Doesn’t matter. They’ve been replacing the content people with repost bots and AI bots for years and most people won’t notice if half those power posters leave as a result. Many of the power posters would stay on Reddit anyways short of being charged $10/post simply for the feeling of being important which they derive from being influential.

Thats not even getting into how the US Air Force has been astroturfing Reddit for over a decade with most active city Eglin Air Force base and would therefore put paid effort in to keep it afloat and their psyops reaching minds. Heck tons of organic posters leaving gives them a chance to seize mod positions and make trustworthy names for accounts under their control.

It’s actually very easy. Don’t use your TV as anything but a display. Don’t connect it to the internet ever.

If you need to watch content on it get an appropriate device. If you want to watch BluRays buy a BluRay player. If you want to do streaming buy a streaming device at a price point and privacy level to your liking. Yes the streaming devices collect some data too but they don’t have mics and cameras and they can’t tell corporations and the government the contents of the vacation photo slide show off your laptop which you plugged in. Also you can in future often neuter many of the more expensive streaming devices and if you get sick of the streaming device you have, you can just buy a different one and sell the old one.

As to librelec and “sucking”. If you’re trying to do yo-ho stuff with free streaming sites and services it isn’t going to be great. Frankly if you want some quality and good experience either pay for a commercial streaming service (or a good IPTV one*) or invest in learning how to host your own content with an Arr stack. This used to be a lot cheaper but AI has ruined everything. Nothing we can do about that.

*yeah good ones are hard to find and one should never pay ahead as many of them vanish suddenly.

Then you’re very ignorant.

Apple’s presence is good because it’s a privacy anonymizing service that obscures your email and forwards anything to an email of your choice and logins/connections can be deleted at any time.

And it was introduced in response to the long existing proliferation of login with Google and Facebook and similar schemes. They forced it using their App Store because otherwise no company would go for the user identity obfuscation over the already existed for years privacy invasive alternatives. Apple came late and forced companies to allow their privacy obfuscation alternative. Note: though it often is more private some sites can request additional data from Apple same as from Google and Facebook such as your name. Apple is no worse and often better overall as a choice just the same though it’s best to avoid these types of login IMO.

I admit my mind went to this too. It’s a shame I just can’t view this thing with anything but anger since learning it is horrendous-tier dehumanizing zionist propaganda from a rabid zionist writer. The game and the show. Shame on the actors for continuing to participate in that zionist agit-prop in the middle of a genocide carried out by the people the writer is doing apologia for.

Unfortunately with AI induced RAM pricing prices are up across the board so cheap is out if you want extra functionality.

You can get as someone suggested the OSMC device. As well as various other third party streamer devices that support OSMC or CoreElec though the Vero does hit near the top for features for video watching as per the spreadsheet linked here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=385600

But if you want general purpose distros that allow emulation you probably want an N150 or similar mini-PC. The tricky part there is that while you can get lets of cheaper older used mini-PCs for emulation if you want to do hardware 4K HDR video content decoding then you need something more recently made for efficiency sake so you’re not pushing the processor to the max just watching videos.

If it has to be under $250 then your options are things like the Vero V or other streaming focused devices but you give up general purpose distro and emulation (I think, Kodi does technically offer a games feature but I’ve never used it and am not familiar) OR else you’re going with a used mini-PC that will okay for general purpose distro and light emulation may struggle with your 4K HDR content depending on video codec used and bitrate.

If you can afford a bit more >$250 but <$350 you can get an N150 or similar intel system that should handle all of the above.

A caveat on the N150 route though is currently there is no support for Dolby Vision, HDR+, etc. You only get plain old HDR and that’s not likely to change anytime soon as it’s a driver issue and no one makes one.

If streaming your own video content is your most important goal and you may need things like DV and other HDR+ formats then go with the Vero V or another item listed near the top of the Kodi list like the Ugoos or Homatics.

It’s not a fallacy when multiple countries/states have passed laws that explicitly demand some form of ID confirmation/scanning and others have stated an intent for it. It’s not a fallacy when you understand what the purpose of this push actually is.

The fact is the end result isn’t going to be compliance with the least restrictive standard but the most. That’s how regulatory compliance always works. You always comply with the most restrictive because it encompasses the least restrictive as well. Further if you stopped to think and analyzed history scientifically instead of it being a series of great man events or whatever you’d understand how capitalism in crisis reacts by crushing the working class using tools like fascism. That the 5-eyes spying abuse far from being some deviation from liberalism embody the deeper desires and wants of the modern western world to spy on and control their citizens and the world and that a free internet has been an incredible threat to state power since day one.

