Let’s flip it. Why do people want data on you? why are people willing to pay for it? or governments deploy threats of fines (backed up by men with guns) or men with guns in order to force it’s collection on you?
private companies feel like they can make money with it, that they can make you do things that are profitable (buy something you wouldn’t, vote a certain way, decide against insuring you etc). Are you cleverer than teams of academics? I’m not.
Governments want it to enhance control. Sometimes that control can be benevolent but it’s still control. Often it’s not benevolent, selective enforcement of unjust laws against political opponents etc.
I essentially just thinking about what the intention is behind something. What are Facebook’s intentions? Are they to connect you with your friends, and improve your life? No. Their intention is keep you stuck too their platform, and sharing marketable details of your life.
You walk onto a car lot. Is your first thought “hey, this guy is super friendly! He just wants to spend time with me” not, his intention is to get you into the most expensive car he can.
The shift from “You have nothing to hide if you aren’t doing anything illegal” to “It is illegal to criticize us. We will keep an eye on you to make sure you don’t.” can happen a lot faster than people want to realize.
A race to the bottom with who can come up with the next dogshit idea on how to ruin the internet and make things actively worse for the people who use it
AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.
Their fake advert viewing numbers and YouTube’s inability to monetise without ruining itself are forcing them to think of new ways to encrapsulate user’s and drain their wallets.
Instead of, you know, providing a service people want and would pay for.
The tech sector just hit a major correction recently. Wall Street found companies like Google to be overvalued and as such their stocks suffered. This is Google trying to claw back some of that value. See step 3 in the enshittification process. This isn’t just Google. It’s the entire tech sector.
Growth reaches a saturation point and now they have to cannibalise every single thing in order to continue growth (in company values). This comes at the expense of product quality for the person using it but that’s fine if you have no competition because everything is a monopoly.
The capitalist system is the problem. The system will ALWAYS reach this endpoint for as long as it is a system that demands infinite growth.
What do you mean, Google of all companies… It’s a company that makes 90% of its money from ads and all of its products are made with the express purpose of enabling them to spy on you or creating technical dependencies so you can’t quit their services.
Plus they’ve already tried to lock the web into proprietary formats (AMP, PWA etc.) and have maneuvered so they have 90% of the browser market and the smartphone market but can’t be actioned for it.
Nothing about this is recent, those who pay attention to the standards process have been screaming for ages about the Google problem. It’s just that now between interest rates being what they are and them having a monopoly on the browser market that they’re cashing in on their investment.
and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).
They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.
Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.
Because for the first time in 14 years money is no longer free.
Right now the interest rate sits at 5% and it will remain there for the foreseeable future. Investors no longer have the patients to wait for growth because bonds are actually investable now, so all your “get user first find business later” companies began to panic and tries to squeeze everything out of its users.
Hilariously, the only social media company that will come out of this relatively unharmed is probably Facebook, because their unethical practices actually makes money
Recently? This is a long time coming. Users have been accepting all kinds of shit from big players without complaint. Even if they protest it’s usually just performative and they keep using the services, sites and software that violates all kinds notions of user and privacy rights. Most people unfortunately are (understandably) not equipped to really even understand the kind of shady shit these companies pull on the daily. The internet is going to shit and its users will gobble it up and ask for more. It has been frustrating watching this happen, but there’s really very little that can be done.
The main problem with us users is that we are god damn lazy. We want everything to be the most convenient it possibly can be.
Remember when Apple updated iOS to allow users to stop cross-app tracking, which severly upset the Zuck, that absolute manchild?
Turns out that if you actually inform people and give them a clear choice to make, the overwhelming majority of users do in fact not agree with being tracked, as an example.
I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.
Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.
For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.
Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.
So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.
Sounds you might enjoy the Enshittification of TikTok article floating around. It explains quite well the mechanism why a site have to becoming worse and worse over time.
