Archive is on American soil. They got sued for lending ebooks during the pandemic and lost, so they are not a safe bet. Archive elsewhere. Anywhere else.

Right now we have no other solutions/fixes. You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won't work anymore.

This might explain why mine has been reliable even though it hasn't been updated in months. I guess add me to the list of confirmations that it works on residential connections.

The answer has got to be helix ;)

I've got some bad news for you. Mozilla bought an ad company.

Ooh damn. Mandrake was my first distro, I remember being sooo excited when the CDs came in the mail. It was I think 4 discs?

The experience was absolutely not good lol. At the time I only had one computer (some eMachines something or other) and a 56k line that only went to 14400 or 2600 baud depending on the weather. My NIC wasn't supported and after some banging my head on the desk I ended up going back to windows 98se after a few days because it was the family computer I messed up and caught sooo much flak for wiping.

Returned some years later when it was called Mandriva and had a better experience with a custom built AMD machine. The eMachines machine by then was still around as a network file server running a flavour of BSD that served media to my OG xbox played through XBMC (now Kodi).

Great post OP and thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Apple confirmed that the Epic Games Store for iOS in the EU compiled with most of its guidelines, but it had an issue with the "a download button and related copy".

Apparently, Apple felt that the download button and related copy might mislead users into thinking they were made by the iPhone maker. While Apple has approved the app, it wants Epic to make the changes before the next app review.

There's the catch. Emphasis is from the original article.

To be honest, the extreme negative reaction was a surprise to me, as I thought interaction between disparate systems was the entire point, but clearly we didn’t navigate the culture correctly.

Noooo fucking shit? If they spent more than a minute on a proper instance and not ~~milquetoast~~ mastodon dot social, they would have realised that a good number of fedi users despise shenanigans like this?

I'm a fan of hellpotting them.

We have recently received a takedown request for content not directly related to these communities, but it prompted us to review other piracy related content and communities.

What a pathetic response. I am interpreting this as:

We will fold whenever we get a legal request, real or not.

To users on .world, I strongly recommend scrubbing your posts, deleting your account, and then going to a different instance. These admins have proven that they WILL buckle to legal pressure no matter what - that means also giving up user data upon request. Your data is completely accessible by admins. That includes your private messages and unpublished pictures.

Off the top of my head I can think of a few scenarios:

• Being LGBTQIA+ in a country where its illegal to be
• Consuming content from websites not approved by the Chinese government while being a Chinese citizen
• Disparaging the Chinese government while being a Chinese citizen
• Activism discussion (eg. extinction rebellion, antifa, the auntie network)
• Right to repair in countries where its illegal to circumvent device DRM to perform repairs

I've deleted my account there because that TOS and so-called privacy policy are complete and utter trash.

Sorry to say, you've mistakenly made one hell of a generalisation on that last sentence. Other than that one stinky turd, the rest is spot-on.

The truth is that if somebody was going to pirate software, then they were never going to buy it in the first place and it’s greedy and mentally ill to think otherwise..

I've been on the piracy scene since 2001 and was a moderator for one of the largest dreamcast piracy forums once upon a time. The core members of that forum are still together on Discord and we all buy things wherever possible. Gabe Newell is correct in that piracy is a service problem.

Steam cut my games piracy down to zero for the longest time (501 games, 414 DLC) because it was more convenient and had frequent sales. Other companies that decided to pull away from Steam and conspire with publishers regarding timed exclusives on a platform that doesn't want me as a customer (Epic). As a result, anything that is an Epic exclusive is pirated indiscriminately and seeded for several weeks. I don't even play any of them. Download, seed for a week, delete, rinse and repeat on the next exclusive. The same goes for anything with Denuvo DRM.

GOG has DRM free games, there's a site where they are all available for download, and I've discovered quite a few gems that way. Those gems got purchased on Steam because GOG also doesn't want me as a customer, even though I had decent library and bought several games at launch on there. I'm refusing to use a third party launcher to install games from there because once again, its a service problem.

Netflix cut my video piracy to zero between 2011 and 2020. When I moved across the world, I brought only my clothes, laptop, and storage drives. Everything I wanted to watch was available on Netflix or YouTube. Once Netflix started losing shows like Futurama, Parks & Rec, and even Sons of Anarchy, I went straight back to piracy and haven't looked back. Netflix only continued to get my money because my partner insisted on doing things legally. By the time she had enough in October 2023, we were paying for Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Ziggo, YouTube, Curiosity Stream, and HBO. At the moment, only Curiosity remains.

Adding up the 3 "services" we consume content from the most (not including the ones we watch one show here and there on) added up to €497 per year. My piracy costs €472 per year not including electricity, which is used anyway since the server also hosts a boat load of microservices like NextCloud which replaces yet another subscription storage. It's costing me €72 to rent a seedbox, and €400 at the upper-end for a large NAS drive one time per year.

It's a service problem and I don't think those who refuse to contribute to the broken service problem are mentally ill. The "managers" in charge are.

I'm expecting to hike my rate of piracy in 2024 as I continue to take a bigger bite out of overall corporate profits.

Buying a proprietary 3D printer with internet connectivity. What could possibly go wrong?

Going by the linked forum post, Anycubic has been aware of it for two months. Any competent FOSS project would have nipped that in the bud on the same day it was discovered. Incredible.