It’s just the first big moment where their propaganda failed, where their narrative was undermined was the Gaza genocide and they will do anything to prop up the Zio-Nazi entity occupying Palestine and prevent their other narratives from suffering the same fate in future. A man in the “free speech” loving EU was unpersoned FFS and can’t be given money, buy food, stay at hotels, use banks, anything for deviating too far from the approved EU narrative. These are the people we’re dealing with.

It’s also not a fallacy when AI has created a crisis for private/government spy fusion platforms like Meta, Google, etc in both gaining ad dollars due to AI bots being hard to discern so hard identifying humans is a must for not only spying but profits from ads.

For a long time the material interests of the massive tech companies and their financial backers and shareholders did not particularly benefit from this kind of ID law and so they pushed back and disallowed it. Now thanks to AI their interests align with those of the state, the capitalist propaganda organs, the moral crusaders. There is in other words nothing major standing in their way and tons of power centers pushing for this as a result of AI, the Gaze genocide breaking containment, etc and it has gained momentum.

I’m afraid this isn’t the win you think it is.

One of two things will happen in the near future:

1. Nearly everything you do online from banking to shopping to social media (including online gaming) to paying your electric or internet bill to yes porn will require OS-level attestation to access and use the site. Linux lacking this will become an incredibly private OS that is useless for anything online making this a defeat for Linux having any hopes of real desktop market share and/or forcing it to comply. Microsoft, Apple, Google would love to push Linux as an OS option off the table.

2. Kids will start using liveboot or installing Linux and evading these controls, Christian fascists, tech overlord capitalists, and the government will take notice and write a bill to close this “loophole” and within a few years having already established the idea in the popular conception that age verification is okay will face lesser resistance in quickly ramming it through.

Quickly running out of places where VPN companies can be legally incorporated/based and where exit servers can be located that aren’t subject to advancing laws like these.

All the fools who were saying “lol they can’t ban VPNs, impossible!!!” are looking well ever more foolish and will feel very confused and shocked when the pain actually hits them and they realize it’s not so easy and they were wrong and complacent and too late now to do anything. But these are primarily westerners who’ve never had the western sanctions regime and its full power turned against anything they care about so they can be forgiven a bit for not understanding how powerful it is, its total dominance of financial exchange and how lacking a counter state interest by Russia or China in spinning up their own censorship resistant VPN for western users there isn’t really much counter to it. Russia and China are going to sit and laugh at you flailing about in the tattered remains of your liberal illusions of freedom and not lift a finger to help.

Sure you can pay for a VPS and spin up a VPN on that but that has your credit card on it with your name making it clear its you doing it and providing zero plausible deniability and as a non-residential IP you’re going to be getting increasing amounts of blocks by anti-AI-scraper methods as well as fraud alerts. Also it doesn’t hide you in the crowd so even advertisers who don’t have access to your credit card like authorities would will be able to associate all your activity back to one person and it’s just a short correlation from there via a mistake back to your real identity. Also won’t help much with torrenting copyright content as your provider will drop you at the first sign of trouble. Maybe you can find one that shrugs off DMCAs but I bet you’ll be paying through the nose. No more $5/month long term plan, get ready for $25/month and much higher than that and you still won’t necessarily be able to avoid ISP throttling of your traffic if they move to allow-listing for uncapped speeds only to known services and throttle everything else.

Very grim.

Then they will break you and industry that wants data will win. You vs bourgeois governments, you will lose.

This is a serious push and though children are the cover they’re after surveillance. Take away their talking points, give them what they claim to want but in a privacy-preserving way and this goes away for another 10 years before they can make another push.

If we win this fight by doing a zero knowledge form they have no scaffolding to use on which to build anything further. If we lose and they build something that isn’t zero knowledge it will 100% be used in a few years to iterate on to build more surveillance and control.

Basically if we don’t push for this privacy alternative and instead fight like hell against it entirely they’ll listen to the only voices putting forward a solution which is meta and the other privacy invasive actors who want an invasive approach. If it’s made heard that people will accept this we can shunt them onto this path.

Ideally we’d push onto this path but make demands that it doesn’t require verification. That parents can set it up at phone/computer setup and it cannot be changed without reinstalling the OS or erasing the phone and that on phones it gets tied to a Google/Apple account. That way there’s not even any identity aspect involved but tools given to parents who want to do this. Shove it back to parental responsibility. But this would be a compromise we could live with and still have some privacy with.

