I don’t even watch Anime but I still get bummed when news like this hits.

The one caveat to building is if you build a PC and a single component is faulty, you are now responsible for determining which component is to get the RMA done. That can be a big hassle. One time for me it was actually two different components that needed to be replaced by the manufacturers, and that was a pain to figure out.

I have about 24TB, lots of stuff backed up over many years, and not all of it pirated. In making backups over such a long period of time, I’ve actually managed to make redundant backups, so a recent project of mine is to just go to my NAS and organize, consolidate, and otherwise delete things I don’t actually wish to keep. I’ve saved a couple TBs and I hope to free up a few more TBs.

And they lived happily ever after. The end.

Due to this it also means that ripping 4K and Blu-ray discs also are breaking a DRM which means you are legally not allowed to make a digital copy of movies that you own. Which directly contradicts the intent of these laws.

Yes, this has been a long-standing point of stupidity in my mind. It’s clearly inconsistent.

I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me when it comes to legal cases you want as many facts stacked in your favor as possible, and as few facts stacked against your favor as is possible. Because at the end of the day some jury or judge will decide one way or another, based on facts and prejudices.

It was bewildering to me in the moment that when TOTK was leaked that they didn’t restrict themselves from working on the emu to handle TOTK. It was some nod and wink “breath of the wild” improvements coming in all of a sudden.

Like… for real? If I were the project lead I would’ve banned discussion and development about it until after launch. And part of the legal filing from Nintendo is that Yuzu’s own telemetry shows that Yuzu devs must be aware of piracy because they can see games being played on the emulator pre-launch. Make of that what you will.

🫡 🫡

I wish there could be good, honest transparency on these figures. Figuring out which streaming service actually best funds musicians is almost like playing with a Ouija board.

I remember people giving Spotify shit for increasing their monthly price from 10 to 11. It was the first price hike in over a decade. That doesn’t seem devastating or bad or wrong.

Compare it to something like Disney plus and how drastically they increased the price since service introduction

You better watch out.
You better not try
To pirate movies I’m telling you why
Motivated rights holder’s coming to town

He sees what you’ve been viewing
He knows when you’re online
He knows if you’ve been sharing movies
So use a vpn for goodness sake!

did i hit a nerve with disney adults, or something?

I’m just curious, did you downvote me for some reason? Or was that another onlooker?

Because the service is now 75% more expensive than what it cost when introduced only four years ago.

Bobby Kotick’s alt account?

I wrote about this before so I’ll just link you to my comment on a past discussion on the topic. https://lemmy.ml/comment/2128815

There are a range of viewpoints on this topic in that thread, too.

In my view if it is from an indie I will try to pay for it. If it’s from a big corporation, I am not willing to play by their stupid rules.

Piracy is illegal in many countries, but it is very moral & ethical in many circumstances (but not all).

This is why I’m fundamentally opposed to what the coreutils rewritten in Rust project is doing. And the guy who started it just claims that he’s not interested in the license or legal stuff, he just picked MIT. I mean, maybe he really doesn’t for all I know, but he can certainly imagine the implications of what he’s doing, no? Personally, I don’t believe him.

This FSF guy might sound like he’s coming in to be a scold but he’s absolutely correct (https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues/1781). We can clearly see the implications of an essential (coreutils) MIT-licensed project like in Android where it is “Linux” strictly speaking, in that it uses the kernel, but every other piece of code is some form of MIT or BSD licensed software that allows Google to, rather successfully, jail its users.

Edit: And if you want to do some reading about how this argument over licenses formed, especially with a PR campaign to support the non-GPL style ones, check out the first half of this piece about Tim O’Reilly (as in the O’Reilly books guy) https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler

Song of the South does whitewash being black in the USA, but it is set in post-civil war America, so superficially it does not need to handle the slavery topic, which can be dismissed as having been dealt with already.

Ok but then how will my kids record company benefit into perpetuity?

In all seriousness, I think copyright law is the best example of how captured our government is to large corporate interests.

Great way to put it

No disagreement about the privacy of services and getting what you paid for. But I’d like to pay commensurate to the use of the service. I was ABOUT TO say Tutanota can get you secure email for $1/mo (which fits much better with how much I actually use email), but I double checked and apparently they had a recent price hike. That’s just how it goes, I suppose.

Proton as a package is nice. If you immerse yourself into their ecosystem (email, drive, pass, vpn) you can get a lot of value from that $10/mo.

I had to unsubscribe from them after using them for some years because they just won’t bring feature parity to the Linux VPN client. I know they don’t have permanent, fixed port forwarding on the Windows client, but the fact that they still haven’t brought that feature to Linux is a big 🙄 for me.

The other thing is I’d be cautious about being dependent on any service where if you decide it isn’t bringing you as much value as you pay for, but you invested in certain extra features that are paid-only. In my case I had a secondary email handle (one that didn’t just have my full name in it, so I can sign up for stuff anonymously). Well, after coming to grips with the fact that I don’t want the VPN anymore, and that I don’t want to pay $4/mo just to send one email a week and receive a few that are only confirmations, that second address can no longer send/receive. I had to move every account into secondary free proton email before my term ended.

I’m not saying there’s anything nefarious about using a paid feature and then losing it. I am just saying be cautious about it and understand what you get yourself info when starting a subscription that you may depend on.

edit: this is advice directed generally, not specifically to the person I’m responding to who merely inspired me to comment

Safari content blockers don’t cover the entire phone like the OP was asking about.

You can’t do better than that on iOS. But the PiHole still goes a long way. It made web browsing from my phone tolerable when combined with the content blockers from Firefox Focus.