Google has already been a worthless pos for years. Impossible to get relevant results, even with operators. You just get ads and irrelevant SEO sites. And adding "reddit" at the end of the query will probably not work so well in the future either, seeing how that site has also gone to shit.
And they have already tried monopolising the entire internet with their amp bullshit.
So this is just in line with their vision of making the whole internet into a pile of burning shit under their total control.
Then i’ll scrape the songs i currently watch on youtube with jdownload and stop using the page otherwise.
All they do is make the internet less attractive. Now that works to increase profits for a while, but eventually the content creators withdraw, the platforms become worse and eventually uncool and people stop using it, or use it less. Facebook is on a decline in western countries. We went through multiple video snippet apps already and tiktok and instagram too will be declining eventually.
We dont have to win the war because the war will never end. We just gotta make the best out of the battlefields we win.
I built a Python script that scrapes metadata from Spotify and apply it to songs downloaded off YouTube so it looks identical as if you bought the album.
I’ve been thinking to post it on like GitHub cause it’ll be useful for tons of people but I also don’t want to get sued
That is super awesome, but yeah, sounds like the kinda thing you should keep underground. Too many cool projects have been killed because they went public.
But a small minority of really determined people is enough to change the world 🙌
I love to see how people nowadays find easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism… That’s how they’ve been brainwashing us till now.
Honestly, this second half of 2023 for me has been about finding FOSS options for literally everything. And eventually I’ll have a home server I can use for the things I can’t use on the cloud
It’s like in Silicon Valley when the VC tells them they don’t need to be profitable they just need to market, then as soon as he dips below technically being a billionaire he demands that they focus on being profitable immediately
Rich idiots threw money at anything because while a million dollars is more than the vast amount of us will ever have, to them it’s like buying a lotto scratcher.
And one of the primary reasons they never had to make a profit was that, so long as interest rates were functionally zero, it didn't really cost the investor class much of anything to park money in a money losing operation while waiting for it to become sellable.
With interest rates back to pre-2008 levels, though, there's a price to money again. And a real opportunity cost. So, compete with bonds or watch your investors walk.
That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.
If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be “Oh great yet another subscription”, because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people’s income each month.
But what if greedy neoliberals hadn’t been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.
Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There’s always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. “If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!”.
Inflation just means “If rich people find out you’ve got more money, they’ll fuck you out of that too”.
The $1 will never be enough. They’ll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they’ll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood – whatever makes them a few more cents.
I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.
I don’t think it’s coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they’ve really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don’t understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they’ve already made a decision, they decide it’s because we don’t understand the squeeze they’re under to make money.
Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing’s a disaster because that’s really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there’s some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they’re doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they’re doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They’ve learned the following lesson: if you’re big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it
Duckduckgo is a wrapper for bing? No wonder it sucks… I want to like it, but the results are usually pretty bad in comparison to Google. Takes me much longer to find what I’m looking for with DDG. :/
I’m using an anonymous browser and for me often DDG has better results than Google now. My Google-fu used to be on point but recently I can’t seem to find sites that aren’t SEO traps.
I have exactly the opposite experience. Google has gone to shit, and duckduckgo gets me there faster 90% of the time. Plus the results are short and concise, or immediately helpful.
The SEO of the internet has really fucked googles algorithm. At least with duckduckgo I can end the search with !g to switch to google if I need a second go, but you cannot !d in google.
I 100% would have signed up for Reddit Premium and payed monthly for Sync access if they had allowed me to hand them the money. Oh well ¯\(ツ)/¯
That's a good write up, thanks. I don't claim it's coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.
Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven't heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can't not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it's not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it's a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I'm kinda curious now
DuckDuckGo is not a wrapper for Bing, but is in fact a distinct and independent search engine. DDG does grab some results from bing. but it also grabs from other sources and it's own crawler.
Elon Musk wanted to drive Twitter into the dirt once he was forced to buy it. Criticism, jet tracking, rejection of fascist-adjacent opinions that are “logical” but only if you’re a heartless engineering robot.
