Balotelli joined Al-Ittifaq last month and has now claimed he was subjected to racial abuse during a game on Wednesday

A consequence of the centralization of the web into fewer and fewer providers and monopolies is that talks of piracy dwindled on the internet over the years. Then with the streaming boom of the mid-2010s it was completely dead.

Now piracy has become a dirty word that people fear to utter. You can be banned on social media for talking about it, and most people just avoid the topic entirely. It's like jaywalking (you probably know the history but it was a 'crime' started by auto manufacturers to claim the streets back from pedestrians).

Talks of "it's on the pirate bay" have been replaced with 'it's on netflix. it's on hulu with ads. it's on amazon prime and they have a deal right now.'

And yes, this was really things people said. They would readily tell you to go look for it on thepiratebay, you had entire websites that hosted episodes of your favorite shows for streaming. I remember watching the simpsons on wtso, literally watch-the-simpsons-online. It wasn't just the circles I was in back in the day, people really talked more openly about piracy. Even when as far back as the early 2000s there were attempts already by the RIAA to equate piracy with violent crime.

People use debrid services they pay for just to watch shows when you can still torrent things as easily as before. They rationalize it as being cheaper than paying for streaming services - but I pay 0$ for stremio+torrentio addon. Maybe debrid services have their extra uses but they just seem like kind of a luxury from the way people talk about them. And yes torrenting works perfectly fine on a VPN.

Even wilder (but not unexpected) there are people who tie their self-worth to paying for streaming services. Apparently you're 'poor' if you don't pay 20$ a month for netflix. Even in the era of DVDs we already knew it was ludicrous to ask someone to pay 20$ for a DVD. IP gatekeeps media from people, it doesn't allow it to be made.

The message is clear: if you don't have money, you don't deserve to experience culture.

The economic arguments had been thoroughly discussed and concluded back in the 2000s already; studies showed that people who pirate are not likely to buy the content so there was no 'lost sale'. Piracy also makes a copy, it doesn't remove the original, so it's not the same as stealing.

For a while this gained traction, and then monopolies emerged and completely shut down any talk of piracy in the public sphere.

There's a talk of convenience, that it's more convenient to open up netflix or steam and buy the game or movie there. But is it? You have to login, provide payment info, etc. At its hardest pirating a game consisted of downloading the torrent, installing, running keygen, and then going on cdfreeworld or whatever it was called to download the no-cd fix. Today it's even easier, most games come in a portable format.

And yet it's never been easier to pirate things. Books, games, shows, are still just as accessible as they've ever been, maybe even more. Used to be emulating a nintendo DS at the time it was in production was out of reach of most people on their home computer, and you had to buy a super expensive microSD card that had maybe 256MB of space on it to run an R4 in your DS. Today, you can easily emulate the nintendo switch on a home machine. You can root your 3DS super easily by just following a guide, and even download games directly from an app on it (but I found it to be very slow bc of the wifi protocol the 3ds uses).

Not only that but piracy preserves material. All those IPs that holders just sit on and do nothing with because they might have a profitable idea for it down the line. All those books that don't get reprints that can still be read, and those games that can still be played when you can't find them in stores any longer.

Not only that but it creates fans who will go on to purchase media. It keeps licenses alive, so there's benefits to the capitalist corporations too. They just want to pretend it's a solved problem because they fear it hurting their bottom line. A lot of artists got discovered in the music industry by being widely pirated, which got them a record deal.

You also own your media this way; it's on your hard-drive. I remember when Steam became a giant in the video game selling business, people were worried about how you didn't really own the games. Steam can ban your account at any time and you'd lose everything you've ever bought from them. You have no recourse.

Emulators also help preserve games. Nintendo's own NES emulators aren't great, they fail at a lot of tasks. This is "just" the NES so they're pretty basic games, but this failure on tests means that emulation is not 1:1 accurate as if on a real machine and can start behaving strangely. Open-source emulators are better than the 'official' ones from the IP holders.

Even on here we self-censor about piracy and other topics so as not to draw attention to the lemmyverse. It's become a ubiquitous dirty word and in good company one must pretend not to know what piracy even is, because corporations demand it.

