This would be my preferred option, but: I do applaud OP's enthusiasm and dedication. He's learnt a lot of things about it, whereas because of my setup (as you described) I know fuck all. Plus, having his sort of setup gives you your own library over time (should that be desired).
I'm a bit astonished how often I see this kind of thread, even here. It's like when people complain about FOSS apps charging subscriptions or standalone fees. How many times does it have to be pointed out that piracy as an activity does not define piracy as a movement or a collective?
I'm certain this simplistic "piracy = not paying for stuff" take can only come from a kind of ignorant individualism, one that lacks any structural analysis of why, when, and for what content people turn to piracy (and why, when, etc, they stop).
That strikes me as really out there. I think the reality is that there's a lot of people into CP sadly – as an absolute but not relative number – and you don't need many out there to have a prolific amount of content, which we know from our own special interest cases.
This is what always unnerves me about privacy tech. I always feel the pull of using high level encryption with whatever I'm doing – file storage, communication, etc – but a part of me is always saddened at the same time with how much abuse is effectively facilitated by anonymity and privacy.
But as the horrors of the dark web have shown, it's a battle that law enforcement will never win – our most effective weapon as a society against CP and related abuse is Chris Hansen (I shouldn't joke) ...is engaging with and changing the material causes of this phenomenon. There will always be tools for sickos; the challenge is to prevent people from becoming as sick as they are, and when sick, finding ways to prevent them from abusing others.
Sorry for slightly OT rant lol.
Right but zlib is full strength at this point, and libgen remained unaffected. Annas archive gives an extensive coverage of it all.
With your capitalisation of "rip" there, I nearly had a heart attack thinking something (implausibly) had signalled the end of rips from streaming platforms lol.
There's a lot of empirical claims surrounding this topic, and I'm unaware who really has good evidence for them. The Substack guy e.g. is claiming that banning or demonetising would not "solve the problem" – how do we really know? At the very least, you'd think that demonetising helps to some extent, because if it's not profitable to spread certain racist ideas, that's simply less of an incentive. On the other hand, plenty of people on this thread are suggesting it does help address the problem, pointing to Reddit and other cases – but I don't think anyone really has a grip on the empirical relationship between banning/demonetising, shifting ideologues to darker corners of the internet and what impact their ideas ultimately have. And you'd think the relationship wouldn't be straightforward either – there might be some general patterns but it could vary according to so many contingent and contextual factors.
Here's hoping YouTube Revanced on Android and Adguard on desktop continues to work, eh...
The elephant in the room, of course, is that this is literally only a problem in the United States. Everywhere else in the world, folks are totally fine using messaging apps. WhatsApp is pretty popular worldwide, and there are regional favorites too. But, the point is, it’s only in the States that people seem to be against this idea. The answer for why is very much up for debate, but the conversation is, at this point, just getting exhausting.
Can confirm, as a Brit. We probably would have a sardonic explanation for why only people in the States are against using other messengers too...
Considering they said almost all, that's not the gotcha you think it is.
You've been gluetun-free all this time?
Basically: American teenagers/kids think Android is backwards and uncool, even though this is false; Android historically and presently more capable than iOS etc. But big problem for Google in this market. Partly driven by fact that most popular Android phones are cheap and full of bloatware. Some optimism in the Pixel sales and Google should push their own hardware more to address the problem /end
in the end, you’re leeching off a service you enjoy.
I don't think that's a fair or true statement.
For one thing, the "service" here has risen to a point of ubiquity that it's a de facto public space. Everything is on YouTube – legacy media channels, individual enthusiasts, alternative media outlets, the worlds of tech, fashion, politics, sports – you name it. If you were deprived of all access to it, you would have a qualitatively poorer access of what is going on in society. So it's not equivalent to a traditional service like a trade.
For another, blocking ads is not merely refusal to pay a fee of some kind. Advertisements are cognitively intrusive, designed to affect your willpower and decision-making, used to track and control your behaviour, compromise your digital safety, and turn you into a product for companies to whom you do not give your consent for the opportunity to be exploited. Blocking that system of "payment" is not simply prudent but right, and the choice between paying a monetary fee or being so exploited is not a fair choice at all.
Are we allowed FOSS alternatives to common FOSS apps lol? In which case, I'm saying NeoStore > F-Droid.
Also, separately, Zotero > all commercial reference manages and increasingly over PDF readers too.
I think to the uninitiated it's a bit of a minefield. Are there guides to the best providers, and ones you can subscribe to using anonymous forms of payment?
For me, what works perfectly is this setup:
Desktop – Adguard
Android – YouTube ReVanced
Never get adverts ever. The day I'm forced is the day I stop using it altogether.
So do people in the US chiefly send messages via SMS rather than WhatsApp and others like it? That's so bizarre to me haha.
Think you've missed the point a bit of OP's comment. They're asking not how the end-user is protected from copyright claims, but how the debrid service itself is.
Yeah it is pretty solid. I used to use KeepassX, which while also a very cool project, was a bit more tinkering than needed. I hosted the database on a mainstream cloud provider though, and figured at that point, you might as well use the cloud storage of a company with a great security reputation instead and just bundle all together. And so BitWarden.
Considering the version you were given by the author could be watermarked in some way, and they could get into shit from a publisher if you uploaded it for mass retrieval, you ought not to do this without their express permission. It's different if you had downloaded the article from a journal/database yourself, or if it was some other version (like an unformatted manuscript).
It's a question of whether they would ever get subpoenaed really, and then whether they'd comply. I'm not sure it's worth it from the copyright holders' perspective. The individual users are getting DDL links, so they're not uploading – i.e. "sharing" – anything. These days, if holders go after anyone, it's for the sharing not the downloading. As for compliance, I don't think we have any evidence one way or the other, as (afaik) they are yet to be subpoenaed (despite running for a long time).
