southsamurai
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Well, just glancing at it, it isn’t discord. It doesn’t connect to discord servers at all.
What it does is replicate discord, in a way that allows users to still make use of things that discord users are already into. Bots in particular.
So discord won’t have access to anything that goes on at all, unless you’re using something that also connects to discord.
Pop-ups and fake notifications would have more to do with the client you’re using than the back-end would, so if you use a client that does those things, I wouldn’t bet on that changing.
The caveat: I’m no dev of any kind, so I can’t say anything about the actual code, I’m basing this on their own description. I linked the page to my cousin that sometimes will give a quick scan for hinky shit for me, but there’s no telling if or when he’ll do so nd get back to me.
You gotta check torrents, soulseek, and i2p sources. The more obscure something is, the less likely you’ll find it on the one-stop sources.
There’s never any guarantees with any of them, but it you’re patient and willing to check regularly over a few weeks, I find soulseek to be the best bet for the really obscure stuff. The problem is that not everybody that hoards obscure files stays online constantly, so you have to spend the time on finding things before giving up on it.
This particular article and the study it mentions are kinda dubious in conclusion. They just didn’t generate enough data, imo.
But, that’s whatever.
Anyone want some anecdotal shit followed by an opinion? If so, read on. If not, well, don’t.
So, I’m a writer. Not a successful one in the usual sense, but I have a pretty good sized body of work, and I actually have a few fans.
So, I got published years ago, back in the oughts. Didn’t sell for shit. Couldn’t even talk family into buying copies. Total flop, but part of that was the small publisher and lack of support marketing.
So, fast forward to maybe ten years ago? Maybe fifteen, can’t really recall. Point being that I was reworking the old books, writing new stuff, etc. My homie, Spider, wanted to read my stuff, so I just passed him epub versions. Dude moves them into his books folder that grts shared via soulseek.
Now, it was at least a decade since the published books were out. But. A few weeks after he tells me he “fucked up”, I start getting emails from people that actually read my shit, and wanted to read more.
Some of those people actually bought a different book via amazon. I got more sales to pirates than I ever got through normal methods.
My opinion? The zone in which piracy is going to hurt an author is narrow. When you’re small enough, even a 1% conversion of pirates to paying fans is awesome. And, when you’re big enough, even 1% loss of paying customers is a drop in the bucket you’ll never notice.
But somewhere in the middle, there’s a range where the lack of sales that would otherwise happen can be the difference between writing for a living, and not making a living at it.
But I’d still rather piracy exist, because I hold the same philosophy as that game dev that said culture shouldn’t only be available to those who can pay for it. That’s a paraphrase, and I can’t remember the guy’s name. But it’s the same reason I gave copies of my print books to libraries in the area I live. I would rather people be reading, have access to material, than make a little extra.
Fwiw, I barely made enough off of any of the traditional published books, or Amazon sales, to equal about two weeks pay at my job as a CNA. Total, over years lol. I made some damn good money doing custom fiction, and research & reporting back in the day, though.
I watch things fairly often, and so far, I haven’t lost anything that was oop before I could make a copy (which is why I go through them, even if it’s just background noise while I do other things). That’s the flow chart; pick the next one, check to see if it’s still available, if it isn’t either rip it or download it, then watch to verify the physical.
But, thank you very much for looking out :) That’s a genuinely cool thing to do
I avoid hoarding by only grabbing things I know I’ll use. With movies/shows, if I haven’t used it in three months, it goes away. With music, I tend to go in cycles through genres where I’ll be vibing to a given type of music for a month or two, then switch things up. So the cutoff is much longer, years in fact.
But books are a slower thing to begin with. I’m a notoriously fast reader, capable of consuming light fiction at a book and a half to two books a day. Something like the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris, as an example, I can zip through the entire series in under a week if nothing interferes. But even at that speed (which isn’t consistent when there’s heavier material), it would still take years to go through my digital library. Plus, the files are small enough that I don’t have to worry about the space, so they only get deleted if I dislike something new.
The exception to all of that is some classics that I keep around just for the hell of it. Like, I have all the Hitchcock movies, but only watch any given one maybe once in five years. So I still have most of a terabyte of movies that’s as permanent as possible barring redundant storage all failing at once.
Music is similar, especially since most of it is in flac format. There’s some stuff I may not listen to often, but I want to keep immediately available.
Which, believe it or not, isn’t hoarding. I go through things and weed out fairly regularly. It’s just that after a collection is big enough, it takes longer to cycle through and use a given file again. Stuff that’s used isn’t hoarded.
Plenty. Music and books in particular. I’m usually behind on making legit buys, but I treat piracy partially like a library where I can try before I buy.
That isn’t saying I buy everything I pirate, I don’t. But if I like it enough to keep the files, I’ll wait until I find a good sale and eventually get a legit copy in some format.
I also do it in reverse, where I’ll buy something, but pirate a digital copy when it’s more convenient. That’s typically for paper books and music on vinyl. Sometimes I’ll even pirate a copy of a CD if I’m not up to dealing with the ripping (disability means I don’t always have stamina for everything, so stuff like ripping a cd is low priority).