Torch is a barebones self hosted chat system built for the terminal. Rapidly deploy long-term worldwide encrypted communication with a onion static address.

The server is a rudementry TCP relay which does three things. Accepts incoming connections, tracks connected clients, rebroadcasts live encrypted blobs and the last 100 messages.

The clients utilizes python cryptography library and handles AES encryption, provides a TUI with ncurses, and handles a few local commands.

Simulate rooms by changing your encryption/room key and hide messages you cannont decrypt with /hide

The system operates in ram, when the host terminates the session the history is gone.

A single file installer that builds dependencies, creates source directory, concats client / server python programs, and configures the hidden service, and manages the program operations.

This is IRC built to leverage the Tor infrastructurem. No network configuration, opening ports, purchasing of domains, or third party services.

Deploy on mobile via Termux, or your favorite distro.

Source

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/176626

From BBC News via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10695948

Visiting the National Library of China in Beijing — the largest library in Asia and one of the largest libraries in the world — to understand why so many people come here to study.

Through a night visit and a real-time tour, I look beyond the architecture to focus on the people inside: what they are studying, how long they study for, and why libraries in China play such an important role in everyday life.

Feds could be in your group chat

Wanting to dip my toes into kubernetes for homelab stuff and I have a few questions.

1. Do I need a specialized OS for it? I've been trying to get some TalOS VMs running but I've ran into some issues. Would you recommend like a Ubuntu server running kubernetes over something like TalOS?

2. Could I run this on a Windows server? I'm personally a Linux guy, but a friend who prefers windows server wanted to try it and I thought I'd ask.

3. Can I migrate Docker services to a Kube cluster? How easy is it?

4. Any recommendations for learning materials? I've clearly struggled with TalOS's quick start materials as I haven't been able to get into the tutorial cluster made with docker locally. I keep getting weird errors and reinstalling Talosctl and docker. I've diagnosed this as a "skill issue". My learning budget is like $100 for a udemy class or good interactive guide (Paid for by work apparently. I was learning this for fun, but it may actually be needed knowledge for a project)

Archive link

Cadmium in breakfast cereals, aluminum in pastries and sweet biscuits, lead in bread, mercury in fish and acrylamide in fries and sautéed potatoes: French people – children in particular – are exposed to "excessively high" levels of chemical pollutants through their diet. The warning comes from the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES), which highlighted a "health risk" for three metals (cadmium, aluminum and mercury) and a "health concern" – in the absence of a reference toxicological threshold – for lead and acrylamide, an organic compound formed during cooking methods above 120°C (such as frying or roasting).

These conclusions are based on the third major total diet study (EAT3), the previous one having been conducted between 2006 and 2011. The study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of chronic exposure to chemical contaminants in food among the population of France. The first results were published on Thursday, February 12. EAT3 targeted more than 250 substances. Further sections, covering other pollutant families (including pesticide residues, PFAS, bisphenols, phthalates, etc.), will be released gradually in the coming years.

The foods selected for the study (272 in total) represented more than 90% of the average French diet. Over 700 samples were collected between May 2021 and August 2022 from supermarkets and markets in three departments (Hérault on the Mediterranean coast, Loiret south of Paris, and Puy-de-Dôme in the center of France). These were analyzed in laboratories to identify and quantify chemical contaminants. The results were then combined with food consumption data to estimate population exposure and health risks.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/59010146

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/59010141

Nissan Motor Corp., based in the port city of Yokohama, said Thursday it posted a 28.3 billion yen ($185 million) loss for the October-December quarter, about twice the 14 billion yen loss it recorded a year earlier.

“I’m proud to officially name the undispuut...” Trump said, before muttering unintelligible gibberish for about two seconds.

“Trump, slurring: I’m proud to officially name the...undishpu...the...jshhhh...whendidthiscomeout,” wrote the Headquarters account, which is operated by Harris’ team.

All this talk about Discord replacements plus my own experience attempting to host a Synapse has got me wondering why it seems so hard to implement voice chat.

Stupid idea: back in 2022 I got an Asterisk server working on a raspberry pi over AREDN without too much trouble. What's stopping people from just using a PBX like that for voice chat?