Don't forget the subscription to be able to start your car from your phone, or if you have really poor taste in vehicles the subscription to heat your seats or unlock other already-built-in features.
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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It’s telling that my piracy of music all but disappeared when Apple Music came along. (Almost) Everything I want to hear is right there on my phone. I don’t have to switch between different services to find artists.
Now, whether such enormous consolidation of the record companies, allowing that kind of setup, is a good thing is another discussion…
I agree, Apple music is so massive that sometimes I can't find something on YT Music + Amazon + Tidal + Qobuz, and voila, it's on Apple music
My peak was one. For like 5-6 years Netflix had enough content to keep me entertained by itself. When the other media companies started pulling their stuff off Netflix to make their own services I started pirating again. Why would I bother keeping track of multiple services when I can get one VPN subscription and have it all plus stuff that isn't on any of them?
I see this same sentiment online all the time. So when it comes to media streaming, monopolies are a good thing?
No. There's no reason the content has to be on only one platform other than anti-competitive bullshit. They could all have all the content and differentiate themselves in other ways with quality of life features. Then people would have options without missing out on content.
Exactly. Music streaming works like this and it's doing fine. There's no reason why video streaming didn't go a similar route other than greed.
Can you recommend lifetime access courses in offline too instead of subscription?
I'm tired of this model, where you just wanna have access to one single course with offline mode and they offer 1-month subscription for all of them. Who has time to check them all?
Jellyfin + library
This simple answer is no doubt the most overlooked; probably as a consequence of the tyranny of convenience.. people too lazy to go to the library.
What can we do to stop it?
But apparently people don’t care? They just keep paying for this?
Is your goal to attempt to stop other people from falling for subscriptions? You would be setting yourself up for disappointment.
Or do you mean "what can we do to stop it [from harassing us personally]"?
I used to have a program called netlimiter (needed to throttle individual aop downloads on a shared WISP that was slow as balls). I bought a lifetime license like 10 years ago because I liked the software. A couple years ago they got rid of the old version and bumped me up to the new version. About a year ago I got an email saying something along the lines of "pay our new subscription fee or you lose your access" and basically put me on a trial account. I pirated their old version years ago to see if I liked the software enough after a couple months. I no longer use that software.
Another time I bought a lifetime access for a game on patreon. About 2 years later the dev switched to a subscription only fee to access all the new content and never released anything from updated versions to the older public release. So essentially I bumped down to a free tier of access to a game I paid for.
I will pirate until I die. Fuck these douchebags.
That's happened to me with a couple of phone apps too. Its infuriating.
I'm peak subscription overload. I'm looking for ways to turf a bunch of ours, I'm currently trying to prove to my wife that our IPTV sub has everything that she needs and the Netflix/Disney/Amazon/Paramount subs can all fuck off and die. Almost there.
Next up is the bike trainer, roadside assistance, fitness and music subs. I'll keep Spotify because I like how it integrates with our car, but that's the ONLY reason.
How about you teach wifey how to sail the seas? Seems like a win-win.
Omg same. I have been burnt so many times on "lifetime" scams, im done. I want to invest in your product, but part of that agreement is you doing what you say. I've had it!
I think a lot of the blame lies on the shoulders of platform makers:
Apple constantly churning their already-working OS so software makers have to keep working just to keep already-working software running
Google constantly fucking with web browser standards/frameworks so it’s an endless stream of work to keep a web app up to date.
The basic productivity software that computers run hasn’t changed in functionality for literally my entire lifetime, yet there is an endless supply of software engineers working hard on these same basic tools for no apparent gains.
Yeah, I’ve thought about this too.
Apple update their OSs annually now because the shareholders demand constant evolution, meaning the devs have to constantly be on top of changes to the OS. And it’s fucking exhausting how badly it affects us all.
I would pay if à la carte was remotely economical. For example a digital DRM movie rental should cost $1 in whatever resolution, on any device capable of playing it. A TV show should cost like $5 for a season or $0.5 per episode. To rent, not to own of course. I don’t care about ownership. With that model I would probably end up spending like $10-15/month on media, but I would feel better about it knowing the studio could pay more to those specific individuals who worked on the programs I am enjoying.
A subscription is a blank check to the studio to make whatever they think draws in subscribers, and to pay everyone involved as little as possible with no bonuses for blockbusters.
I am too radicalized now. I refuse to fund my oppressors, and fuck all they can do about it.
I will teach my kids how to do it and advise them to never pay for engagement slop.
FAFO hollycreeps and recording studios, whatcha gonna about it, bitches ?