For proprietary streaming apps where I want to be able to see what’s going on because I’m allowed a higher resolution than a 720p blurry mess? Apple’s TVos seems pretty great. Zero ads, smooth, devices are overpowered for watching just TV. It does have apps for Jellyfin and Plex though I’d have to suggest infuse instead which is a $12 annual subscription for 4k or any proprietary audio codecs but it does work pretty well.

For everything else some version of libelec or corelec depending on the device in question it’s being installed on. There are also external launchers that keep Android but remove most of the problems.

If you want plug and it works then AppleTV. If you’re interested in putting in some work maybe a custom launcher on an android install. Beyond that libelec, coreleck, and Kodi.

Kodi maintains a big csv list of hardware (and software) with capabilities and suggestions here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=376035

Dust, fingerprints, etc.

Allegedly they may check these things under black lights at the factory for any evidence of opening to attempt to deny warranty. With drive prices having doubled since I bought it and all capacity bought out they’d be extra eager to find any excuse to attempt to deny. Magnuson–Moss warranty act should prevent them from doing that but I don’t have a high power law firm on retainer to sue and intimidate western digital into compliance if they tell me to pound dirt.

Thanks for the kind offer.

Funnily enough I have a WD HDD enclosure that I shucked a drive from not too long ago. I do recall someone mentioning the circuit boards on those being functional as a USB to SATA bridge but I suppose I presumed they need mains power and didn’t want the extra mess. That and I guess I wanted to keep the one I had pristine in case I need to RMA after putting it back together again as I’ve heard people have real mixed experience with RMAing shucked drives and with prices the way they are well I’d rather not take chances given I’ve only the one.

You don’t understand.

The alternative to device based private attestation which is what this is or could be part of is constant online verification by Palantir.

Is every time you want to view porn or adult content you have to verify your real identity so evil corporations and the government who pays them know exactly what your fetishes are and can blackmail you. So they know exactly what you’re posting online because you have to face-scan and ID-scan to set up an email account, a social media account, any account with anything that allows posting content online. Is training the population not to enter a date for their kids or themselves when setting up a computer or device account for the first time, once but upon demand scan their face, scan their ID, comply, sit meekly in fear because everything they do online is known.

What does this know? Your birthday. That’s nothing. As it stands it you can enter anything you want. Fight them when they come to add a verification system to this and point out parents would be in a position to set this up for their kids anyways and its just spying. Fight on stronger ground.

We’ve already lost the maximalist position. The internet scanning and ID verification has already been enacted in several states and countries and we risk a world where it becomes the norm and hosting companies drop anyone who doesn’t implement it because they’re made liable as well. This stuff won’t be repealed. People don’t live in democracies. They live in a dictatorship of the wealthy and the corporations. Your dissent doesn’t matter and it cannot reach most tech illiterate people who have far more pressing concerns than to riot over this.

This is a compromise solution and I wish more people would see it. If you can bend you don’t break. If you don’t bend and your enemy is the government they are stronger than you and they will snap you like a twig.

Linux desktop market share is too small to matter. And if you make this push fail then the only alternative, the only viable solution these politicians who are being cajoled and urged to implement this will see is online live-scan face and ID verification and it’ll sweep everything. You’ll have destroyed the internet and having saved Linux won’t matter. After that it’ll be a quick move to ban encryption that the government cannot break and ISPs will block traffic they can’t inspect. Game over. A simple maneuver from the place you force them to by refusing to cooperate and enact this compromise, privacy-preserving solution. We need strong defensible positions to protect privacy and the internet and free software and to understand that the old ways have been lost, they’ve died, they’ve been strangled and a compromise position must be taken up to endure and avoid a total loss.

Edit: To be clear, I agree with you in general. I just got bugged a bit by those three things 😅

You do not. You are misinformed and propagandized. Your choice of examples revealed that clearly and nothing you say can refute that fact. Read Marx, read Lenin, your understanding of the state is lacking.

For one, anyone educated would understand that Americans are the best example of sheep in the world and that many Europeans are good second examples. The British for example with their high tolerance for a surveillance, laws that criminalize all manners of small trivialities, etc, etc. Educate yourself.

“We have to comply with the law”. This has become Russia or China where the sheep people do whatever an oligarchy dictate.

“What are we a bunch of Asians?”

Also China isn’t run by an “oligarchy” but by a dictatorship of the communist party via a mandate of the masses (they execute CEOs and rich people there, we let them rape kids and commit horrific crimes of greed and fine them less than they made off that crime). Russia is but so is the west and I prefer the term capitalists or if you prefer the original French “bourgeoisie”.

There was a study from one of the big ivy league universities that showed that in the US the people don’t get what they want, popular policy is consistently not passed nor popular will acted on. Princeton I think.