His hubris forced him into buying it, but once he had to, he might as well destroy it. How else do you think he got the Saudis in on it for another billion?
I laughed about this theory at first, just memeing it like “ha could you even imagine?” But every single day it seems more and more like he does the worst thing possible to “monetize” and then gripes about it like the only reason his brilliance isn’t working is because big mean liberal woke mind virus society is trying to do cancel culture because they’re just jealous he’s rich.
I don’t trust Brave one bit. Its whole approach reeks of a bait-and-switch (think “we won’t share or sell your data” pre-9/11 Google). Its founder is a massive homophobe and crypto-bro, and I have a massive learned distrust of homophobes and crypto-bros.
Moreover, I see no reason to use it when we already have far superior options (Firefox).
I don’t generally use that feature, even as a programmer, but I use Google at work just because my privacy is already pretty exposed at work and I’m not looking up anything wild on a corporate network. I also enjoy the targeting in this particular instance because then my search results are developer focused
You should also check out Tab for a Cause as well! A new tab screen that uses ad revenue to donate to charities. You can select your cause and every new tab you open contributes to it
I can get you a referral link the next time I’m on my desktop, it you’d like
I appreciate the sentiment and the offer, but I know that Tab for a Cause does not support Firefox, and I exclusively use Firefox browsers.
However, I do donate directly to several non-profits, and I work for a charitable non-profit myself, so I’ll actually mention this to my admins because I don’t think we’re part of this yet! So thanks!
Thank you for pointing that fact out! It sounds like it was decided by Mozilla about a year ago to institute that change and I hadn’t noticed the lack of ads until today. At one point it did have issues, but I was able to get around that by changing some settings. But from the sounds of it that may no longer be possible
I just tried it, and my one concern is that it appears to tailor its results based on locational data, which is a feature I try to avoid. Like you said, I might use it sometimes, but I’m sticking with Startpage and SearXNG instances as my primary search engines for now. I’m adding it to my list though, so I can test it out a bit more. Maybe there’s a setting I haven’t found yet.
I went to the open streetwise magazine and asked folks if any search engines use open streetmaps by default with searches and they steered me to quant. to boot it otherwise behaves just like duck duck go but does not have the microsoft baggage.
Unfortunately, my experience with qwant does not corroborate this. In spite of promoting themselves as “the search engine that doesn’t know anything about you,” in reality the use locational data derived from your IP to provide tailored search results. This function is not opt-in, and in fact there is apparently no way to opt out.
I don’t think I need to explain why this is deeply problematic in a privacy community, but just in case: Imagine that people in my location tend to have right-wing extremist interests. A search engine could then decide that people in my area are interested in right-wing conspiracies and thus serve me more of this type of result. (This has in fact been the case for me upon first testing a site or app when all it has is my general locational data to serve me algorithmic recommendations, so this is a concrete problem for me.)
On top of this, a search engine that brazenly declares to know nothing about me is in fact using data derived from me to customize results? They have breached my trust from the start.
A search engine should use only search terms, syntax, and data I manually and knowingly provide to produce results. No more than this.
The way I test this is quite simple: Try searching “restaurants in my area.” When I do so, it currently provides a list of restaurants in Helsinki, since that is where I’m currently connecting via VPN. When I disconnect my VPN and try again, it gives results for my home town. Any search engine that does this is not one I opt to use.
Gonna give SearXNG a spin then, since even though “I don’t have anything to hide talk”, privacy is a right we’re better off upholding and I want to use services that respect it.
Does any search engine work well for super specific stuff these days? I’m finding search is increasingly useless for my niches (high level topics usually being Carpentry, Building Codes, and Astronomy) but their results usually take me to a word vomit blog, something clearly GPT generated or Pinterest spam (DuckDuckGo is terrible for that)
To be fair, more often than not I find stuff by going into “siloed sites” (yt, forums, etc) and searching from there than using a search engine, but it’s still good for stuff that are more common but also more of a hassle trying to remember than just searching it quickly (e.g. “how do I add my user to sudoers again?” kind of stuff)
Privacy? What is this article talking about. Ads not displaying in no way implies privacy. They will harvest your data as much as it possibly can either way. All you are doing by paying to remove ads is directly funding the ad business model.