Does this really bother folks that much? I’ve never cared much about this kind of leeching as long as it isn’t dominating my personal bandwidth. And it never has so far, though I have to admit my 4ish tb of movies isn’t exactly high demand stuff, so I don’t usually have more than one or two at a time being leeched.
Hell, I don’t really care much about leeches anyway, as long as the overall ability to find things is still there. I look at it as the price of the freedom of torrents. There’s always going to be higher demand for data than there are people with the resources/time/willingness to seed heavily. I’m okay with that because I don’t really want to have to keep and seed every fucking thing out there, it would take much more storage than I can afford to be able to keep a ratio on most private trackers since I tend not to keep shit I don’t intend to watch at least once a year unless it’s something pretty damn obscure.
Yeah, I’ll echo the soulseek suggestion. It’s trivial to find anything but the most obscure stuff, and even that’s possible. I have something like 4tb of total shared files, of which about 2tb is music, almost all in flac format, with acceptable tagging standards. And I’m a lightweight on soulseek.
Throw in musicbrainz to flesh out the tags, and you’re good to go.
Just be sure to share some of your stuff back, and you’re set. There are people that won’t let you download from them unless you’re sharing, so it matters.
Ahhh, no, no they didn’t.
If you read the text, rather than just the title, OP says that the movies over LAN via wifi are free, and then goes on to say that you get access for 8 bucks.
The relevant section :
Southwest doesn’t have traditional In-flight entertainment, instead offering movies and shows through a local LAN server on their WiFi for free. To get Internet access you load the site and pay $8usd using a CC, and then they’ll unblock your device from the WAN.
That’s pretty much where I am. If I was trying to make money as a primary goal, I might be a bit miffed, but then I’d have to deal with deadlines and editors and bullshit, when the truth is that I just want to make stories like I enjoy reading, and hope that letters enjoy it. Hard for that to happen if there’s a wall between readers and the stories
Well, here’s something I learned.
Years and years ago, I got two books in a series published by a tiny imprint that did zero marketing, and I was too noob to do any myself. Didn’t sell shit. Had trouble even getting anyone to read the damn things.
Years pass. I get disabled, and make new friends. One of them asks to read the shit, so I send him some epub files I made for my own use.
He, being the awesome fucktard he is,promptly puts copies in his book folder. Which is one of the folders he shares via soulseek.
A few weeks later, I start getting emails from random people asking if the third book is available. My files have my author email in them, so it wasn’t super confusing, but it did take a bit to figure out where the files came from for these strangers.
To date, more people have asked about the third book than ever read the printed version.
Now, would I rather have gotten paid for those reads? Fuck yeah. But, when I sent the small list of interested people a link to the series I’m currently publishing via amazon, maybe ten percent went and bought a copy of the file.
So, despite having had maybe fifty people “steal” my two books, those thefts resulted in sales anyway. Sales that I absolutely would not have gotten from those same people if they hadn’t read and liked the older stuff.
Piracy is not some noble pursuit. But, realistically, it can be an advantage if you’re small enough that it serves as advertising, or big enough that it won’t decrease sales enough to matter monetarily. Mid range “creatives”, though? They’re going to be in a bad spot from it. The conversion from pirated works to sold works is fucking SMALL. It’s small enough that if you’re struggling to make enough income to create full time, you’re fucked because you aren’t going to get serious grass roots awareness pushing sales to bump you up like that. People are going to pirate instead of buying at that popularity level.
But me? I’m fine with it. My old books, I may put up on Amazon at some point, but since I am unlikely to finish the third in the series (which is a long story), I don’t see the point. So, they’re out there, and that makes me happy. Now, maybe once or twice a year, I get a new email. That, for a no name hack like me, is better than the chump change I’ll ever get from Amazon.
Yeah, that’s been a thing for ages. All the way back to tapes being copied because my parents had the best double tape deck out of anyone I knew. Vhs tapes of skinamax (skinemax? Idk how that should be spelled lol) movies, or regular ones being swapped around.
I still swap files in the same way. Well not the same I don’t use magnetic tape lol. But yeah, if someone wants something, and I have it, all I need is something to put it on. Since I have a disc burner, it doesn’t have to be a drive, though they’d need a drive to access anything on a disc, which gets less and less common. I don’t loan out thumb drives to just anyone, but I’ll usually be glad to copy files to theirs. Hell, that’s actually my preferred method for swapping files. It’s faster and less prone to hassles than p2p methods.
Me and my best friend serve as each other’s off site storage too. He keeps a drive with important/hard to replace files with me, and vice versa. When we visit, we’ll swap out with a second drive that’s updated. Ends up with triple redundancy, since there will be the last drive at each other’s, plus the second drive that’s being updated between swaps, as well as the original files on whatever device is the main source. I have another drive like that that I swap out at my sister’s.
Most of those drives we swap aren’t media, though there is some of that, what with hard to find stuff being easier to keep multiple copies of instead of trying to hunt down again. The media files, those are open to copy off, so it’s a form of sneakernet in that regard, rather than only being backups of stuff of our own.