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Cake day: Jun 16, 2023

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I’ve tried to do this a few times, and unfortunately it feels like you really have to go all in on managing your own content library.

Like many, I had stopped pirating shit when netflix etc were “good”.

None of the streaming services want you to use them outside of their official sites/apps, so you end up being limited to like 720p when running them through kodi etc.


Archive has been around for well over a decade with no issues outside of sporadic DMCA claims against user uploaded content. For many many years they have been left alone, despite hosting a shit ton of copyrighted material.

Occasional legal battles that they’ve handled with no problems with the help of the EFF. This is the first “existential threat” to them in quite a long time.

This is absolutely because they pulled the emergency library stunt, and they were loud as hell about it. They literally broke the law and shouted about it.

Libraries are allowed to scan/digitize books they own physically. They are only allowed to lend out as many as they physically own though. Archive knew this and allowed infinite “lend outs”. They even openly acknowledged that this was against the law in their announcement post when they did this.

I can absolutely say this is their own damn fault while disagreeing with the law they broke. There, I just did.


This buries the lede so deep it’s popping out the other side of the globe.

The entire core of this case is that (in abscence of more lenient agreements with publishers) traditional libraries are allowed to digitize physical books in their posession, as long as they do not lend out more copies than they physically own. The Internet Archive decided that they would lend out infinite copies, because “covid lol”.

Boston Public Library isn’t being sued because they don’t lend out more than they own! It has precisely zero to do with fucking optics.

Edit: Don’t get me wrong, I hope they win this case, but them continuing to play stupid helps nobody. Unfortunately, as discussed thoroughly online when they opened the covid19 emergency digital library, they fucked around. Now it seems they may have to find out.


This is the worst kind of misrepresentation of tech. Nothing you said is explicitly false, it sounds true in passing, but it sure is effectively false.

The amount of data you can actually store in any single node/transaction on a given blockchain is traditionally very small. Even most NFTs are not truly “on the chain” as in the image data fully stored in a node/element, it’s instead a “smart contract” which just says X identity owns Y (with Y itself being stored elsewhere). There have been many many attempts at actually storing data on various chains and there hasn’t been any successes significant enough to come even close to being able to store the classic 90’s Space Jam website, let alone the fucking Internet Archive.

Beyond that, you absolutely can take down nodes in a chain, so to speak. Numerous major “heists” have been “rolled back” or had their nodes/transactions flagged to be ignored by marketplace admins.


Exactly. I hate fucking everything about this. I love the internet archive and nearly all they do.

In principal I love their “covid-19 emergency library” or whatever they called it. In practice? They absolutely know better than to pull stunts and I’m terrified that this will spell the end for one of the greatest knowledge and media resources of the modern age. For shit that was effectively already available to the public through ebook piracy sites.

They already operated on shaky ground, hosting downloads for a metric ton of shit that is unquestionably still under copyright (despite their claims to only be archival of things that are not), skating by on technicalities and by not drawing too much attention to themselves.

Plus, there were so fucking many better ways to do the “free digital library” thing without jeapordizing themselves.

  • Have some volunteers “misuse resources”: load an SSD up with the book files, “borrow” some compute power to decrypt/remove drm, pass batches off to existing ebook “dumping” groups to stagger releases and obsfucate the true source. This would ensure that any material they had which was not already available on the high seas would get there.
  • Make a big red banner on the site to a blog post with the generic “While we would never condone piracy or copyright infringement, we understand that times are extremely hard right now [blah blah] here are some links to community guides on how to access learning literature (pirate ebooks) during these trying times [blah blah] Please abide by your local laws.”

Don’t have a direct answer, but have you tried making the same short playlist on each, exporting as json from each, and comparing the files?

JSON isn’t a specific filetype that is interchangable between multiple systems. It’s just a way of organizing data as text. You can open it up in a text editor.

The format that invidious is exporting is for invidious. Invidious won’t have the data in that json file organized in the way that piped expects, which is why it says it’s not valid.