The article confuses privacy and ads-free. As in, you pay $10 a month not to see what the data they collect on you would be used for if you didn’t pay. But they still collect data on you and monetize it in many other ways.
What annoys me most about that kind of logic is that the reverse could also be true - they could potentially run ads like on TV without directly profiling users or violating privacy. But by marrying the concept of ads and tracking, they can play the “but we need to pay for our services somehow” card.
Some people in this thread are claiming the article doesn’t mention Facebook.
I actually read the article. You’re welcome.
When you click on a link in the Facebook or Instagram apps, the website loads in a special browser built into the app, rather than your phone’s default browser. In 2022, privacy researcher Felix Krause found that Meta injects special “keylogging” JavaScript onto the website you’re visiting that allows the company to monitor everything you type and tap on, including passwords. Other apps including TikTok do the same thing.
Kraus makes very clear that while Meta apps are also injecting javascript, that he only has evidence of TikTok doing “keylogging” type activities. Both Gizmodo and ProtonMail are wrong in that regard.
It’s like nobody has real media literacy anymore, even media organizations.
It’s weird how ardently you defend Facebook. This post and one earlier where you insinuated Proton Mail is liable for libel is something a Meta employee would say to dissuade this kind of thinking. But the fact is the researcher, Kraus, confirmed that the logging script is present. Meta maliciously spies.
While they log a lot of things like all clicks made on the site and what elements you focus on, there was no keylogger script found in metas apps as of now.
Don’t get me wrong, that’s still a shitty thing to do, but it’s nowhere on the same level as a keylogger that even reads your passwords. If Meta wants to this can easily end in a defamation case against proton.
I just went looking for what you were talking about cause I was curious to know more, and from what I can tell, saying “Kraus confirmed the logging script is present” is a bit misleading- it implies that the logging script that logs keystrokes is present. Its possible I missed something but from what I could find, it looks like what he confirmed is that meta tracks interaction with the elements of pages, like selecting a text box, tapping/clicking on buttons, etc., but I didn’t see anything about keylogging. Thats still super creepy, and is obviously bad, but it doesn’t seem like the person you’re responding to is wrong to say that the findings of the security researcher have been misinterpreted here. And you’re not wrong that they’re absolutely maliciously spying (of course they are, maliciously spying, contributing to genocide in developing countries, and negatively manipulating peoples mental health for profit are meta’s bread and butter! 😀) but I do think it pays to be accurate when we criticize things, and to not mislead people.
But if we wanna criticize meta, may I interest you in: facilitating a horrifying genocide resulting in massive loss of life in Myanmar?
" Safety Bill " the fucking irony of it Tories making sure we’re the biggest clown show in the world. Well time to shutdown all those https end points and spool up jhonlewi5.co.uk to my offshore account.
“If companies do not comply, media regulator Ofcom will be able to issue fines of up to 18 million pounds ($22.3 million) or 10% of their annual global turnover.” Yet thier mates can quite happly steal tax money under PPE contracts and pump literal shit into our waterways.
Some perspective from a user who’s been on Magic Earth for well over a year:
It works very well. With a few quirks, it’s like 90-95% as useful as Google Maps for a majority of personas
It’s a mature app, finds most addresses (with possible exception of recent changes like a business moving)
Does surprisingly well with being current on traffic conditions
While not FOSS, they seem to be open about what they sell of your information and it’s in aggregate, so I’m much less worried about location data being tied to other online dossiers I’ve left in my digital paper trail.
