While Gabe’s famous line still holds true, I find that repeating it without qualification is increasingly glib, because vendors are making the matter a technology issue instead, thanks to years of investment in DRM techniques. In the long term, either side’s ability to enforce its will on the other will come down to availability/control of compute resources, and unit economics.

Keeping corporate at bay is going to require a combination of maintaining the commons, seeing genuine competition in cultural production, improving consumer legal frameworks, and becoming politically conscious of our entitlement to digital rights.

In my day it was a sight of your ID alone, and only on the cashier’s discretion. Which is still the norm today at many retailers. I will never use any POS system that requires ID scanning/PII provision as a default.

It’s probably my inexperience with self-checkout speaking, but I would never enter PII into a corporate terminal for the sake of a six-pack.

I knew I just needed to type my bday on their terminal to get it to sell, so I went n did it lol.

EWW

In EVE Online that’s called ‘getting underneath the guns’. 🎓

Two of my colleagues still use locally stored plaintext for individual work credentials, despite having been shown where the password manager is. Both have accessed their files in front of me. If it’s not in those files it’s saved in the browser (because convenience is a hell of a drug). Now you start to see why discrete managers have a hard time, even amongst technology workers.

I should have realised it was an instance issue. Thanks!

‘I don’t care’ is the refrain of someone who doesn’t know how to safeguard his digital interests. Easier to pretend it doesn’t matter than admit to wanting to hit land, but are adrift at sea with no bearings or tools. It’s not entirely your friend’s fault either. Education systems have so much ground to catch up.

Libretube is usually broken in some fashion (often a fatal one, like failing to load video).

I hope I’m wrong about her, but she is a politician. Constituencies are built to gain office, and the closer she gets to power the more she will (and must) contort her program.

Black and white are English words at least a thousand years old. They’ve taken on numerous positive, negative and neutral connotations over time. But all that heritage and utility doesn’t matter, and must be denied, because in 2023 it doesn’t suit some people’s politics to use ‘black’ in any context besides referring to a black person.

I think that’s a very sad and limiting attitude toward language.

She’ll do an about-face as she approaches spitting distance of POTUS.

Head to 4chan: /r/ Requests and /t/ Torrents. Good magnet link trade there.

Vendors should be entitled to withdraw support on particular hardware, but they shouldn’t be allowed to brick the service as a result ‘just because’. All it needs is a TOS/EULA update prompt advising that viewers with X hardware are on their own as of now. I’d be willing to bet this denial of service practice originates in kickback discussions between TV manufacturers and streamers.

It strikes me as another case where corporate can inculcate learned helplessness in the customer by having him think disallowing and withdrawing support for are indivisible.

In a letter written to X’s head of global government affairs Nick Pickles on April 17, the CBC said their label was “factually incorrect” because the government doesn’t have involvement in CBC’s editorial decisions.

Many public broadcasters are set up so that their governance is done at ‘arms-length’ from the sitting government. The problem is that the mechanisms used to achieve this (usually a government-appointed board of directors, a parliamentary committee, etc.) often intervene in coverage on behalf of an annoyed government, including threats to litigate against the entity, termination threats against the director or other personnel, tabling of targeted legislation designed to make the entity’s life worse, etc. These governance bodies are kind of like car brakes made of balsa wood: rock solid when not in use, then a pile of sawdust during the organization’s time of need.

For that reason I’m happy with X’s label, even though I value public broadcasting, because history has shown executive government tends to issue marching orders to media (no matter their ‘independence’) whenever it feels that getting its way is particularly vital. The motive for the label may be ideological given Musk’s record, but it has some utility to the reader in that it reminds them of a broader, awkward truth about government funding.

(I think the general media’s shunning of X has a certain coordination about it, and that it’s really about sector-felt resentment rather than engagement metrics. The metrics stuff is just noise, and likely explains the refusal to disclose the engagement figures mentioned in the article. Musk to them is a foreign occupier, and they are the underground resistance, withholding their content/advertising dollars, determined to undermine his efforts to reforge Twitter to X and ensure they get ‘their’ platform back.)

If OP takes the Soulpill, I offer some tips:

• Don’t despair if search results carry a [private] prefix. Some of these people just got frustrated once upon a time and decided to whitelist peers rather than blacklist. Often they just want a polite PM asking for access. It pays to be inquisitive, so check their User Info for information.
• Chat rooms don’t need to be occupied to obtain or download search results. In fact it’s usually better to ignore them.
• 99 per cent of users would rather you share 3 albums than 500 system files.

Yeah, better to stay on Youtube and Reddit and Xitter, where there’s no propaganda. Odysee’s content range might accommodate the moderate centre better if people started using it. And we can’t have that!

/artist initial/artist name/album name (It’s a fool’s errand trying to create a folder scheme that accounts for every classification edge case. Accept the mess!)

Tagging is outsourced to the BT tracker community. Playback via cmus or Emby.

The existence of the paid offering doesn’t invalidate use of the free offering, regardless of whether people are permitting ads on the latter. Any given Youtube page is just a collection of web elements and a call to a video server: these things get loaded or blocked at my sole discretion. My hardware, my web browser, my internet bandwidth, my opsec, my time.

If I put household items out on the nature strip, I have no expectation that passers-by will have a cup of tea with me first, then take every item as an indivisible lot. So my proposal to Google is: take those items off the nature strip, put them back inside the house and lock the door. Until they do that, no issue exists, despite the company’s efforts to fabricate one.

You should refer her to Cory Doctorow’s writing, namely his concept of enshittification. He’s one of the most effective political communicators alive today. If anyone can get her to understand the import of the issues surrounding Reddit’s Simple Jack routine, it’s him.