You might be able to reorganize the JSON or rename the property names to match the pattern that piped expects. You’d probably be looking at scripting something yourself though.


You’re better off rotating usernames on a semi-randomized schedule if it really matters to you that much. Is your personal threat model such that you actually need to be concerned about this?

Anyway, OpSec rather than asking others to fix your privacy concerns would be the way to go.


Create separate accounts by topic, with different fake identity details beyond what you made them for. Keep track of each identity’s fake time zone when planning when you post so that no one can figure out what time zone you really are posting from.

Beyond that decide on a lifetime (and “cooloff period” before you make a replacement) for each account using a random number generator.

Most importantly, use various AI tools to obsfucate your typing style and word choice.


This all seems like a shit ton of work to just talk about your hobbies. I sincerely hope you don’t have stalkers this dedicated.


Lol. Minecraft alone proves you wrong. 4chan is where Notch first posted early builds and got feedback.

No argument on it being a cesspool. It is, and has been, for a long long time. But plenty of good stuff happens there too.

/vr/ has unearthed a large amount of formerly lost media (guides, promotional material, entire games! Most of Osamu Sato’s work outside of LSD Dream Emulator had effectively been lost before they got onto it) and is often the spot that leaked stuff drops, like the huge Nintendo leaks a few years ago. The Doom threads there have had a hand in some big, well known mods. It’s arguable that Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart grew out of those threads’ failed Doom Kart project.

/g/s “friendly windows thread” is decidedly unfriendly, but the guides and links in the OP are wonderful resources on how to set up and configure new Windows installs. I haven’t seen the info there laid out as well and as easily digestible anywhere else.

/vg/ has a large number of threads that are really the only source for certain info about certain game series. The emulation general threads are great resources, and the wiki built from them is the best go to one stop shop for info on emulators. The amateur game dev general threads have been the building grounds for a decent amount of games you’ve heard of before. Risk of Rain is a good example. Hopoo started his game dev journey in those threads. Any game that references “AGDG” is shouting those threads out.

Point is, there’s diamonds in the shit pile.


Yeah, that is an important side effect of this. In their constant pursuit of higher profits, insurance companies can use this data to more accurately analyze what factors into making someone high risk.

They sure as hell won’t be discounting people that don’t show those traits, but it’s something.


… you think they don’t? You need to read the fine print again. It’s not proven where it’s going, but they absolutely have the right to sell your genetic information and already do.


Full autonomous vehicles, and particularly significant levels of adoption of them are decades away. It’s taken roughly 20 years for hybrid vehicles to become “big”, and that’s after the tech already existed. We still don’t even have anywhere close to reliable full autonomous driving.

It usually is much more effective to make plans and changes based off what currently exists rather than anything that isn’t absolute immediate future. No reason to say no to the good because you’re busy waiting for “perfect”.


There’s plenty of reasons to want to share images of your offspring besides chasing internet clout, and I find that simplification ignores all but the narcisistic fame chasers that will never care anyway.

Not making any judgement on whether any other reason is particularly valid. Just saying that the people who do it for likes are never going to see it as anything negative or exploitative. Better off talking with or working to stop the people oversharing for other reasons. Higher chance of success.


Have you tried using adb to uninstall, freeze, or otherwise disable it?


Not if it’s for legal compliance.

Oh, sorry. I meant to say “Haha, Windows sucks! Am I right guys? Updoots to the left!”


With the right settings on Pro, you can get it to give you a week’s warning before an update is forced, with multiple subsequent warnings if you don’t restart in the meantime.


Protecting your traffic over the wire also doesn’t stop them from getting the data directly from the OS or program itself.

It’s their hardware, you’re just allowed to use it (and according to papers you signed when hired, likely only for work use).

My company uses a similar MITM technique on all our network traffic, but we have also used a number of other tools that don’t have the ability to snoop on the network traffic but can still get browsing data from user machines. Most browsers have “enterprise mode” features, or just store browsing history in a file that other programs can read.

