whereas systems file paths are completely necessary.
You may as well have asked this question in 2012 because it’s exactly the same as it was back then, except now there is iCloud. Which in some ways is impressive.
Folders are generic labels, Photos, Documents, Downloads, and within those there is folder structure, but I’ve never seen any Apple user actually utilize them beyond the most basic organizational functions (and even that is not common). Granted, my demographic for the past couple years has been the elderly, but before that I worked with kids and it was basically the same.
If you use Apple products, you don’t need folder structures because you can’t take files off your device easily, it basically has to go through some form of cloud upload, if not iCloud then Google Drive. And you don’t need folder structures for the same reason, cause why are you adding files to your device from somewhere that isn’t iCloud?
This is only like 95% facetious, it’s actually ridiculous how closed off Apple makes their products. By default when you make a spreadsheet with Apple’s software it exports as a .pages file, instead of the actually useful .xls. This is for every. Single. Program. Word files, PowerPoint files, I’m sure there’s even a PDF specific Apple file format.
I was more talking about their mobile devices, the iPods, iPhones, iPads, I should have made that more clear.
Even so, that doesn’t change the fact that Apple does actively prohibits users from accessing files/folders within the system, computers included. For something as basic as the Library folder to be hidden is just a little ridiculous.
It’s not hating on Apple to call out ridiculous things, and none of this is facetious. Unless you are a developer of some kind, having this hidden away in some ways is good for users who might break things. It just happens to make it difficult for anyone else who wants to have control over their computer.
No most millennials are also too lazy because they stopped giving a shit about computers when it stopped being a requirement to use the internet like 10-15 years ago because smartphones.
Most who did haven’t in at least a decade, and wouldn’t unless you put a gun to their head.
For some reason the vast majority of people seem to just want to ignore the machines that literally run our society, and its fucking maddening.
FFS the amount of people who I work with in IT and even then don’t really give a shit about their daily computing is absolutely fucking baffling.
Its really just a smattering of people from all ages who actually know how to use a computer because they’re actually interested in doing so.
I’m in this comment, and I don’t like it. I still fix “computers” for a living, but when I get home, most days, the last tech I want to interact with is anything more complex than my phone.
I like to think I know how to use a computer, but I mostly use my phone for private stuff. I have a few things running on my PC, but they’re all online now in my local network and they have a mobile website through which I interact with them. Even my TV runs a frontend for things on my computer.
Computer stuff has become an even broader spectrum of devices and skills than it used to be 20 years ago.
As part of Gen Z I do not approve this message. When I was young I would stream movies from stream sites (to be fair I had no money to have VPN to torrent etc) but I have not visited one of those for like 5 years now since I learned more. Now not all gen Z is tech smart I see it in my friends and family members close to me age who are… Dumb and worse they don’t care to get better and think it’s fine and that is what the problem is imo.
i don’t get this ‘generation gap’ thing. There are also Milennials who are just as clueless.
You can always dive into the whole private tracker, sonarr/radarr + media server setup if you want superior quality or just to host your own files. But if you are happy with what streaming sites/apps provide that is fine too.
I for one am glad that piracy is easily accessible by anyone who has access to the internet.
I’m an older GenZ born in the late 90s and I’ve had to show a few younger peers how to torrent recently.
The idea of you needing a “special” program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
One other thing I’ve noticed, People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices. Which its good people give at least a bit of a shit about security but convincing people Firefox isn’t a virus gets a bit annoying (Yes I’ve had that conversation).
People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices.
I see this as a natural byproduct of Google, Apple, et al. “Walled Garden”
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of. Granted Apple is far more on the latter side than Google but even Google fought tooth and nail to keep Epic from having their own store.
I don’t interact much with people who are younger than me but I feel like the age of tinkering might not be as strong with them as it was for me. PCs were the predominant form factor and you could literally take it apart and put it back together with just a screwdriver. You can’t do that with laptops or phones at least not without a lot of other specialized tools. This isn’t their fault either since device manufacturers have really tried to make it difficult to do anything that they don’t control.
