As a non-American, sometimes you open your phone and there’s a meme with no context about a candidate being shot in the ear, or people eating cats, or transgender aliens or babies being aborted after they’re born or the president trying to buy Greenland and you just kind of go “Oh, America” and go about your day lol.

Yeah that was my first thought too. While I kind of get the spirit of it, in practice this is so absurdly dangerous IMO. Even if someone has the best possible intentions, there are so many things that could go wrong with this, especially if you include things like long-term effects that aren’t immediately apparent, or interactions with other drugs, especially if you’re taking other home-made pills with potentially unknown ingredients. While it can be frustrating to hear about a promising new medicine that won’t be available for years, there’s a reason why they spend so long testing these things.

IMO the better (but much more difficult) solution is reforming the medical industry so that it’s easier for people to see a doctor and actually afford to get medicine. I’m not usually a fan of big government stuff, but medicine is one of those things that just needs to be kept under supervision I think.

Literally every site in my regular rotation is completely unaffected lol.

Yeah same here, my backup for media is basically just a text file with the names of all the folders in my Movies directory so I have a list of what to download again when the drive craps out. I could buy terabytes of extra storage or a NAS or something and make sure it’s all synced, but it’s not really worth the expense/trouble for me TBH.

Luckily I live in a country that doesn’t really seem to give a shit. I still use a VPN, but a friend of mine didn’t bother at all and used to be downloading constantly. Eventually he got a phone call from his ISP asking him to not seed so much lol

Yeah I’m just downloading random data for fun in little tiny bits. If that data happens to arrange itself in the form of the latest episode of Doctor Who then that’s not my problem.

I use Mullvad personally, but probably any of the major ones would do the trick.

I do! And I set QBittorrent to only run through the VPN connection 👍

Grayjay works well for me too.

Just a standard issue Lenovo, Linux, and a VPN. Nothing too wild or likely to stand out lol.

He may well have broken the law, and he may well be a bit of a dick (I don’t know, but I’m basing this off off comments I’ve seen), but the thing that’s confusing me about this is, why is this America’s business?

As far as I can tell Dotcom is German-born with New Zealand residence (so presumably still a German citizen?) and the article says:

The site was formally based in Hong Kong until 2012, when the US seized the domain names and closed down the website. But it survived, relaunching in 2013 as Mega, with a New Zealand domain name.

The only connection I can see this having to the US is that it cost some US corporations some money, but then that’s surely true for a bunch of other countries as well. I highly doubt it was only US content being pirated. Why does the US get to be in charge of this?

Also, if this is illegal, why aren’t they arresting the CEO of Google for Google Drive? You pay for that, and there’s a ton of pirated stuff on there. Same with Discord. And those are actually based in the US.

So now copyright infringement is both consuming media and refusing to consume media, based on the arbitrary intent of the copyright holder?

Also if, according to this lawsuit, it’s illegal to be “meddling with the appearance of the publisher’s website in users’ browsers”, then wouldn’t that make it illegal for Netflix to drop to a lower resolution when bandwidth gets low? After all, if the publisher gives them a 4K source file and Netflix drops it to 720p, isn’t that meddling with the appearance in user’s browsers?

Exactly! I assume that my little 4tb external drive full of movies will one day be the only usable relic discovered of our civilization, so I must plan accordingly lol

I tried it but TBH went back to torrents. I found it to be very fiddly to get working, every single component seems to want you to pay for it (and not wanting to pay for and keep track of half a dozen streaming things is one of the main draws for piracy for me anyway) and overall it just didn’t seem worth it to find the ~1% of things I can’t find on torrents (and I didn’t even find all of them on Usenet either.)

Other people’s mileage may vary of course, but I didn’t really think it was worth it.

Yeah I had the same experience. Tried it out, found it way too fiddly to set up, had to pay for stuff at every turn (and managing a bunch of subscriptions is a big part of why I hate using streaming platforms in the first place) and I really didn’t find it to be worth it just to cover the tiny fraction of things I can’t find on torrents (and which TBH I didn’t even find there anyway.) Went back to torrents as it’s like 2 clicks to download something and it covers 95% of what I need anyway.

To be fair, it’s entirely possible that I was just doing it wrong and not getting optimal results, but also I don’t want to start over and pay for a bunch of other stuff to find out.

Yeah I just leave Mullvad on 24/7, and set QBittorrent to only download through the VPN connection and just leave it at that.

Also, I wouldn’t trust Kaspersky with anything important personally. It’s from an older interview but…

If you had the power to change up to three things in the world today that are related to IT security, what would they be?

Internet design–that’s enough.

That’s it? What’s wrong with the design of the Internet?

There’s anonymity. Everyone should and must have an identification, or Internet passport. The Internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the U.S. military. That was just a limited group of people–hundreds, or maybe thousands. Then it was introduced to the public and it was wrong…to introduce it in the same way.

I’d like to change the design of the Internet by introducing regulation–Internet passports, Internet police and international agreement–about following Internet standards. And if some countries don’t agree with or don’t pay attention to the agreement, just cut them off.

I haven’t tested this but Calibre has a plugin that will give you the word count of an epub, so I’d assume if you got a few copies and the word counts were pretty much the same it should be a fairly safe bet. There might be some variation for dedications, forewords etc. though depending on the version.

I really feel like we need to have a huge overhaul of copyright law in general, it seems like it’s all a mish-mash of old laws from before the internet existed, patched over with half-assed rules that we’ve just been making up as we go along since then.

Some of it is absurd to me, like the way something can be online but geographically restricted. I’ve had the situation in the past where I want to watch a movie trailer, but I can’t because I’m in Canada and not the US, even though the movie is also out in Canada. It’s so pointless and easily circumvented, and all it does is annoy people. Or that something can still be copyrighted almost a century after the author is dead.

And to get back to the point, we also really need to make some kind of exemption for archival purposes. So much information, art and cultural heritage is lost because copyright holders don’t look after the stuff they own and don’t want to pay to preserve it properly. The internet could be one of the best archival tools we’ve ever had, if we’d just let it do its thing IMO.

Yeah basically, people are using AI to write applications and cover letters, and recruiters are using AI to read and filter them, so it’s just robots talking to each other.

I’m heard some other horror stories too, like companies requesting a “one way remote interview” which basically means they send you a list of questions, and you’re supposed to record a video of yourself answering them as if you were in a proper interview and then send it to them.

At which point I’d rather be homeless personally, but that’s maybe just me lol