We’ve also used systems that installed at the BIOS and/or bootloader level to allow us to track the location of and take certain remote actions on company hardware that was taken off the company network. If the device got an internet connection at all, it was still ours to control. Was very handy for people who tried to keep their laptop after they quit.

Technically they could use OCR on automatic screencaptures, which would bypass anything you could do. There’s a ton of “management” software that does automatic screen captures, or allows someone to look at an overview of desktops like a security guard looking at a bank of camera monitors. Usually that’s something schools use, but it is available for companies.

They could use a keylogger too.

The point is, you cannot control, or have any foolproof knowledge of, what they have installed on your work machine. That means that you cannot effectively work around or bypass it. If you absolutely need to, make a new “personal” email account to use for things like spotify or youtube on your work machine, and just use your damn phone for personal stuff.


Also there’s the aspect of just… not caring. As someone who technically could read the email, browse the files, or track the apps installed and used on the phone of nearly any person where I work, any small bit of idle curiousity died before I was done my first day.

Even if I was nosy, 99% of people are just not that fucking interesting. What would even be the point of abusing my access?

I’ve seen someone put it like this: male gynecologists don’t get excited looking at lady bits at work.


Likely that they don’t “trust” your email provider, but there’s a lot of strange A/B testing going on behind the scenes of that data harvester.

Setting up a dedicated spare gmail or outlook account solves that issue.

Registering a “cell number” helps too, but it’s hard finding a service that offers “free texting numbers” that isn’t set up in a way that they can see that it’s just one of those services. Wish I remembered what finally worked for me.

Lastly, if you’re using a modified Discord app or desktop install, be sparing with the non-standard features. That can flag you sometimes too.

For most servers though, I find it easiest to just access them in browser as a not signed in guest.


Not true, there is a distinction between your reply address and any secondary addresses you have configured on the mailbox. Still, as far as I know that’s not something they should be able to see from outside your email server. You are setting up aliases on your own server right, not using some third party as an intermediary? Using a third party intermediary would possibly be something they can see from the delivery routing.

It’s most likely that this is just them shitting on you for using an “untrusted” provider. Most big sites and email providers are really getting stingy lately with who they’ll accept email from and what is accepted as a valid email domain. There’s also a big push for properly configured SPF and DKIM records that aren’t set to allow spoofing sender domain. It’s combining to cause a lot of issues for self hosters lately, and also for companies that have vendors who insist on sending email from the vendor’s servers but appearing as from the company itself.


To be clear, Ethernet cable has no bearing on whether a connection was/is dial-up. It just means that it’s a wired connection instead of wireless (WiFi).

At that time WiFi wasn’t super widespread, so it wouldn’t be super surprising if a laptop didn’t support it. Especially if the laptop itself was a few years old.

With enough speed for youtube, you probably had some form of DSL, coming into your house through a coaxial cable, into a coax modem, then back out through ethernet cables.


I’d be shocked if the dbzer0 (piracy) instance blocked it.

I’d also expect that this has more to do with cloudflare than the specific instances.


What in the absolute hell are you talking about with the IP shit? I feel like I’ve had a stroke.

In normal circumstances, your IP address is always available to each and every server you connect to online to retrieve content from.

Like at a restaurant, you put your order in, they need to know the table you’re sitting at to bring the food out to you. The table is your IP here.

This is absolute base line principles of TCP/IP! It’s the reason “servers” are called that, they serve the content to you!

You could always have someone else go to the restaurant, then bring the food to wherever you are, that would be the equivalent of a VPN, or a proxy, etc.

But tl;dr- everything you access online sees the IP address for your connection. It’s not some security issue that any specific site points that fact out. It’s how the internet fucking works.

Sure as hell isn’t a red flag in a privacy policy. Most sites leave it out because it’s like saying the sky is blue.

I can’t even. You get wet if you go swimming. Your IP address is seen if you do anything online.