Hell chrome is the best example of this. Google, whose business is selling your personal data for ads, is preventing the use of ad blockers. Firefox is mostly developed by Mozilla with a small handful of volunteers. It’s already showing signs of enshittification. We don’t have a viable third option.
It will only be a matter of time before these tech companies start having brain drains due to their own greed.
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of
Not just that, I remember when app stores were new and people clamoured to be on them AND those app makers would often move to ONLY being on the app store, with anything downloaded off-store being a scam
So a lot of people grew up to use these devices at a time where downloading something off the web was more likely than not to be malware, giving them the ick on the idea as a whole
Fuck, I’m from the time a bit before all of that and even I have a goddamn hard time downloading shit that’s available off-store on someone’s website out of pure paranoia from those days
i remember not using firefox for a rlly long time bc i heard it’s ram usage with multiple tabs open was a lot less efficient than other browsers. idk if that’s true but i use firefox w 4 windows with 20+ tabs each and have never had a problem
It’s not true currently. Firefox and Chrome trade blows on which is more performance and which uses more/less RAM these days. It varies, but they’re quite close.
I currently have 130+ tabs open in Firefox and 90+ in Chrome in addition to some other programs open and running (libreOffice, vpn, and others)
Everything is working fine on my old laptop with an i5 processor and 16G ram and windows 10, ssd hd
I can’t really game on this, and trying to run a virtual machine is a slog.
But VS Code, database, xshell, calibre, audacity, photopea, even basic video editing all run fine. Granted I usually do one project at a time, so I’m not using VS Code and editing videos at the same time.
The browser tabs are usually always open. Oh, and I actually just cleaned up my tabs. There were a lot more…
I feel like the memory issues are mostly worked out now for most of us.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
I feel like we also got a new kind of guy, the tech-forward digital illiterate. They run most of everything.
Many of my Gen-X colleagues in tech (looking at you Stanford alumni) have been really into making sure their kids got into math, science and tech from an early age. So I think tech is going to be like medicine or law. Households with one or two parents in tech are more likely to produce tech savvy children by default. Everyone else will require effort.
Why can’t browsers treat torrents as just another protocol for downloads, so that if you haven’t got a default set for torrent out magnet mimetypes, it just downloads it in the included download manager?
Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.
The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn’t really connected with the browser’s main responsibility, which is browsing the web.
Just because torrents come from the web shouldn’t make it the browser’s responsibility to deal with them.
You just reminded me there actually was a browser called Torch that could download torrents like a normal download. It was basically just Chrome with a built-in torrent client.
I remember trying it out when it first came out in 2012. It never caught on and looks like the last release was in 2020.
Opera had torrent support at the time I stopped using it, I never heard they had discontinued that feature but I’m assuming they did, both because it probably would have been mentioned in this comment chain already and also because making that decision should have been inevitable. I never used bittorrent before joining oink, I think I remember on joining thinking I would just use opera and then installing utorrent after finding out client whitelisting was a thing. Maybe I was already on oink when opera added the feature and I thought I’d try it because I was already using opera. Maybe this is all a fever dream, who can really say.
This would be terrible, because any website could potentially make you a seeder for „illegal“ content while normally browsing the web without a VPN. Meaning, your real IP address may accidentally be recorded by some lawerers and you’ll get a fine for whatever you accidentally shared (very dangerous, depending on country).
There are already solutions for webtorrents, but at least these scripts can be blocked.
Stuff got too easy to really have to delve into a deeper understanding, most of the time, now. No jumpers, no dip switches, no pre-loading drivers or plugs that can be plugged into places they shouldn’t get plugged into. Everything is color coded and plug n play. You don’t have to dive in and assign com ports or anything.
I learned as I went because I wanted to get shit to work and that took a lot of educating to get there. Now, most of the time the situation doesn’t come up, so that deeper understanding is a building block that just got skipped over. The offshoot is that when the more rare occasion arises that a deeper understanding is required, it’s usually got a person way behind the 8 ball to be able to recognize and fix the issue.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
I am a bit OOTL - which ones went down? Things like Internet Archive & related to AnimeFLV? I presume new ones will come back though?
No.
