• Decreased performance, as DRM is often hooked deep into event loops and adds non-negligible overhead.
• Decreased privacy, as DRM often requires pinging an external server constantly.
• Decreased security, as DRM is a black-box blob intentionally meant to be difficult to peer in to, and has been the target of attacks such as code execution vulnerabilities before.
• If you own a game but don’t have an active internet connection, DRM may prevent you from playing the game.
• If you own a game but have multiple computers, DRM may force you to buy multiple licenses when you’re only using one copy at a time (c.f., a physical CD with the game on it).
• Eventually, a DRM company is going to go out of business or stop supporting old versions of their software; if you want to play an old game that had that DRM, you won’t be able to even if you own the game.
• &c.

DRM exists to "protect’ the software developer, i.e. protect profits by making sure every copy has been paid for and to force people to buy multiple copies in certain cases. DRM never has and never will be for your (the consumer’s) benefit.

ISPs coming out and bothering you cause you pirate stuff? Never heard of it.

You must have the distinct privilege of not living in the USA or several other Western countries.

I’d jump ship immediately if I got one such letter.

If you mean jump ship off that ISP, there’s nothing you can do. You can go to another ISP (if there even is one in your area), who will do the exact same thing. You can jump ship entirely and not have internet, I guess.

Mullvad does not allow port forwarding.

They announced on May 29th that they would not allow new port forwarding. On July 1st, all existing port forwarding was disabled. Since then, Mullvad no longer allows port forwarding.

In hindsight, yes. But there was no indiciation ahead of time that this situation would happen or was likely to happen. In fact, there was no more reason to believe a free ccTLD was any more likely than a paid ccTLD to cause a problem. The problem arises because a ccTLD’s host country can choose to remove any domain it wants, paid or not. One could argue that using a ccTLD at all was a mistake, but you’d have to look at precedent for ccTLD’s country’s doing this and see if it happens often or not.

Silence trimming is something you need to be careful of. If you listen to any comedy podcasts or storytelling, silence (pauses) have meaning and value. If you just listen to news or talk podcasts, its pretty nice to have. I have it turned on or off for selected podcasts, and it tells me it’s trimmed over 1 full day of silence from my listening.

They’re lucky their content is high quality because god damn the pre-roll and inline ads are always absolute fucking garbage. I know the show host doesn’t control what ads the network uses, but they’ve literlly had USA military recruiting ads on their show, which is peak irony.

I’ve set my podcast player to skip the first X seconds to get past the pre-roll, and my finger is trained to skip-forward through the ads, but some automated system would make life a lot easier (and listening to Behind the Bastards more enjoyable).

Oh that’s interesting. That makes sense. Like I said I’m using the Kindle 4 from 2011 and it has a slightly different form factor and no way to use a magnetic case.

Huh. Yeah that must be a thing with newer models. Mine doesn’t have any magnets, and its not in a shape a case would even make sense. I do press a button to dismiss the “screensaver” (the thing that keeps you from accidentaly turning pages with side buttons when not in use), but I don’t see an ad on that screensaver. It’s pencils laying on a book, and has been for about a decade now.

Dynamic ad length wouldn’t be an issue for chapter markers, or “tone delimited” podcasts (the first two categories). It would only be a problem for the third category, which is already the more difficult of the three.

There seem to be three categories for how podcasts deal with ad spots.

Some podcasts mark their ads inline by using Chapter Markers. For example, ATP marks its ads by putting them in a new chapter with a name like “Ad: X”. In theory, you could have a player that skips any chapter who’s name begins with "Ad: ", though I don’t know of any existing apps that do that. Unfortunately, the number of podcasts using chapter markers seems to be a small portion of the podcasts I listen to, so this wouldn’t be very useful.

Another method that could work on some podcasts that don’t use chapter markers is identifying a delineating tone. Using ATP as an example again, every ad spot starts with the same jingle, and ends with the same jingle. In theory, an app could skip the delineated sections. Mind you, this would require work from the user to set up (or it could be crowdsourced): you would have to tell the app what specific sound snippet delineates the ad read. Luckily, many podcasts seem to be structured in this way, with a clear audio cue to delineate ad spots.

Then, you have really free-form podcasts where the hosts may just say, in everyday speech, something like “time for ads”, and the ads will insert. Sometimes it’s always the same phrase (e.g., the use of the phrase “the money zone” on MBMBAM), but that’s not always the case (e.g., there is seemingly no consistent verbiage in the Aunty Donna Podcast). This category is the most difficult to deal with.

In summary, I don’t know of any existing apps that enable skipping ads for any of these three categories. Of the three categories, one is very easy to implement, one less easy, and one quite difficult. All potential solutions would require a shared/crowd-sourced database of which category each podcast falls into, at the least.

I don’t follow. When you say magnetic cover, do you mean some of the newer models? Also, what does pressing the button to unlock it do? Does that turn on wifi or something? I have to press a button to turn my Kindle 4 “on” (aka remove the screensaver and show my book) but that doesn’t cause an issue.

I have a Kindle paperwhite without ads, worth paying extra imo.

