Meanwhile, Steam is raking it in by continuing to offer a better product than piracy. The Steam Deck is making that even more true; it’s so much more convenient to have games in the Steam library than try to keep a repack updated with new patches/content.
Right, but pirating Disney-owned IP is more moral than paying for it. Disney is the number 1 company in the world for lobbying for copyright over-reach. Every dollar that goes to Disney pays for lobbyists who will continue to push for life-of-author + 90+ years, because life-of-author plus 70 years just isn’t enough time to control our shared cultural heritage.
Similarly for Nintendo and software piracy.
Paying for Disney/Nintendo media is immoral.
I don’t think you’re understanding how trivial this is to detect:
Set up an open WiFi network in an area without any other open WiFi networks. i.e. almost anywhere outside of dense urban areas. Then you don’t even need to inspect traffic, just look at connected devices in admin controls. No devices should be connected aside from your monitoring device.
There’s no way the TV manufacturers are going to risk the legal quagmire that would come from this when there’s no plausible way to keep it remotely secret.
Super easy. Anyone who knows networking could detect new device connections on an open network they set up. I know next to nothing about networking and I could set it up in 10 minutes, 5 of which would be finding my old router in the basement.
So I’m not going to give this a moment’s thought until someone brings receipts. It’s not hard to check if this is happening.
Fake news, as far as I can tell. Lots of claims this is happening, but nobody has brought receipts. Considering how easy it would be to catch, and how likely illegal it is to connect to and use networks without permission, this is definitely an urban legend.
The author of the article is under the mistaken impression that bundling the “smart” features into the TV increases the price. It’s actually the opposite.
By injecting ads and bloatware into the TVs, the manufacturers earn more money, by far, than the cost of the features. A dumb TV would cost more.
The best solution is to decouple them; get the cheapest TV you can with the video quality/size you want, then attach your own device to stream content. I use a modified Fire Stick due to price, mostly with Stremio/Torrentio/Debrid, but there are lots of options.
You can stream remux releases using Stremio + Torrential + a Debrid service, like Real Debrid. 30+GB 4K resolution.
I only have a 1080p screen, so I’ve never tried it, but I’ve tested the download speed from Real Debrid for regular file downloads and it caps out my gigabit line, so it can definitely handle streaming remuxes.
That’s over half a 100mbit line 24/7.
I have my upload capped at 6MiB/s since that’s ~half my 100mbit upload. (I can’t get symmetric gigabit internet here, at least not until fibre-to-the-door lines are run in the next couple of years.)
Impressive numbers for home internet.
Just FYI, I’m pretty sure you’re confusing “AI” and “AGI”.
Even enemy behavior is videogames is “AI”, but obviously is not “General Intelligence”.
I think the problem is Hollywood confusing the two terms, so people think AI = Skynet, but that’s not the technical definition in Computer Science.
Err… That’s definitively AI.
AI is just any computer algorithm that does a task that would be aimed to require human intelligence.
Identifying text in an image is a non-trivial task, so OCR is a type of AI algorithm.
That said, I assume “AI phones” are probably not using the term AI in the general sense; presumably they just mean that it uses MM-LLMs somehow.
The cynic in me is wondering if this is just Google trying to get around the movement to stop children from being given addiction machines* before they’re ready for them. (*Smart phones with infinite-content-stream “social-media” apps)
There’s a push to ban smart phones for students below age 16 at schools (and educating parents to try to get them to just give their children dumb phones until age 16 outside of school hours, too.)
But maybe that’s just me being cynical. This movement only started gaining steam after The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt was published earlier this year, afaik, and Google is hardly an agile company anymore…
I pay whatever is needed to get the features I need, within reason. My current phone was ~$500 CAD (XPeria 10 V). It was the only narrow phone with good battery life at a reasonable price with 8 GB RAM at the time.
Out of curiosity, why do you need so much storage on mobile? Massive music library in FLAC or something?
I am totally content with 128GB. It’s enough that I’ll never run out of space for my usage. (Well, aside from photos, but those get backed up in full-resolution to Amazon Photos as part of my Prime subscription).
Granted, most of my media consumption is ebooks, which are tiny.
Seriously… I’ve downloaded 2TB in a week before.
I get that it’s not about the bandwidth, though; it’s about needing to upgrade their security since they scraped the site without needing to log in, so obviously their site wasn’t secure. They’re claiming IT costs as damages.
Sentencing hasn’t happened yet; 48 years is the maximum, according to the article.
Whatever the sentence is will be ridiculous since it’s just copyright infringement, but hopefully the sentencing goes to a small fraction of the maximum.
I dunno. I think there are enough things named after men.
Maybe a nice neutral woman’s name… Like, Anna?
And it’s more about preservation and archival, so I think it should be called an Archive, not a library.
Yeah, Anna’s Archive. Great name. Let’s go with that one.
I don’t follow. The Internet Archive only allows 1 copy of each physical book to be loaned at a time. If someone has the book you want already, then you need to wait until their loan expires. It’s not like shadow libraries that allow unrestricted DRM-free downloading.
And publishers’ profits are rising and don’t seem to be at all correlated to library access, so of course nobody is suggesting they should close.
What am I not understanding?
There’s probably something in the terms about it, and it would take a very expensive legal battle to settle it. And I doubt it has enough legal merit to be taken on as a class-action lawsuit.
So, really, does it matter if it’s illegal? With the asymmetrical power imbalance, they literally don’t need to care about the laws. Realistically, no EU regulator is going to fine them for cancelling “a purchase made in India”, either.
Yep. Z-Library loaded fine for me with their app, which leads the darknet site.
But Anna’s Archive is probably easier.
Isn’t it getting harder to find custom ROMs, now? Used to be basically everything was on XDA forums, but I’ve heard lots of custom ROMs are moving to they’re own websites/Discord servers/whatever.