I’ve pointed this out on another account on this very community through KBin Social.
And I was talking about how lazy and entitled pirates across all ages have become overtime. That we were losing more and more sources that had withstood a long standing of time. And one moment everyone is going “RAH RAH! HYDRA! CUT ONE DOWN AND MORE COME UP!” but when we lose some of which that have yet to return or take it’s place, the attitude grows weak. Almost desperate.
And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”. There are few pirates out there doing the work and it’s just so that these lazy and entitled pirates can just take and take.
But when we lose sources, they scatter away like cockroaches and all that they can think about is asking where it is that they can get free shit. It’s almost like consumerism but for free shit, it’s annoyingly disturbing. It’s not about wanting the new product, it’s about wanting the source to mooch off from.
I sadly predict in time that the whole hydra ideology will just simply become the way the Pirate Bay has become, just a symbol, but will it mean anything? It’ll be so if this whole trend continues and all generations are just as guilty to doing it.
I agree with the sentiment that it’s very easy to underestimate the harm done by the loss of a major site or scene group, but I’m not sure I really agree with much else you’ve written here. In particular:
The people making those posts have minimal exposure to piracy. This is getting your feet wet. For me, contributing my share is saying that I think these users deserve access. Yeah, they wouldn’t have a place on a private tracker, that’s not a problem because they’re not on a private tracker, and if they join one they won’t stay for long if they neglect seeding.
I’m sure a lot of these people will continue their lives without seeding or contributing. I won’t say I endorse that, but I’m cool with it, and even if I wasn’t I still don’t think an argument can made that the harms of any hypothetical injustice here outweigh the benefits from a single dedicated pirate that began their journey this way.
I care about uploader counts, about seeder counts, about the wellbeing of the people who maintain the infrastructure. I’m invested. I don’t care about download counts. Looking at an unseeded download as a loss in seeder count makes exactly the same amount of sense to me as looking at a download as a lost sale. I think it’s morally right to support pirates who will not end up contributing, and beyond that I think treating them with kindness a net plus for the cause, because less than 100% of them will just say “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
To complete if you share back and join or multiple private trackers you can get all latest contents.
The best pirates are librarians with legit ethics.
Preserve human knowledge and make it available to everyone.
I hate that you are right about mostly just greedy dipshits pissing in the high seas without contributing.
We should have taken up arms after Aaron Swartz…
I remember learning the whole torrenting process after years of irc, newsgroups and p2p clients. It took a bit of time but, man, was I passionate about dumping everything I could on to SuprNova way back.
Anymore, I only package and share on private trackers, its just too much of a risk to seed out to public ones. And being completely honest, the majority of my dl’s are coming from newsgroups again. It’s just a simpler process and I don’t feel the leech anxiety.
That said, I also keep an eye out for requests and try to fill bounties whenever I can.
I remember having a torrent client set up was a great way to become popular back in 2010
Now do generation Alpha :]
We know how to torrent mate we aren’t dumb
I see a lot of Millennials using G-drive instead of torrent, actually.
Yeah, Google Drive is huge because it just works and millennials are more comfortable going to a Google owned platform than doing something that seems sketchier.
Phones (and tablets) changed the way people use devices. It’s neither better or worse imo, I use both methods.
the only people who know how to torrent are the ones that want to learn. the learning curve is gentler than a walk-in shower. I’ve shown people of all ages and all tech backgrounds, though recommending VPN connections and getting that going does throw a few.
anyway, it’s so easy, it’s crazy compared to the old days of usenet, ZIP disks, ftp sites, .is files, and sequenced RAR files. this is the golden age of piracy and I love it.
What’s there to learn? You just simply download a client, go into thepiratebay (if it still exists, dunno, havent torrented a thing for like 10 years), click download and wait.
thepiratebay still exists but is regarded as untrustworthy and infested with malware. I’d say knowing you’re getting something from a trustworthy source is harder than it used to be.
It is more difficult than a few years ago, especially if you don’t want to get sued or get a threatening letter from your ISP.
I would only torrent with a VPN and a private tracker. It’s certainly not difficult to learn, but absolutely requires some small amount of information to acquire.