I refuse to fund my oppressors
Bingo. I live by this philosophy.
Although more precisely: I refuse to ~~fund~~ feed my oppressors. The reason for s/fund/feed/ swap is that our oppressors profit from our data too. So e.g. I won’t even email a gmail user because my data would then feed Google (an oppressor because of how they dictate e-mail terms among other oppressions).
Did you ask all of your friends to get a Proton/Tuta account/ host their email server?
I give out my XMPP address and offer Snikket accounts. Some go along with it and some do not. I lost touch with some friends. Some people are in contact via phone but that’s not ideal some connections are lost as phone numbers change.
I used to push some people toward Hushmail until they dropped the gratis plans. Then for a while I pressured people onto Protonmail but then distanced myself from PM when the brought in Google reCAPTCHAs and killed off Hydroxide. Tuta is a non-starter because Tuta’s variety of e2ee is incompatible with open standards, thus forcing me to periodically login to a web UI (also due to them sabotaging their Android app by way of forced obsolescence pushed in the most incompetent way).
So it’s a shitty state of affairs. 2024 and simply sending a msg to someone has become a total shitshow.
Why don't you use PGP with email?
And that's really cool
That’s exactly what I did with hushmail. I would tell low-tech folks to get a hushmail account then I would use hushtools.com to do all the key management, putting my key on the keyring and grabbing their key. So the other person did not need to know anything or take any special steps. That was best option of my time. But last time I checked hushmail was still entirely non-gratis.
Protonmail emerged when HM became non-gratis and messed with hushtools. But PM requires every one of their own users to do key management which creates a barrier to entry. I would have to walk a PM user through adding my key to my record in their address book and walk them through sending me their key. That effort is a show stopper for many. I might as well walk them through setting up a PGP-capable MUA. But then if they keep their gmail or MS acct the metadata still feeds those corps.
I believe thunderbird has good PGP integration, and new users can just use Kleopatra instead of GPG on the command line.
The real question is, do your friends run Linux?
I wonder if it's possible to set up my own email server with Proton acting as a proxy in front of it. When other people send emails to me, it goes through proton and lands in my email server and vice-versa. Not exactly forwarding but acting as an end-point of sorts. I know nothing about e-mail so I can't quite get the right words for it.
If you're worried about metadata like time-stamps, message size and IP addresses, it shouldn't be too hard for someone of your technical calibre to spin up a VPS, install mutter, configure POP3, set up routines/automated actions with cron to send replies on a calculated but random schedule through a VPN/TOR/I2P. Yeah decrypting messages will have to be by hand but you're doing that anyway.
The metadata in the headers can be avoided using Memoryhole and similar protocols which embed the headers inside the encrypted payload. The problem is again barrier to entry. Low-tech users generally can’t even handle app installs on desktops.
When you say “worry”, that’s not the right word for it. My boycott against Google is not fear-driven. I will not feed Google anything it can profit from as an ethical stance. Even if an expert linux tor user were on Google, I’m not sure we could exchange email in a way that ensures Google gets no profitable data. If we use PGP coupled with Memoryhole to strip out the headers, I’m not sure Google would accept a msg with a missing or bogus From: header. But if so, Google still possibly learns the user’s timezone. Though that may be useless if Google learns nothing else about that user. But we’re talking obscure corner cases at this point. Such an expert user would have no Google dependency anyway.
MS/google-dependent friends are generally extremely low-tech. They don’t know the difference between Firefox and the Internet. They don’t know the difference between Wi-Fi and Internet. Linux -- what’s linux? They would say. At best, they just think of it as a mysterious nerd tool to be avoided. So what can I do wholly on my end to reach them via gmail without Google getting a shred of profitable data? Nothing really. So I just don’t connect directly with a large segment of friends and family. Some of them are probably no longer reachable. Some are in touch with people who connect to me via XMPP, so sometimes info/msgs get proxied through the few XMPP users. It’s still a shitshow because Google still gets fed through that proxied inner circle of friends and family. In the past when someone needed to reach me directly, they would create a Hushmail or Protonmail mail account for that temporary purpose (like coordinating a trip somewhere). But that option is mostly dead.
I just had to reach out to plumbers for quotes. All of them are gmail-served. All I could do is refuse to share my email address and push them to use analog mechanisms. They are not hungry enough for business to alter their online workflow or create protonmail accounts.
My prediction is that now that tech has run out of its endless growth runway the- industry will begin to consolidate and they will have massive ecosystems that you can join for like 200 bucks a month
You mean cable packages, which have been on the comeback
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