So it’s not what people per se want, it’s what the ruling class (capitalists in the west) wants. And they’ve decided that because the rate of profit falls and their demand for profit grows that they need to put the population under lock and key because they’ve made economic conditions worse and they’re going to get worse yet. They need a police state to control the workers who might want better conditions or gasp to take some or all of their wealth. This is part of that.

This is also because China is rising and they are terrified of people seeing a more equal, just society that can be created through socialism. They are terrified of dissenting voices so they want to remove anonymity so they can terrorize dissidents and opponents into silence. They saw what happened with their attempts at narrative shaping in Gaza, they are deeply alarmed that tik tok won’t be the last thing, a new one could pop up anywhere, right now they play whack a mole, they want to control the whole thing top to bottom.

As to people being sheep. It’s more like they’re beaten down. You defeat this today they come back in a year and then again and again. They have all the money, all the time and are willing to wear people down, use their capitalist owned media to propagandize and sensationalize for this until the people are exhausted and stop fighting it so hard. People work long hours, they take home less money than ever, the government openly abuses people, the police don’t act fairly and persecute black people, there’s a sense of there being no fairness and not enough time. The people are also mis-educated. They’re led to believe there’s this big problem, they don’t understand technology and passively accept their leadership has some amount of good will in how they pass laws and govern to address real problems the bourgeois press has done its job of propagandizing them for. They can’t see the whole picture because of these facts.

1. Don’t sync anything to icloud you wouldn’t want the government being able to get it or generally want to keep private.
2. Go through privacy settings, especially location settings and check what you’re allowing including system services, adjust as you feel comfortable while still meeting your needs.
3. Pay attention to what apps you’re installing. Most profiling data is not sold by say Google directly off your phone but based off ad-networks incorporated in third party apps you install. The app store has a scorecard on all apps showing you how much if at all they profile and spy on you, make use of it, make wise choices, don’t install bad apps.
4. Install a privacy respecting adblocker to help limit tracking while using the web browser
5. Limit permissions for apps. If you must use an app that has location tracking consider only allowing it while you’re using the app, this may have implications for some extended functionality like updating while in the background or via Apple’s little info tiles.
6. Disable siri or limit it, turn off “hey siri” mode in settings.
7. Enable lock-down mode (this is an extreme step and will result in some loss of functionality, Apple details the implications themselves so take a look at their page on it before doing so)
8. Disable radios such as bluetooth and wifi while outside your house to prevent any possibility of their use in tracking you. You can actually make a “Shortcut” using app of the same name from Apple to automate this anytime you leave home and I believe there are existing ones you can find if you search around.

Apple phones are fairly private as long as you don’t use icloud for anything sensitive, apply common sense privacy settings, and pay attention to what apps you install and what permissions you give. Also don’t send them crash or debugging data as that can contain personal info potentially so uncheck that option.

Use the IMDB ID for search in that instance.

The ID is the part of the URL that starts with “tt”. Lots of sites support that and for instances like that it’s the best bet. Do include the double t when searching.

Note: this works via API with jackett. It will probably work otherwise but worth trying the searcher plugins in qBittorrent using this method even without jackett.

SMR in those. Also typically 5200RPM vs 7200RPM speed.

From experience I can say you can’t reliably play back high bitrate content from those. Read and write speeds get bad after you’ve used 1/3-1/2 the drive. Oh 8-14MB/s should be fine. But forget playing a 4K encode at 20MB/s with a 2MB/s audio track.

As backup drives they’re acceptable as long as you can accept much longer write times to refresh data.

Bigger drives with power supplies generally are 7200RPM. Many of the lower capacity ones (under 14TB) are still SMR but you should be able to play back higher bitrate content and get a bit better read/write performance.

@davel@lemmy.ml

I was willing to give this user I’m replying to a crumb of benefit of the doubt but given they’re using Nazi dog whistles and don’t seem repentant about spreading Nazi conspiracy theories after being made aware of it (see their reply to me and their other posts) and instead seem to double down. I think action may be warranted under global rule 1 given it’s unacceptable to be a Nazi or talking like one here.

Given they were also banned from the CTH sub on hexbear for the same behavior I think it’s clear they’re beyond saving in their desire to spread Nazism.

All that would happen absolute worst case scenario if MS breaks this is your users would get a whining complaint about not being activated. Get a small “Activate Windows” logo stuck in the lower right hand of their screen and would lose the ability to change wallpapers, customize windows colors, etc.

To be clear it wouldn’t break the install and it would leave it in a state in which you could use an updated version of MAS (reminder MAS supports multiple activation options) to fix it remotely.