And these days magnet links are everywhere, making it even a little simpler
The tools were annoying but the process wasn’t very hard. Unprotected FTPs were pretty common early on and IRC download bots were around before torrenting. Sharing applications like Kazaa, Scour, Limewire, and Napster were super simple. There were fewer roadblocks. I wouldn’t want to explain to someone how to get a private invite, understand the trackers rules, and ensure they do not get VPN leaks.
Zoomer here. The problem is really much worse than the meme suggests, and it isn’t really a generational gap at all.
The computer power user is a dying breed.
Today’s average computer user on windows, macos, or (heaven forbid) chromeos, knows nothing about software. They don’t even know what software is. They can’t install a program except through an app store. If you ask them which browser they use, they’ll probably say “google.” Furthermore, many perfectly functional people don’t use any computer except their phone.
The tendency toward user-friendly systems is fundamentally a good thing, in my opinion. It has advanced the democratisation of computing and its advantages. But on the flip side, it has left a huge swath of the general public totally reliant on systems they neither control nor understand in the slightest.
I use Arch, btw. I put my own computer together - I bought and assembled the hardware components, I performed a minimal, headless installation of my operating system, and I meticulously scripted every personalisation of my window manager (I use dwm).
To me, computing comes easily, as second nature. I used so many systems from such a young age that I simply intuit the design language of user interfaces, whether I’ve used them or not. To me, they seem painstakingly designed to make this easy. Yet, because of my computer literacy, I am often called upon as tech support for my family and friends, from zoomers to boomers, and most of them seem like helpless infants when it comes to technology.
This is because the average user doesn’t have to know or care what their system really does or how it really works. So, by the path of least resistance, a user learns the bare minimum to get what they want from their system. I’m not sure of anything that could change this reality.
As I said, it’s not a bad thing that most of the population can now access the advantages computing delivers. But I do see this state of affairs as brittle and concerning, where people depend utterly on software they don’t understand. This is often propriety software made by profit-driven corporations. The average user doesn’t know or care that they don’t actually control their software - because they don’t need to. They don’t know or care that their data is being tracked and sold, that their computer will update itself without permission or install programs they can’t vet, and that alternatives to this exist.
FR, younger generations don’t have to fix anything / solve any problems on their PC; any problem they’re likely to run into is an abstracted error within Google Docs, within their browser.
Not exactly, first of all, this is pretty divisive which I dislike, a lot of late Gen z can and has torrented and used ddl sites. It’s early Gen z and Gen alpha that is hopeless.
lol, you point out how this is divisive and then proceed to divide Gen Z into late and early cohorts.
Oh wait
Honestly as a German, torrenting seems to be way too risky. Internet providers will immediately cave when they are contacted about an IP adress they control and there are multiple law firms whose only business model seems to be sending out c&d letters.
Hats off for our poor German friends. It’s definitely not easy over there, but if you do the private torrent tracker + VPN combo, you can be relatively safe.
Rightsholders have seeders sitting in public torrents to grab IPs to sue about. Private trackers are essentially a “club” that only invites known users, (friends of friends) and as such, fewer (not zero) rightsholders are able to join, and as such, fewer instances of being referred to a lawfirm simply because there isn’t anyone in the swarm who is a rightsholder who only wants your IP… because they don’t invite those kind of people most of the time.
Rightsholders like how hanging fruit like public torrents. Private trackers help take a lot of the stress away.
However, I don’t know how it works in Germany so maybe rightsholders over there are more zealous.
Do you not have a VPN?
VPN?
In Canada, they can send those letters but not much else.
In Germany, those letters come with a fine, which they can sue you over, if you don’t pay.
Yikes :( that’s brutal. You could use a seedbox and encryption? I think that would mostly circumvent that issue. If storing it locally isn’t a concern, then just hosting it on the seedbox and connecting services like Plex to it works as well.
as a high schooler with a special interest in computers, it’s genuinely surprising how poor most of my peers computers skills are. most of my peers don’t even know the very basics of folder structures.
also unrelated, let’s all love lain
I just watched lain some weeks ago without knowing what I have let me into 😂 got pretty confused, but I think in the end I got it. Probably…
that’s basically how I felt after as well, it’s such a confusing but interesting series. I want to rewatch it though after really starting to grasp it, it’s such intriguing show
I’ve tried watching it about 5 times and get to different points before I burn out.