I found that Organic Maps and OsmAnd+ just couldn’t cut it at all for finding addresses, routing wasn’t super great (or intuitive), and otherwise rated very low on family acceptance as a replacement for Google Maps. I used Acastus Photon for addresses and frankly it’s not that much better and the workflow was janky and pretty useless when you want to plot route waypoints. Magic Earth was the bridge between fully de-googling and having a livable acceptance factor. So far I haven’t seen them doing anything they don’t claim (not getting in trouble privacy-wise), so I’m good.
I would say “privacy friendly” is accurate in the title - but this is not FOSS. Even so for those looking to de-google without losing utility, I recommend it and am glad it exists.
Edit: I wish some apps (looking at you Starbucks!) would use a default mapping engine like Magic Earth instead of expecing Google Maps on Android phones (Graphene, Lineage, Calyx)
I agree completely with your review of Magic Earth. I will say that I keep some maps on my phone in Organic Maps as well. They are easier for me to follow when hiking on forest trails. When we went trailblazing on snowshoes, it made finding our way back to the main route simple.
Some icons of the undergrounds have different license. Read your first link carefully. And you link the source of the ui, or you don’t consider png files as “source”?
If it wouldn’t be foss, it couldn’t be built by the f-droid build system, it can only build foss projects
Publishing applications using the OsmAnd UI/UX code to Google Play, Amazon Market, or Apple Store must be done with written permission.
That’s why I linked the folder Osmand/tree/master/OsmAnd/res. It contains icons and XML files, which are used to describe the UI.
CC-BY-NC-ND is a non-free license. It forbids commercial redistribution and it doesn’t allow any modification of the files. OsmAnd further restricts what you can do, as it does not allow redistribution in the most popular app stores without permission.
If it wouldn’t be foss, it couldn’t be built by the f-droid build system, it can only build foss projects
The source files are publicly available, so F-Droid can use them to build the app, but the license restricts what you can do with these files.
F-Droid does not sell the app (non-commercial clause), is not modifying it (non-derivative clause) and is not listed as one of the restricted app stores, so it can distribute the app. But this does not make the app free and open-source software.
Aha, I see, you can consider it whatever you want, maybe the “not fully free software” would be a better term, but “not open source” is too harsh, because source is open, as you can see it, but doesn’t fit the definition of Free Software as defined by FSF. If you use requirements by FSF, please use their terminology as well, it’s confusing.
Do you know if they support disabling things like auto-equalization of audio or changing the bitrate? I use zoom for music lessons because they’re the only one I’ve ever found that will let me do that, which sucks because zoom really isn’t that great of an app
My understanding is that my employer dropped webex because it was more expensive than others. I think we only use Teams now which works but not as well as webex.
Just a thought: Explain your needs to Jitsi devs. Or other software linked here. Maybe they could cater to a niche market to get more market share. Or offer a free music lesson for their trouble.
Update: they have a very active github for the desktop app, and they had a fix almost immediately. There are webAPI calls that can be appended to the end of the meeting link before starting. If your link for example is “meet.jit.si/myLesson” you can append the following string: #config.disableAP=true&config.disableAEC=true&config.disableNS=true&config.disableAGC=true&config.disableHPF=true&config.stereo=true
and this will disable all the audio processing that could harm the meeting. You will probably want headphones though as it will cause a lot of echoes if it can hear anything from the meeting.
Figured I’d leave this here in case anyone else was looking for a similar solution.
EDIT: Lemmy keeps adding “amp;” after each & symbol. Those are incorrect but so far I’m failing to get the thing to stop doing it every time I hit post. Those should be removed for a working link. Try this link to see how it should look.
I looked up the brand (Invenda). Their PDF includes “using AI”, “measuring foot traffic”, and gathering “gender/age/etc” e.g. facial recognition to estimate a persons age and gender
And in terms of “stored locally” this is straight from their website
The machine comes with a “brain” – Invenda OS – and is connected to the Invenda Cloud, which allows you to manage it remotely and gather valuable environmental, consumer and transactional data. The device can be branded according to your requirements to further enhance your brand presence.