Is there any information about potential downsides to this? Are there any hiring or loan systems for example that would lower your “score” if info on you isn’t as immediately available from these brokers?

I have a hard time believing this stuff is being used exclusively for marketing.


Most online storefronts I’m aware of would have no issues with giving a refund if the play time shows that the game was clearly not fully installed.

Only issue would be if you bought it as a key from a key site.



You don’t need to use Mullvad to change your local machine’s DNS, and as long as you can do that, you can set up a pihole on your network to handle DNSad blocking still.


A lot of these devices will refuse to complete setup, or will silently do meshnet type stuff with other devices from the same manufacturer just to get the collected data out


Not that anyone’s watching, but someone could if they wanted

For the record, browsing and sharing open camera feeds was popular on 4chan’s /b/ for a while (like over a decade ago iirc), with commenters treating them like some sort of drama or sitcom. It was fucked up.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s still those sorts of people around on better hidden forums.


And here we have an intense difference in world view.

If you’re actually “fucking furious every minute of every day”, you have a serious emotional issue. And you’re hiding behind this idea that reading more news has any reflection on mental acuity to justify it. Effort, hell yes it takes more effort, but fuck off with elitism over your righteous anger.

You don’t need to sift through all the piles of absolute bullshit to stay informed, or to be aware of all the horroble shit in the world. It doesn’t take a concentrated effort to be aware. It does take a concentrated effort to stay emotionally invested in things that don’t directly effect you, and I’m of the opinion that effort is much better spent taking action, or simply doing what you can to better your small slice of the world every day.

Unfortunately it is extremely unlikely for any of us to have significant impact on large scale issues in the world. Stay reasonably informed, do what you can, and get on with your life. No sense in wallowing when there’s far better uses of time and energy.


My man are you for real? You commented in a public forum on the internet. You’re going to get unasked for feedback/advice/shit talking/commentary. That’s just how things work.

And no one’s asking you to pretend, whatever you mean by that. I’m assuming you mean that it’s impossible to accept that this world is not a dystopia, so doing otherwise requires one to pretend?

I’m asserting that we are not living in a dystopia as you and many others repeatedly claim. Maybe you disagree, but it’s not something that I personally have to pretend. Again I’ll repeat the last sentence of my last comment: These are hard times, not end times.

Plus, there’s a whole spectrum of news media exposure between “drinking from the fire hose” and “burying your head in the sand”. Everyone should stay informed, but there’s a lot in the news that only serves to get emotional response over things that have no impact on your life, where knowing of it does not convey any significant value besides emotional effect.

I have seen far too many people actively contribute to their own mental issues due to feeling some obligation to engage in news that has no direct impact on their lives, or that they can do nothing about but worry. Additionally, being aware of the emotional and psychological effects of media exposure does not make you in any way immune to it. I know way too many people suffering from depression and anxiety related issues directly and significantly exacerbated by how much they consume news media, which is why I have a hard time keeping my trap shut about this.

Moving past that, being married to a journalism major is not the supporting argument you may think it is. Of course you would bristle at the idea that news media may be harmful when you are married to someone who spent years training to be in that industry. I’m not saying any of this as an attack on journalists themselves or as an attack on caring about what is going on in the world. Ideally journalists and news organizations serve a vital part of keeping people informed, which is vital to a good society and proper political process. Unfortunately the entire way that news media makes money to continue to exist in the modern era is entirely dependant on optimizing for views, which means optimizing for emotional impact.


If you think this is a dystopia, I have a lot of books for you to read.

There’s a lot of dystopian shit going down, but (assuming you hail from a first world country) we are definitively not living in one.

Wean yourself off news media, limit your consumption of it. They literally make their money through keeping eyes watching. The easiest way to do that is to keep viewers feeling like there are ongoing crises constantly and to stoke visceral emotional response in their readership/viewership as much as possible.

This is not some issue siloed off to news organizations that lean to one political side or the other, it is an inherent result of how they all generate revenue in the modern age. They are all optimizing for ad impressions.

These are hard times, not end times.