It has sparked an interest in the works of R.D. Laing for who Lain is named in reference to.
A Psychologist who was active in the 60’s and is famous for their work with schizophrenics; I’ve been curious if their work may give a bit more context to understand Serial Experiments Lain
It is funny, up until really far you think you have lost it, and than at the and you be like, oh yes, I got it somehow, kinda😁
Directory?
Don’t both Windows and MacOS call it folders, and Linux calls it directories?
Directories predate them however per Windows a directory is a type of folder that points to a location on the file system - a list of network printers are a folder but not a directory
fair. Thank you for the correction ILikeBoobies
Twenty years ago when I was 13, I started doing web stuff. This was back when everything was super simple, so everything to get a webserver up was super manual. I’ll mention port forwarding at my current job and there’s this slice of people that are 28-40 years old that know what I’m talking about.
I love doing homelab stuff! it seems like at my school either you don’t know what a port is, or you actively maintain 3 web servers (the latter being the significant minority, with a total of like 3 of us)
I’m slightly younger than that even, currently finishing up my master’s but have been working as a backend dev for a couple of years.
I’ve learned an order of magnitude more about networking from just being in the vicinity of my girlfriend (who is a network technician) than from uni, and it’s definitely already paying off.
When I spent a few years teaching in the local school, one thing I taught was a class on Design and 3D printing. The VERY first thing I always had to teach was “how to use a mouse” before I could even begin to start teaching CAD modeling.
I swear, smart phones and touch screens are a curse and pox on humanity.
I blame google for the demise of well-organized folders. Their approach to email was “chuck it all in one big folder named Archive, and you can search for it using keywords that you will definitely remember when you need to find it again!”
It’s a useful tool, but paved the way for the current state of affairs where people get overwhelmed by their email because they have 150,000 unread emails in their inbox and as a result, don’t read an email until you tell them the entire contents of their email via the inferior messaging platform known as texting.
Idk. I blame Apple, and Android hasn’t done much to really bolster the need for file folders (not a bad thing, just lack of opportunity for learning).
But Apple actively prohibits its user base from engaging with folders, and has been for well over a decade - plenty long enough for my (millennial) generation to phase it out and for the generations after to never need them in the first place. Plus, emails aren’t dependent on file paths, whereas systems file paths are completely necessary.
Wait, with no folders how does apple deal with files these days? I’m a lifelong pc person so I have no idea
As a user you can’t access the filesystem. It’s completely abstracted away. At least this was the case for the iPhone 6
You may as well have asked this question in 2012 because it’s exactly the same as it was back then, except now there is iCloud. Which in some ways is impressive.
Folders are generic labels, Photos, Documents, Downloads, and within those there is folder structure, but I’ve never seen any Apple user actually utilize them beyond the most basic organizational functions (and even that is not common). Granted, my demographic for the past couple years has been the elderly, but before that I worked with kids and it was basically the same.
If you use Apple products, you don’t need folder structures because you can’t take files off your device easily, it basically has to go through some form of cloud upload, if not iCloud then Google Drive. And you don’t need folder structures for the same reason, cause why are you adding files to your device from somewhere that isn’t iCloud?
This is only like 95% facetious, it’s actually ridiculous how closed off Apple makes their products. By default when you make a spreadsheet with Apple’s software it exports as a .pages file, instead of the actually useful .xls. This is for every. Single. Program. Word files, PowerPoint files, I’m sure there’s even a PDF specific Apple file format.
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I was more talking about their mobile devices, the iPods, iPhones, iPads, I should have made that more clear.
Even so, that doesn’t change the fact that Apple does actively prohibits users from accessing files/folders within the system, computers included. For something as basic as the Library folder to be hidden is just a little ridiculous.