The marketing also so fricken backwards that it reads like satire:
For a consumer, there’s no greater comfort than shopping pressure-free. Invenda Wallet allows consumers to browse, select and pay for products leisurely and privately 🤦♂️
beuh, they obviously mean that the biometric data is stored and processed locally, not the data that results from that processing.
i mean that’s still kinda creepy but you’re making it seem like they didn’t obviously admit to it in the original sentence.
People panic about face scan while the ongoing massive privacy breaches exist around online services and electronic devices. The amount of personal data that people pour into smartphones is enormous compared to using that vending machine. We need more GDPR.
What really bothers me is the “measuring foot traffic”. I already refuse to use vending-machines because of the pricing and unhealthyness, but you’re telling me I need to make GDPR takedown requests just for walking to class?
Also this is data that any reasonable company could get in like half an hour of searching and asking.
There is data on how many meals are sold a day at the mensa, how many students are enrolled, how many students live on campus…
Unless the vending machine is in the last corner of the third floor of an half empty building, all this information can be puzzled together to get a good estimate of how many people are passing the machine on a day to day basis.
There was a quaint old time, shortly after Google was founded, where people mused about privacy over the internet. It was forgotten about as the profits started rolling in and pretty much all other companies started following along. That was the time when we started transitioning into a period of massive data surveillance. Glad to see that the conversation is starting to pick up again in some areas, though it’s definitely being actively suppressed in many others.
I keep telling my zoomer son he needs to read 1984. Not to live his life in fear of it, but to help his awareness of it, and provide an example of what that sort of societal control can look like. It’s probably the one thing I nag him about. 5 years later he still hasn’t read it. lol
I haven’t read it in decades, but I still feel it’s hard to miss certain parallels with modern reality when you have.
That plus Helen Nissenbaum. When you read 1984 and then start thinking about the concept of future contexts changing use of private data, you get real nervous.
A good book to pair with 1984 is A Brave New World. They both tackle forms of control but from two different approaches. In A Brave New World there’s no need for thought police. Every person is designed and crafted from conception to adulthood to never have a criminal thought.
That’s another good one! Thanks for reminding me of it! Kind of ironically I read most of that book while hiding from my job (that’s a story) in the bathroom for short periods of time in my early twenties.
Banks require a physical address, that’s part of basic KYC (know your customer) requirements and part of anti money laundering / anti terrorism funding laws.
So they won’t accept P.O. boxes. While those mail forwarders can work, some will also blacklist them over time.
And really, ask yourself the question if you want your cards, PIN, and general correspondence about your finances mailed to a random third party where some underpaid person opens up and scans your letters all day…
Not quite sure what you mean with whitepages btw., your bank is not signing you up anywhere.
Somebody is. Either way. I don’t want to let strangers online my phone and home address. Ideally, I would want a p.o box type thing or mail forwarding. I don’t care for them scanning my packages.
Unless your government id has a PO box on it you’re likely not going to get the results you’re looking for. As somebody else mentioned, that info is public record.
This is simply a rehash/summary of an original article on 404media. Beyond that, you would have to be living under a rock to think that Plex was interested in what their users actually wanted. I ran a Plex server for years until I got fed up with trying to turn off some new self serving misfeature with every new update. It’s been clear for years that offering a self hosting media server solution is simply a bridgehead for Plex to seek every more revenue opportunities, even for paying victims customers. I moved to and recommend Jellyfin- comparable user experience (minus the crap), use the same library, apps for all your devices, open source and completely self contained.
Problem is jellyfin doesn’t have apps on stuff, therefore my family can’t reach the content on their TVs without side loading and that’s so far beyond any of them it isn’t even funny
I’m gonna guess plugging in a roku is too much for them, too? When Arthur C Clarke said his magic quote I didn’t expect that line to be drawn at shiny lights on a screen for most people.
What “stuff” are you referring to? Has the webapp, Android, iOS, Firesticks, Roku. What are you trying to run it on? Even my SmartTV has it in thier native store.
