I’ve used it on probably 10+ windows systems that I’ve had to refresh/set up for various needs and people. I’ve never had it fail on any flavor of 10/11.

It’s a little longwinded and meandering, but it’s a good piece and a good message. This is why things like Linux and opensource are so important. On the surface it looks like a bunch of nerds making our computers slightly more of a hassle to use and slightly less compatible with everything else, but maintaining full control of what our systems do, what other system’s they talk to, and maintaining a chain of accountability that goes all the way to the hardware is so important. Sadly it’s important in ways that the average person doesn’t care much about, or rather they won’t care about them until it’s too late. Until every computer for sale everywhere is just a surveillance device shaped like a laptop that plays youtube and opens facebook while logging and sending off every click and keystroke.

Now I’m all fired up. I’m going to go install Linux on an old thinkpad.

To be fair I only do work from a work computer, and my work computer already has a ton of shit on it I’d never use in my personal life.

It’s especially rough when you remember seeing it on the internet before and even had it yourself at one point. There are/were a bunch of music artists I discovered at both the old eMusic and the music section of old download.com, but those collections weren’t archived anywhere in any meaningful way when the sites changed. It took me years to finally locate what I was after. It’s just so draining to know that something used to easily and freely available and to not be able to find it no matter how hard to dig.

I’m in the same boat. I pay for a couple streaming services just because they have the shows my kid enjoys. It’s so hard to find good sources for kid’s shows that are actually quality and not either ancient or abandoned. Even popular/new shows can be hard to find, whereas every throwaway netflix original has seasons available from multiple different release groups.

Kid’s shows are really the weakspot of piracy for me. Thrift store DVDs help a lot, but it’s always older stuff and never whole seasons of shows.

Yeah, but if your boss or client sends you a document that doesn’t work you’re not going to tell them “Uh well this is a badly formed document and you shouldn’t embed scripts and it’s your fault that my FOSS alternative application can’t work with this”. At least I hope you’re not.

So do I call her Mother or Goddess.

The game was rigged from the start.

Maybe I’m missing context, but the article doesn’t mention what this admission looked like. Was it just a use saying “yeah I downloaded the new ghostbusters movie, it sucked glad I didn’t pay for it”, or was it someone admitting to camming/distributing/facilitating piracy at a base level? Surely they are not going after someone for just casually mentioning they pirated a movie?

Gold does not oxidize in atmosphere. You are spouting nonsense you do not understand.

Try what? Add some pointless solder to a disk and then what? Wait years to see how long it takes to die? How many do I need for a sample size? Do I need to test the same model? What about workloads the drives should be under?

This is pure untestable unverifiable snake oil.

I ran a cgiproxy instance with proper ssl certs that totally bypassed and trivialized the school’s internet filter. It was password protected with unique passwords per user and I had it set up in such a way I could tell when a password “got out” and I’d cancel it. It got added to the blocklist a couple times, but I was ready because I’d already registered like 20 dynamic dns services to point to the server. It would take them months to add it to the manual blocklist but just a minute to change a link on my forum so people used the next address in line. It was an open secret that I was running it, but I was pretty smart in how I ran it and who I provided access to. I also ran a forum that was popular with the student body and the passwords to the proxy were given out there, but only to people I trusted and could reasonably deduce who they were. Even then they didn’t know it was me running the whole thing.

I mean most people probably did, but again I did it in such a way there was never any real paper trail. I never made any money or wanted any clout for it. I just thought it was fun that I got pissed off at the internet filter blocking newgrounds one day and thought “absolutely not”, and basically trivialized the filter schoolwide.

I’m not “okay with it”. Empress is a psycho the scene would be better without, but when they’re gone, it doesn’t all just burn down. There’ll be someone else. There always is.

What will the community do then? Carry on. There’s always a new hotshot waiting in the wings. This cycle has been going on since before I was born and it’ll continue long after I’m dead. There will always be new cats and new mice in the scene.

I’ve never heard of a Steam ban for running a pirated game that uses cracked steam_api.dll. The whole point of the cracked .dll is that it doesn’t communicate with Steam anymore.

While I personally haven’t run into the same roadblocks as you when using alternatives, I appreciate the counter-point and reality check.

I have not had to pirate software since I was a teenager. There are free/FOSS tools that do all of what I need well enough that I haven’t needed to even consider non-free options. Documents I just use Google Docs/Sheets, video editing I use kdenlive, sound recording/editing I use audacity, screen recording and game capture I use OBS, photo/image editing I use GIMP, etc.

It’s not that I am opposed to software piracy, I just have not had to do it. I would if I needed too but it just hasn’t come up. For games I typically either buy them for a console or Steam and don’t pirate them.

The only thing I really pirate with any regularity anymore is tv/movies/music, and most of that is just finding things to add to my jellyfin rather than anything that’s new/current.

Stock up while you can! Try to download some longer series and then when you’re off wifi break them up into an episode a day or so, so that there’s always something new to look forward to, in the same way you’d have new content on youtube each day.