It's also worth noting if you do want to do this totally privately: when you buy an RD subscription, you cannot use a VPN during that process (they block known IPs). So, you would want to use a public WiFi connection somewhere, and choose an anonymous payment method like paysafecard.
You would just find the directory location of the DRM locked ebook, put it in Calibre with the DeDRM addon installed and enabled, and hey presto, you have an unlocked clone. (This works on MacOS)
My life goal isn't to make pirating as easy as possible for myself. There are plenty of reasons to use MacOS over Windows (bracketing Linux distros for the moment), chiefly that it's not a broken and endlessly frustrating experience on a daily basis for everyday tasks.
I don't game on PC, which is the only reason I'd have a machine running Windows in my household.
I use Android and MacOS as my operating systems of choice, and that is more than suitable for piracy setups for most media. E.g. music (soulseek), films and series (real debrid + stremio), adblocking (Adguard, root mode). I don't have a particular need to pirate software or games.
True by the letter but not really by practice. PC is synonymous with a computer running Windows, or Linux at a push. I don't know whether that's because of Microsoft's early market dominance or because Apple enjoys marketing itself as a totally different entity, or some combination of the two. But yeah, usage determines meaning more than what the individual words mean in a more literal sense.
Guessing English isn't the first language here (a few mistakes), and what he probably meant was that refund requests would be honoured, rather than that all purchases would as a rule be refunded.
You're right that it mustn't be the only prism, yes. But maybe we shouldn't also splinter things like functionality and appearance/usability from the merits of "free as in freedom" either? One of the things that makes FOSS apps work better than alternatives, when they do, is the fact that it's not looking for extra revenue streams all the time with marketing-led nonsense features, bloating the hell out of their product, redesigning just to seem modern (usability be damned), and so on.
And what happens when you have a FOSS alternative with committed and talented devs, a large user base and resources tends to be something truly superior.
Are you saying you do not care about internet points? Outrageous!
+1 for MiX. It's FOSS and has everything you could want in a file explorer, functionality wise.
Edit: scratch that. God knows how long I thought it was FOSS for!
Not the method of a narcissist or manipulator at all, that.
Hey I respect the hell outta this guy for manufacturing desires in me, lemme now buy this shit I didn't want before he manipulated me. Good job guy!
/s
It's a strange post in general. Someone's substack, written in some generic faux-journalist style, with one source for the main claim ("a Redditor"), who isn't linked to. Don't know why it's being shared here.
I've been learning French on there for awhile now and it's been extremely effective por moi.
I wouldn't normally comment on a spelling issue, however, in this case...
So before you can message anyone you have to download whatsapp?
I love how this seems like a near insurmountable hurdle. Install an app?? On a phone?!
I have a relative who is ~85 years old; he uses WhatsApp. It's really not that hard.
But loans are temporal. That's all that is happening – you're renting out software (akin to digital library borrowing), in some sense, not buying a product.
The problem is how to do it otherwise and maintain enough income to ensure continued active development for future updates.
I don't have a solution to it, and subscriptions aren't ideal, but that's the problem at least.
The real issue here is that people in the US are tied to using SMS for real-time chat groups when so many better (and private, and well known) alternatives exist. Thankfully, in Europe, nobody so far as I know ever really uses SMS anymore – whether for single or group chats.
This, but it's very temperamental. Normally end up having to switch between 2-3 for a given match, and many of the best quality ones freeze and have to restart. Also, the comments boxes adjacent to all these streams are generally pretty toxic and strange. I miss the days of Bloodzeed and TorrentStream lol.
from someone who'd once seemingly tricked us all into thinking he was really smart
Well, ...
For as long as Magisk has been going, that's been my root strategy. I'm new to hearing about KernelSU though. Any advantages?
But I suppose if you're buying Apple you're probably going to buy a new device every year anyway. Never understood the mentality personally.
My cousin gets the new iPhone every single year, and he was up for it at midnight as well, I don't understand why because it's not better in any noticeable sense then it was last year, it's got a good screen and a nice camera but so did the model 3 years ago. Apple customers are just weird.
I think you're basing your general estimation of the Apple customer on the iPhone customer a bit too heavily. E.g., I have never had an iPhone and wouldn't ever consider buying one, considering how locked down and overpriced it is, and how competitive Android is as an alternative OS.
Meanwhile, I've been on MacOS for something like 7 or so years and cannot look back, for everyday computing needs. I have to use Windows occasionally on work machines and I cannot emphasise enough how much of an absolute chore it is. Endless errors, inconsistent UX, slow (even on good hardware), etc. It is by contrast just a painful experience at this point.
And one of the reasons people buy MacBooks, myself included, is to have longevity, not to refresh it after a year (that's insane). It's a false economy buying a Windows laptop for most people, because you absolutely do need to upgrade sooner rather than later. My partner has a MacBook bought in 2014 and it still handles everyday tasks very well.
Indeed that does seem like the sort of mistake that someone who made the largest purchase of thier life after staying up alll night playing Elden Ring would make
Hey, playing Elden Ring takes some skill and dedication. Did you see the build he put on Twitter that time? It was hilariously stupid. In fairness, maybe he was playing all night with it just to get past very basic foes.
It is an interesting project, not sure where it goes. The title is deeply misleading though. The features of ReVanced make YouTube so much better, whereas this project doesn't seem to be about making YouTube better so much as circumnavigating YouTube for the comment boxes and as your hub to creators. They seem to be doing different things.