That’s one of the reasons I don’t like buying games with Denuvo. Waiting a few years before buying games is something I usually do anyway, so at that point Denuvo DRM would’ve already been removed.

I’m honestly fine with DRM, as long as it’s removed within my definition of reasonable time. I’d say a year vor two.

Once the DRM is removed it allows for archiving and preserving the piece of media — as well as pirating copies.

Really very similar to Lemmy, where the identity of each group is tied to a particular server, e.g. lemmy has [email protected] but Matrix has #anime:matrix.org

So what happens if matrix.org goes away or decides the server admin wants to be hostile to #anime?

A matrix room can have multiple identities/adresses set by the room admin. E.g. the admin of !anime:matrix.org could add another adress for the same room on !anime:myanime.instance. Because the room is replicated on all other participating servers, this would let the room continue to exist on the network (besides all matrix.org users not being able to access it).

Matrix does have a single “room id” per room, which looks like it gives the original creating home server more rights, which it does not. E.g. !ehXvUhWNASUkSLvAGP:matrix.org

Any server admin does not have any more rights over a room than another server admin. They can ban the room for their local users, but this does not stop federation as a whole.

[1] https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/419
[2] https://app.element.io/#/room/#synapse:matrix.org/$htJmba92wLTP9AoFg4eEWi9IXpgwvXr6G9Sa-kBsNNs
[3] https://matrix-org.github.io/synapse/latest/admin_api/rooms.html#delete-room-api

It also appears that anything beyond text has to be hotlinked […]

Matrix allows for media to be hotlinked, but it can also be replicated across servers.

I.e. if I send an image in a room and look at the source (available on many web clients), the image url looks like the following "url": "mxc://matrix.org/qGgUKuZuHcRsWAhSfqKnmtiX". The actual image (and preview) then gets fetched by your server from my server [4], and then gets send to your client.

It’s important to note that a server isn’t required to download all media. If a user does not read a room, it might not download the media from another server, until the user actually wants to view it (or rather that part of the room history). Or a server admin might clean up the media store to free up space.

[4] https://matrix.org/docs/spec-guides/authed-media-servers/

@[email protected]

They do basic checking for known malware.

You’re right. I’ve read somewhere that Apple plans to work with GSMA to add encryption to the official RCS standard, so this major issue hopefully gets fixed at some point.

RCS isn’t E2E, and it doesn’t minimize metadata.

Moxie Marlinspike has been strongly against federation in Signal because of how it makes avoiding metadata almost impossible.

I’d say there’s basically zero chances Signal will add RCS.

I’d argue XMPP is less ideal than Matrix because groups are located on a single server, which makes them easier to take down than Matrix’ replicated state.

Running any P2P/decentralized protocol over I2P seems to be the best for privacy and censorship-resistance. I2P already works great for torrents, except for it’s speed and lack of users/seeders.

@[email protected]

The problem always comes down to usability and barrier to entry. Telegram is popular because it’s great to use, and doesn’t moderate much. More private services rarely (never?) reach the level of usability most people expect, often simply because of it’s architecture.

Since most of the fediverse is run by volunteers, blocking ads isn’t much of a concern.

Though I do agree with the sentiment and I love Firefox + uBlock Origin on my phone.

The Lemmy equivalent to a Reddit subreddit is a community.

Well, it seems my reading skill deteriorated to a surprising extent. You’ve even mentioned handbrake in your post…

Building MakeMKV seems to require a binary, which is unfree. I assume this is the reason it’s not in official distribution repos (except Nix and FreeBSD).

It’s in the AUR and Nixpkgs, both automate building it from “source” (+binary). MakeMKV is in FreeBSDs official repos, according to pkgs.org.

desec.io can be used with any domain registrar and has an API with support for various ddns clients (ddclient, lego).

deSEC is a free DNS hosting service, designed with security in mind.

Running on open-source software and supported by SSE, deSEC is free for everyone to use.

Edit: To clarify, desec.io does not sell/rent domains. Desec has to be set as the authoritative nameserver on the registrar, then desec can manage domain records instead of the registrar (which usually also provides their own domain hosting for “free” by default).

(Of course, not realistic if you have 500GB of music and no SD card slot in your phone)

That’s the problem right there. SD card storage is so cheap, but the manufacturers don’t include a slot for it.

It’s a sad day. E.g. former MEP Felix Reda did incredible work around the time of the 2017 EU copyright reform and helped the protests through transparency.

Now with the risk of badly written laws enabling (atm. restricted) surveillance, we’d have needed them more than ever. Luckily there’s still MEPs from the Czech Republic in the EU parliament.

Torrents are based on the idea that everyone using them pays for it with their bandwidth and hardware cost. Except for those leechers who don’t share.

I’m paying more for my seedbox than for my usenet subscription. If I used my own hardware I’d pay with stress on my hardware, e.g. the disks aging and failing earlier because of seeding. The power consumption is also not negligeble, altough the server is also used for other purposes.

With private trackers this idea of an equal exchange is more obvious because of ratio requirements.

Edit: I’d say it’s similar to open source in that no single individual has to pay for it, but someone does have to, for it to exist. Most often with their (valuable) time and knowledge. If no one helps out and does their part (through money or time+knowledge), a project won’t survive for long. Same is true for torrents.

I will be surprised if Spotify won’t announce a new more expensive HIFI subscription with their support for lossless audio. Imo this still makes it less interesting than Tidal/Deezer/Qobuz since it’ll still be impossible to permanently download music from Spotify.

Nonetheless it’s great that Spotify will provide lossless audio for those who want it.

What happens if you start the torrent client without the VPN already running?

Bind your torrent client to the VPN interface, then you won’t even need a killswitch.

Sadly I find myself opening up Stealth (open source reddit client without any login) more than I’d like. There’s just more content for some topics. No longer supporting reddit by commenting is largely good enough for me, but it makes me understand how most people never left reddit.

At the same time I spent more time on social media than I should, like typing this comment.

The dowloaded files can’t be played and testing .flacs with flac -t throws errors.

https://github.com/nathom/streamrip/issues/656

If that’s the case, streamrip still works fine with Tidal. Deezer support is currently broken.

https://github.com/nathom/streamrip