Honestly, this is the best time to snapshot it, because even with the slop already there, the exponential increase that’s about to happen will absolutely dwarf what’s there now.

That’s like a different universe, hard to even imagine we have a pro-worker policy that nice in the US.

This is the correct list, having lived through it. BBS services in the mid-1980s were the start of Razor1911, Paradox and other distro and cracker groups. I’d edit 2 to include FTP which is what BBS evolved into with secret dropsites for new releases.

IRC is 2.5 on this list. You can group that alongside the pre-web internet services, like AOL which had slightly IRC-like chat rooms dedicated to serving warez and videos in the same way (requesting a list from a chatbot, and then requesting sequential files).

Some light history here, though like all warez-related scholarship, there’s a ton missing that you had to have seen to know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

https://archive.org/details/b904a8eb-9c98-4bb1-bf25-3cb9d075b157/

I don’t know if this meme is fully ironic, but kind of strange to think “torrenting” is considered the OG piracy method now.

Interesting. So you have *arr set to auto-download from certain lists and see it in Plex for the first time, as options? What kind of lists? How do you cull content you don’t end up liking so it doesn’t fill up your server?

Very interesting. I followed BD circumvention on the doom9 forums from that link decades ago, but it looks like the VUK database method is more reliable now.

Is there some version of Handbrake or workaround for BD copy protection? This is the excerpt from the site, and matches my understanding that it isn’t a circumvention tool:

Supported Input Sources:

Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or BluRay sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.

Yeah, this 100% only works (but I think does work) with a reliable physical chain of trust, since we’re not yet in an age where you can Mission Impossible mask social engineer trust face-to-face. Not a great plan if this isn’t a USB drive handed directly to them, though.

You could always package them with everything they need to watch, like VLC (which should be able to read most formats anyway). Not clear if they are all on Windows, but perhaps you could include the portable VLC version that doesn’t require an install and make an obvious-named VLC playlist file for them to open.

Similar in the virtual spaces. “My AI agent is almost ready to live my life for me, the future is awesome.”

Do you reverse proxy, Tailscale, etc to authenticate or circumvent the need for a secure connection? Every time I come close to planning a switch, that part paralyzes me, it feels so unintuitive.

Do you remote stream (off your server network)? If so, how’s the experience?

Tech bro startups.

This is a helpful. This sounds like a way, even if I’m still in the “hmmm, yes, I recognize some of those words” stage. Maybe I’ll look for a detailed guide.

I admit, though, the details of how to do this are pretty hard to imagine for me - networking and tunneling seems very technical. Before I can jump off the Plex enshittification train, I just want a way to share my media with tech-illiterate family without complex setup on their end.

Sorry to hit you with a random question, but since I’m in a similar situation: are you using Tailscale to remote stream to your parents, or how do you get that working seamlessly with Jellyfin?

I’m glad you asked, Horsecook. Well, my take is this:

Pokemon depicts the fictional Pokemon as friends of the protagonist who submit willingly to their control after “capturing” them. It’s in line with humans keeping pet animals in captivity, since they also have no say in the matter but eventually come to depend on the human. The problem of course is the “blood sport,” which is most analogous to dog or cock fighting. That said, this is Nintendo’s kid-friendly fictionalized world, and the depictions in this show no blood or injury, and only that Pokemon get tired and “faint.”

But in the end, and most importantly, Pokemon aren’t real. Whatever is in the Pokemon game does doesn’t violate any animal or human rights, even if Pokemon were depicted as blood-drinking monsters who derived their power from sacrificing cherubic Christian children to Mammon at a blood moon pentagram altar, clad head-to-paw in white robes weeks after Labor Day. I think that’s a vital distinction.

On the other hand, ICE’s social videos are about treating real humans with equal or less respect than animals. It is meant to normalize removing their human rights including procedural and substantive due process, and parading them to viewers as little more than sub-human vermin (a favorite word of Trump and Stephen Miller for those picked up by ICE), and criminals (usually without any legally reliable basis).

So TLDR: Pokemon anthropomorphizes fictional animals and treats them mostly kindly, with debatable exceptions. ICE dehumanizes real people and treats them as subhuman. I think Nintendo has a pretty good argument that (as this is not intentionally parody of Pokemon, but an ICE recruitment ad) that their brand/market is being damaged.

Literally, thank you. This is not the axe to grind with Nintendo. I don’t disagree with their stance here at all—am a lawyer. It’s absolutely fair use and would be a losing lawsuit.

Sorry to lawyer a lawyer, but this isn’t likely a fair use. I’m not going to credential smash because we’re all just dogs on the internet, but I do this kind of thing a lot for my job.

In short:

• a. It’s promotional, where fair use defenses are weakest under the first and fourth fair use factors;
• b. it’s used at best satirically and not as parody, because the target was not to comment on Pokemon but to comment on immigration or ICE’s actions, which is also inherently not reliable a basis for fair use. So the first purpose/transformative use factor is even less in favor of fair use. But even that is a stretch, since the post plays like a recruitment or promotional clip;
• c. the other elements of the four-factor test are objectively against finding fair use here, since (i) the use of the clips and especially music is excessive and not narrowly tailored to any arguable transformative use, and (ii) under the recent realignment of factors in the Supreme Court’s Warhol case, the transformative prong is less important and the (now greater-importance) market harm prong would be strongly against finding fair use, considering how damaging it is for Nintendo/Pokemon to be associated with this.

That’s not even getting into the trademark/dilution arguments, which play out similarly.

Nintendo can do what they want, but it’s a totally fair criticism that they are selectively enforcing their copyrights, and it’s probably because they are scared of stepping into politics. I get it, but I certainly won’t defend it.

I’m a Plex Pass user and we cannot opt out on Roku devices. On Android I was able to roll back the app, since we can sideload old versions and turn off updates.

There’s a new Plex UI that they pushed to Android a few months ago that breaks everything, removes options and customizability, requires extra unintuitive actions to get to any self-hosted libraries, and pushes Plex’s Live TV and other junk into prominent UI positions, as I assume the investors and MBAs demanded.

It was released and universally criticized. So Plex’s team thought long and hard about that user feedback - ok, ok, sorry, I couldn’t make it without laughing. They changed nothing and pushed forward and now it hit Roku, with no way to decline or roll back.

Ngl, the fact that a 9/11’s worth of people were dying every fucking day, just in the US, during the peak of Covid, and one entire fucking half of our country was just shitposting and TRYING to spread it more entirely reframed 9/11 for me.

I’m glad to see this, I feel like all Americans should have to come to some personal terms about the 9/11 worth of daily COVID deaths that half the country was just casually were ok. I prefer existentialism to nihilism as a response to the absurdity of the world, since nihilism is just going to trap us in a cycle of resigned apathy, but a little self-reflection is preferred either way.

And related to the 9/11 comparison: amazing how there was no reckoning about how hundreds of thousands of those cumulative deaths were attributable to Trump’s mishandling. From that standpoint, we elected Osama bin Laden times a thousand to be president, after he took down the twin towers.