I just use ViMusic or RiMusic or one of those types of forks. I believe it uses YouTube and other sources. It is ad-free and has the usual stuff you’d expect like suggestions, playlists, genres etc. Occasionally the source platform will make a change that breaks it, an update comes out fixes it.

That and there are still (probably ancient at this point) desktop clients that scrape your Pandora and download local copies of all the tracks. That’s another good way to never listen to ads.

All I remember is the one where they are crawling around some shitty Route 66 diner and service station unsupervised while Stu pores over the entire menu and then eventually decides on, of all things, the fucking Patty Melt.

If you have your VPN client and torrent application set up correctly, your traffic would all be routed through the VPN and the network would see your VPN IP and not the actual IP of your machine. If you have a private tracker you can probably test this on their site as many will show you which IP they see as you seed.

A few considerations with this- Some VPN services do not support or allow torrenting. Also some trackers have issues with you using multiple IPs etc. so your account could be flagged if you have used different VPN nodes over time.

It would legitimately not surprise me at this point if Google starts serving precise bra ads to your girlfriend after discerning cup size from her nudes.

Yeah these have basically been ineffective for P2P such as torrenting for many years. The media companies can just outsource their Anti-Sharing campaigns to third parties and it is fairly trivial for them to do discovery from non-obvious or even residential IPs. They just have to open a given torrent long enough to see who is in swarm and start sending nastygrams to those ISPs.

The best way to protect yourself is seedbox/VPS in a jurisdiction with no filesharing enforcement, or at a minimum join a reputable private tracker, because then all participants are vetted and there will never be a snitch in swarm.

But not before causing 2+ years of tedious previously-unnecessary migration work. Thanks a lot assholes.

Are you sure I can’t save it in case I need to get out of the Backrooms some day?

This is bullshit. There are many people hired with the job title “Software Engineer” who don’t sit and generate code, and for a number of reasons.

You could be on a hybrid team that does projects and support, so you spend 80% of your time attending meetings, working tickets, working with users, and shuffling paper in whatever asinine change management process your company happens to use.

I have worked places where “engineers” ended up having to spend most of their time dicking around in ServiceNow/Remedy/etc. instead of doing their actual jobs. That’s shitty business process design and shitty management, and not a reflection of the employee doing nothing.

Yeah I was just about to say one obvious flaw in his methodology is that people could show up as “high productivity” by adding thousands of lines of worthless comments.

The House isn’t stuck with that though. They can amend the rules for the next session, and I’d imagine any speaker worth his salt would demand that rule be stricken because it is unworkable.

Eventually people come to the surprising realization that their best product was actually the Zune.

This could be a blessing in disguise… My main purpose would be to avoid Apple-style “client side scanning” which, in the hands of vertically-integrated Google hardware and software, amounts to exposing yourself to constant and on-demand warrantless searches.

Since there is no transparency into the hardware backdoors, the internal workings of the close sourced Google ROM, or the business agreement to cooperate with LE / intelligence agencies, bare minimum is to run an alternative OS that complicates their efforts to undermine user privacy. Hobbled AI features on the chip itself might actually be another safeguard, depending on how it is implemented.

Not a lawyer but I believe in the US this would be legal as you are granting the use of the original license and not duplicating any content for simultaneous use by others.

What I would like to see is a gentlemans agreement of sorts where companies agree not to come after people for playing pirate, emulated or archival copies of games that are decades old and not for sale in any format anymore. I guess this is somewhat encompassed in the framework of “Abandonware”.

While you should do this to block your TVs telemetry and other undesirable behavior, realize that YouTube native TV app ads can’t be blocked at DNS level alone without also blocking the core functionality of YouTube, due to the way it serves the ads.

This is and has been a big deal for a while. Do we really want easily trackable movements on every major road? What happens when they start feeding that data into federal fusion centers for cataloging and storage “just in case” they need it later?

What happens when a regime that criminalizes dissent has access to realtime vehicular and individual (via mobile phone) tracking data?

If you really need it to be secure and private, and are communicating mostly with known acquaintances within a reasonable radius, with low bandwidth requirements, LoRA with encryption is the best bet.

It is a higher bar of entry but at least you can be confident your messages won’t be intercepted in any useful form.

Maybe and maybe not. We need to encourage robust alternatives, unfortunately this requires a ton of capital to develop hardware and reserve fab time and get your devices fabricated instead of a major player like Google or Samsung.

We basically need something in the smartphone space equivalent to the Framework laptop, that can meet the security hardware requirements, allow bootloader unlock/relock and support GrapheneOS and other custom ROMs.

I am now of the opinion that you should just download books off indexing sites/IRC/ Usenet/torrents and if you like the book and want to support the author, buy a physical copy, or buy 2 and put one in a neighborhood free library. That maximizes the good you are doing and helps your community instead of just generating Bezos bux.

This.

Yeah… fuck this shit. This is part of the reason I still drive a nearly 20 year old vehicle. It has features I want, and can’t be stolen via fucking API calls. Absolute insanity.

I think Hyundai/Kia group has done unfathomable damage to their brands. Kia, despite being a budget brand, wants to be seen as a legit competitor to Toyota or at least Nissan. Their corner cutting with the immobilizers and the resulting “USB” theft shit was bad enough. Now this exploit.