Pro tip: if you leave off wifi for long enough, the ads seem to expire and they’re permanently replaced by some generic pencils image or something. And, since having wifi on can cause the kindle to overwrite your cover images, I sync with calibre over USB anyway. I have the ad-supported Kindle 4 from 2011 and haven’t had ads on it since 2012.

I’m not sure why people use anything other than Windows Defender. It literally shares signature databases with most of the large AVs, it doesn’t have any anti-features or isn’t itself malware/adware/spyware like commercial AVs, it’s tightly integrated but also easy to turn on or off (ever tried to uninstall an AV?), and no commercial AV is going to catch anything Windows Defender won’t. It’s also free and has no need to make money as a product in itself, and so there’s no motivation for bad behavior.

The only features some commercial AVs have that Windows Defender doesn’t are things like DNS blocking or browser addons (which there are plenty of non-commercial/profit-motive-driven options for: uBlock origin, pi-hole/adguard home, etc).

You can tell malwarebytes is broken because it doesn’t catch itself as malware.

Hmm fair enough. I suppose by looking at the encoding and container formats I can probably narrow it down to a couple choices for each one.

Awesome thank you so much. I’m glad it is going to be easy to fix then.

Now, one thing I’m not sure of is: how do I find the exact torrent to use? By now there’s no way I have a magnet link or torrent file, and due to file renaming for my media library I doubt I’d be able to identify an exact release anyway.

Oh cool! I had considered that as maybe being an option but I wasn’t sure if it would actually work or not. I can’t afford a VPN right now so I wasn’t going to try, I figured I’d go ahead and ask so when I can get one running I can jump right in.

Now, will it know the difference between “missing” and “corrupt”?

Pharmaceuticals is about the worst example you could pick to make a point. It’s notorious for socializing the cost and privatizing the profit (not to mention the ethics of price gouging life saving medication treatments).

Here’s what Johnson&Johnson is doing right now with a TB drug whose development was paid largely with public funding:

The pill, called bedaquiline, was first approved in 2012 as the first new TB drug in over 40 years and revolutionized treatment for drug-resistant infections. But its relatively high cost limited access in many low- and middle-income countries hit hardest by an epidemic that still kills around 1.5 million people every year, most of them among the world’s poorest. The company initially charged $900 per course in low-income countries, according to a 2016 report, but gradually lowered it to $340 three years ago.

The secondary patent particularly irked some advocates because the drug’s development was largely underwritten by public funds, according to a 2020 analysis. That study found public sector funds contributed $455 million to $747 million to getting bedaquiline to market, compared to $90 million to $240 million from J&J.

Yes. Go to their user page by clicking on their name, and click the Block User button.

Alternatively, you can go in to your User Settings page, and in the Blocks tab, you can search for users (and communities).

Ah interesting. That is unfortunate.

Isn’t there another person who knows how, but just restricts themselves to very specific games? I wonder if there’s any way to convince them to help replace the too-far-gone Empress. I understand they probably also don’t want to just make the cracking info public, as it would presumably just accelerate the cat-and-mouse game, but perhaps they could be convinced to help bring a new person up to speed? I wonder if they could be convinced by donations to mentor an Empress replacement?

Well I’m sorry you can’t fathom that there is potential future value in old games. I even said that we can’t know the future value of something like this, so the safest thing to do is to just preserve them as well as we can.

Do you disagree with all of the explicit examples of ways it can be valuable that I laid out? Or do you simply want to assert the games are “meaningless” and ignore every way in which value can still be derived, or could be derived in the future, from them?

I suspect you haven’t actually thought this through and are just being antagonistic for fun; that’s how it comes off, anyway.

So why should the Library of Congress exist? Why should the Internet Archive exist?

“They’re books, who gives a shit. Most things are lost over time.” “They’re web pages, who gives a shit. Most things are lost over time.”

There’s value in record-keeping. People can analyze it on a technical perspective (like a literary analysis). People can enjoy old games (like reading a book from the 1500s). People can analyze trends in the industry. There are endless reasons why record-keeping could be useful, and you can never plan for all of them ahead of time.

Jesus, that’s a rough read. What a horrible person.

Yes, I deleted my comment after I checked the command line I was using and testing it out. The CPU usage was because I was using the --audio-format flag with something other than m4a/opus or whatever it is that youtube uses natively. And the file I saw on disk was not the video, it was the audio file in youtube’s native format.

For reference, I’m using $ytdl -f "bestaudio/best" -ciw -o "$audioroot/%(title)s (%(upload_date>%Y-%m-%d)s).%(ext)s" --extract-audio --audio-quality 0 --audio-format mp3 "$vidurl".

From my use of this, it downloads a video and extracts the audio stream from it. In fact, you can see this as it leaves the video file on disk while it’s extracting the audio, and the audio-extraction process uses a decent amount of cpu (takes a few minutes for long concert sets on my raspberry pi). AFAICT, there’s no way to only download the audio without incurring the unnecessary bandwidth and CPU usage.

Edit: I just checked and the CPU usage seems to be coming from the fact that I am asking yt-dlp to convert the audio format. Now I’m questioning whether it is actually the video that I’ve seen temporarily on disk or just the audio file in the youtube-native format.