There are archives of all the rarbg magnet links. I still use them to successfully find stuff. As long as those links are out there it is still possible to help people out.

When rarbg went down I immediately went and for any torrent I still had loaded in my client I quadrupled my normal ratio (3.5 -> 12.00). Then I also just increased my ratio generally.

I wish I had more disk space to keep things going even longer, but I really gotta cycle stuff out unfortunately.

I had this experience when while I was playing Bioshock Remastered on Steam, 2K Games in their grand wisdom decided to “update” the game after 5 years of neglect. Oh, did they fix remaining bugs or other outstanding technical problems with the game? No. Of course not. They dropped a “Quality of Life Update” to force a 2K games launcher, which immediately made the game unplayable for me because I couldn’t get the game to launch anymore. The irony.

So anyway, I had to pirate the game I bought and transfer my saves to finish playing.

IMO pirating media from anybody but indies is moral, correct, and good. The big companies have trade representation and lobbyists which they use to push their insane copyright agenda. Consider the Mickey Mouse act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act which extends copyright to such an absurd term, only corporate lawyers could have devised it. Which they did. Disney is a great example, in fact, since much of their media empire relies on adaptations of public domain works which are then copyrighted basically indefinitely. If our copyright laws today were more similar to what copyright laws were back then, we could have a lot more remixes, adaptations, and takes on well known stories and media.

Anyway, by purchasing from these copyright pushing companies I am funding their agenda, which is against sensible patent law and copyright law, and against me. They also promote vile DRM schemes, as their industry pushes ever onward away from personal ownership of anything and toward rent seeking behavior. If it were up to them we would all have tivoized boxes that we not only have to pay rents for, but must also consume ads on. Literally against my own interests to give them money, ever.

It’s too bad that so much of our media is produced by a shrinking number of companies, because pirating their shit isn’t even worthwhile. Most of their garbage is unwatchable slop.

As for any other form of piracy, I consider intellectual property to be mostly bullshit. But I can appreciate the time that goes into creating a work one wishes to sell and having some domain over that for a period of time after initial publication. But like many other things about our world, it’s the stupidest version we have to live with.

P.S. and that’s just one aspect of copyright law. Imagine trying to copyright the fundamental advances of human knowledge and science. God bless Sci-Hub!

That’s exactly right about pirating software that requires you to develop skills with it. Pirating Photoshop or whatever just means you are foreclosing the libre options to yourself in the future as you build up the proprietary ecosystem.

User statistics
All-time upload: 	12.436 TiB
All-time download: 	3.021 TiB
All-time share ratio: 	4.11

That’s starting from about May 1 on one device. There have been and are others, of course. My provider no longer offers port forwarding and that really curtailed the upload part, but I tried to maximize that while I could.

While I do miss what cd dearly, I haven’t been on a private tracker since. I prefer freeing the bits as much as possible for all people, so that means public torrents and trackers.

I have long felt that the computer industry course-corrected with mobile phones. They made a mistake in the early years of computers by letting users do things like install software from unauthorized sources, modify software to run to their liking, or even strip out the operating system and replace it with an alternative. Now we get things like TPM, Pluton, chains of trust, and DRM. 2% (rounding up) to protect users from malicious software tampering, 99% (rounding down) to extract rents from users and to track them for advertising or other purposes.

remember those website that say “oh you are using an ad blocker so disable it to access our site”

I can easily imagine this not being a necessary, anymore. Just let the website using this WEI API automatically disable all browser extensions on a WEI-enabled site. Why not, after all? Why should you dictate the traffic you receive on your computer? Why should you own anything?

Proxmox host. Fedora server vm.

• openvpn as a backup (and because i went through the highly laborious process of setting it up)
• wireguard
• nitter (twitter alternative frontend. makes twitter usable)
• audiobookshelf (podcast manager)
• pihole (block ads by dns)
• nginx for my website and some related website stuff
• Vaultwarden (sometimes. I usually keep it off because I prefer KeepassXC anyway)

The hardware is a 10 year old Thinkpad. I think it’s pretty clear by my software list that I don’t ask it to do much, but it does so much for me. Like, I wouldn’t run Jellyfin off of this thing. In fact my NAS is 4x8TB drives but I keep it mostly shut off. It’s powered on maybe about once or twice a week for a few hours at a time. I try to batch my activity with it. Like “oh, yeah, I want file X but it’s on my NAS. Maybe later, when I have a need for file Y I will turn it on and retrieve both.”

I can achieve everything I want with even lower spec hardware, but this Thinkpad has a faulty trackpad anyway, which is also how I got it for cheap. I have never measured it, but supposedly it consumes around 6W at idle which is low enough for me.

I do this exact same setup but one thing to add to your answer and be aware of is that syncthing is not a backup solution. If you delete the files on one computer, those files will be deleted on the other synced devices. And accidents can happen.

So, as always, take backups.

There’s this program which supposedly will take a PDF and if it’s unsafe make it safe. https://dangerzone.rocks/

I’ve only heard of it today, so I have no idea about its efficacy.

Haha. Is there a demand for that from old timer windows 2.0 users? That stuff is before my time :)

I’d love to but I would dox myself here which I don’t want to do. I’ll say this much: it is a thing where if you have looked for Linux alternatives of the Windows version, there is a small chance you’ve found my code already :)

I’ve got a 60 star project on github. Some people have left some very nice feedback about how useful my code has been for them as a Linux alternative to a Windows program. I’m proud of my little bit of code, even if it hasn’t earned me a single cent (nor do I have expectations for it to)!