It’s not hating on Apple to call out ridiculous things, and none of this is facetious. Unless you are a developer of some kind, having this hidden away in some ways is good for users who might break things. It just happens to make it difficult for anyone else who wants to have control over their computer.
Those inbox ignorers are monsters. My inbox is my todo list and if it has a scroll bar I get anxious.
(I’m totally with you though)
I could swear there was a wildly similar version of this particular comic that was even more on point with reference to assembly call codes.
there is, I tried to find it but I can’t seem to. there’s lots of versions of it for different interests, I love xkcd
lol I love that xkcd, but yes it absolutely applies
No most millennials are also too lazy because they stopped giving a shit about computers when it stopped being a requirement to use the internet like 10-15 years ago because smartphones.
Most who did haven’t in at least a decade, and wouldn’t unless you put a gun to their head.
For some reason the vast majority of people seem to just want to ignore the machines that literally run our society, and its fucking maddening.
FFS the amount of people who I work with in IT and even then don’t really give a shit about their daily computing is absolutely fucking baffling.
Its really just a smattering of people from all ages who actually know how to use a computer because they’re actually interested in doing so.
I’m in this comment, and I don’t like it. I still fix “computers” for a living, but when I get home, most days, the last tech I want to interact with is anything more complex than my phone.
Which is actually extremely complex…
Edit: the phone not the interaction
I almost clarified “in external form”, but you’ve really hit the nail on the head.
Unless they’re interacting with a landline.
Which, to be fair, is still pretty complex.
I like to think I know how to use a computer, but I mostly use my phone for private stuff. I have a few things running on my PC, but they’re all online now in my local network and they have a mobile website through which I interact with them. Even my TV runs a frontend for things on my computer. Computer stuff has become an even broader spectrum of devices and skills than it used to be 20 years ago.
As part of Gen Z I do not approve this message. When I was young I would stream movies from stream sites (to be fair I had no money to have VPN to torrent etc) but I have not visited one of those for like 5 years now since I learned more. Now not all gen Z is tech smart I see it in my friends and family members close to me age who are… Dumb and worse they don’t care to get better and think it’s fine and that is what the problem is imo.
i don’t get this ‘generation gap’ thing. There are also Milennials who are just as clueless.
You can always dive into the whole private tracker, sonarr/radarr + media server setup if you want superior quality or just to host your own files. But if you are happy with what streaming sites/apps provide that is fine too.
I for one am glad that piracy is easily accessible by anyone who has access to the internet.
I’m an older GenZ born in the late 90s and I’ve had to show a few younger peers how to torrent recently.
The idea of you needing a “special” program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
One other thing I’ve noticed, People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices. Which its good people give at least a bit of a shit about security but convincing people Firefox isn’t a virus gets a bit annoying (Yes I’ve had that conversation).
Just call it an “app,” that’ll shut 'em up.
I see this as a natural byproduct of Google, Apple, et al. “Walled Garden”
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of. Granted Apple is far more on the latter side than Google but even Google fought tooth and nail to keep Epic from having their own store.
I don’t interact much with people who are younger than me but I feel like the age of tinkering might not be as strong with them as it was for me. PCs were the predominant form factor and you could literally take it apart and put it back together with just a screwdriver. You can’t do that with laptops or phones at least not without a lot of other specialized tools. This isn’t their fault either since device manufacturers have really tried to make it difficult to do anything that they don’t control.
Hell chrome is the best example of this. Google, whose business is selling your personal data for ads, is preventing the use of ad blockers. Firefox is mostly developed by Mozilla with a small handful of volunteers. It’s already showing signs of enshittification. We don’t have a viable third option.
It will only be a matter of time before these tech companies start having brain drains due to their own greed.