Damn good, is an understatement. The only app I found better than the Xbox app is using Kodi Plex Plug In, but the HDR is non-existent on that, so it’s worthless to me.
This madlad made a chart comparing which files /codecs transcoded or Direct Played a few years ago. I finally found it again. docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/…/edit?usp=drivesd…Edit: That’s an old one, there was one updated with the Series consoles, but I can’t find it. The Series Plex update (which may work on the others as well) rarely transcode anyone.
Every time one of you says this I can only imagine you’re into the most degenerate shit on earth. Like Christopher Walken in fursona shitting on Peter Dinklage while Megan Thee Stallion flicks bean in the corner
My tastes run deeper than skin and excretions. Only tainted minds can even discern where the sensuality begins and ends, the flickering myriad coaxing froth only from souls who peered long into the abyss. The decadent ecstasy afforded to we few is as delicious as it is unknowable. Do not search, do not query, if one is worthy then it will seek you out.
Skip-intro is an unofficial plugin ATM but can vouch that it works decently well. Can’t compare it to the Plex implementation since it has been quite a while since I’ve had Plex deployed.
Ah you’re probably right about the mobile clients. I’m not a mobile watcher really. I can say though that the jellyfin desktop app and jellyfin mpv shim both have skip-intro integration, though I’ve only tested it with jellyfin MPV shim.
Proton are very transparent about what data is and isn’t stored, how data is protected and what (very limited) data may be available in the event of a legal warrant - going through all the proper channels.
Complying with legal warrants doesnt make the service insecure or not private. It makes it a legal and legitimate company.
It shouldn’t really be a surprise to any of it’s users.
I agree with you these people think that Proton will fight and protect you for $11 a month. Lol we really have to keep in mind that companies will comply to a government request its on you to keep your data secure and communications encrypted.
Remember that time I think it was Signal got a warrant for all data they had on a user and literally all the data they had was account name, creation date, and last login date? That was funny.
Some people have the idea that a private business is going to break the law or defy their governments requests for them. That’s completely deluded, nobody would ever open willingly expose themself to that kind of risk. No organization is going to let themselves go on trial for $15/month. It seems we have a binary idea of privacy, when the reality is much more complex.
I'm 26, and don't know anyone, myself included, who purchases and downloads music to any significant degree. Essentially everyone I know just uses streaming platforms.
Sure. But the question you asked was "Do people not just download music anymore?", and the answer to that question, which you seemed unaware of, is "Not really, no".
Do enjoy your highly refined and elevated desires, O noble one.
Part of my job is traveling by air, so I got a $30ish sandisc mp3 player with a 200+gb sd card. I have a bunch of music and sometimes podcasts on there. Saves my phone battery, has zero ads, and as a bonus it has fm radio for surfing the stations below as they fade in and out every minute or so.
to be fair, to buy albums off sites like bandcamp, cutting out greedy multinational media conglomerates and give the money to the ppl actually working on it (yeah, i know, fees, welcome to distribution) and getting basically every (losslees/hr) codec in return for "name your price"-conditions makes it questionable to pirate some indie album to save like three bucks.
This is always surprising to me. I can understand streaming video due to their high file sizes, but audio (even FLACs) is a lot smaller in general. The only reason I use spotify sometimes is to discover new stuff.
I have my music library that I listen to, to which I add songs by getting them from youtube (it’s good enough for my cheap on the go earphones). Sometimes I tune into radio stations that offer nonstop music (like stubru tijdloze).
In total, I’ve probably already spent weeks on completing captcha. It often takes me up to 5 minutes, “try again, try again, try again, wasn’t able to verify try again later,…”
Apparently, doing a captcha right the first time reeks of robot, and deliberately clicking a wrong tile, before deselecting it again to complete it looks more human.
I have no idea if that’s actually a thing or not, but the few times I’ve tried it, the very first captcha accepted me right away, so idk.
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