Not just that, I remember when app stores were new and people clamoured to be on them AND those app makers would often move to ONLY being on the app store, with anything downloaded off-store being a scam
So a lot of people grew up to use these devices at a time where downloading something off the web was more likely than not to be malware, giving them the ick on the idea as a whole
Fuck, I’m from the time a bit before all of that and even I have a goddamn hard time downloading shit that’s available off-store on someone’s website out of pure paranoia from those days
i remember not using firefox for a rlly long time bc i heard it’s ram usage with multiple tabs open was a lot less efficient than other browsers. idk if that’s true but i use firefox w 4 windows with 20+ tabs each and have never had a problem
this may still be true, we just tend to have more RAM nowadays
ah makes sense. i also have a pretty big swap file so i think that helps a bit when im doing other ram intensive stuff
It’s not true currently. Firefox and Chrome trade blows on which is more performance and which uses more/less RAM these days. It varies, but they’re quite close.
I currently have 130+ tabs open in Firefox and 90+ in Chrome in addition to some other programs open and running (libreOffice, vpn, and others) Everything is working fine on my old laptop with an i5 processor and 16G ram and windows 10, ssd hd
I can’t really game on this, and trying to run a virtual machine is a slog.
But VS Code, database, xshell, calibre, audacity, photopea, even basic video editing all run fine. Granted I usually do one project at a time, so I’m not using VS Code and editing videos at the same time.
The browser tabs are usually always open. Oh, and I actually just cleaned up my tabs. There were a lot more…
I feel like the memory issues are mostly worked out now for most of us.
For awhile Firefox’s JavaScript engine used more memory, but those gaps have been mostly filled.
I feel like we also got a new kind of guy, the tech-forward digital illiterate. They run most of everything.
FTFY
EDIT:
Many of my Gen-X colleagues in tech (looking at you Stanford alumni) have been really into making sure their kids got into math, science and tech from an early age. So I think tech is going to be like medicine or law. Households with one or two parents in tech are more likely to produce tech savvy children by default. Everyone else will require effort.
Why can’t browsers treat torrents as just another protocol for downloads, so that if you haven’t got a default set for torrent out magnet mimetypes, it just downloads it in the included download manager?
I’m sure they probably could but they don’t really have the incentive to add support for them.
Brave does I think. I didn’t allow it to do so the one time I saw the pop up and I would not want that to happen unless I was always behind a VPN.
i think brave browser for the desktop does that but i’m not sure since i switched to firefox a long time ago.
Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.
The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn’t really connected with the browser’s main responsibility, which is browsing the web.
Just because torrents come from the web shouldn’t make it the browser’s responsibility to deal with them.
I think pocket and quite the slew of unrelated features disagrees with you. Seems like most browsers are happy to be the everything app.
You just reminded me there actually was a browser called Torch that could download torrents like a normal download. It was basically just Chrome with a built-in torrent client.
I remember trying it out when it first came out in 2012. It never caught on and looks like the last release was in 2020.
Opera had torrent support at the time I stopped using it, I never heard they had discontinued that feature but I’m assuming they did, both because it probably would have been mentioned in this comment chain already and also because making that decision should have been inevitable. I never used bittorrent before joining oink, I think I remember on joining thinking I would just use opera and then installing utorrent after finding out client whitelisting was a thing. Maybe I was already on oink when opera added the feature and I thought I’d try it because I was already using opera. Maybe this is all a fever dream, who can really say.
This would be terrible, because any website could potentially make you a seeder for „illegal“ content while normally browsing the web without a VPN. Meaning, your real IP address may accidentally be recorded by some lawerers and you’ll get a fine for whatever you accidentally shared (very dangerous, depending on country).
There are already solutions for webtorrents, but at least these scripts can be blocked.
No Herr officer, I was just trying to download my favorite distros, and I don’t know where all that Metallica/Disney/Nintendo came from.
While I appreciate the reference, most kids probably don’t know about the whole Metallica Napster thing.
Stuff got too easy to really have to delve into a deeper understanding, most of the time, now. No jumpers, no dip switches, no pre-loading drivers or plugs that can be plugged into places they shouldn’t get plugged into. Everything is color coded and plug n play. You don’t have to dive in and assign com ports or anything.
I learned as I went because I wanted to get shit to work and that took a lot of educating to get there. Now, most of the time the situation doesn’t come up, so that deeper understanding is a building block that just got skipped over. The offshoot is that when the more rare occasion arises that a deeper understanding is required, it’s usually got a person way behind the 8 ball to be able to recognize and fix the issue.