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  • 35 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • A little ham-fisted, sure, but if you think it’s irrelevant you evidently didn’t take any time to actually think about it (you did also reply instantly, so I’ll take that over you lacking reading comprehension).

    I’ll simplify.

    Digital piracy is illegal copying of unlicenced content.
    Alice creates content.
    Alice licences the content to Bob.
    Bob decides to distribute the content with advertisements from Charlie.
    You download the content.
    Charlie does not pay Bob.
    You did not breach any licences.
    You did not pirate the content.

    And just to further clarify, Alice is the person who made a video, Bob is Youtube, Charlie is an advertiser. Your argument is not an ad is piracy if “the advertisement company [hasn’t] paid the content creator.” The advertiser pays the distribution company, and the relationship between those two companies is irrelevant. The advertiser failing to pay does not retroactively turn you into a pirate.

    The whole argument is pointless in the first place, it’s irrelevant whether or not you consider ad blocking to be technically piracy. A sensible adblock argument would be around the ethics of manipulation versus payment, or security versus whatever it is advertisers want. Arguing semantics doesn’t matter.





  • There’s a lot of replies here about why US citizens are in the situation they are but not how to fix it, which was the question you asked. You have two political parties in a first past the post system with largely similar corporate focussed policies, people primarily vote against a party rather than for one that represents them. If you really want to change things you’ll need to overhaul your voting system to break up your two party system and encourage competition from parties that actually represent what people want.

    Unfortunately there is no safe and easy way to do this; it means the two parties in power giving up that power which they will not do willingly. You’ll need large scale consistent and actually disruptive protests, ie not just meeting up for a day then returning to life as nornal, but the US has a history of responding to protests the same way they do everything; with violence.

    So more practically, you can contact your representative at the appropriate level of government and hope they don’t completely ignore you this time.





  • Social security numbers being involved in a breach does not mean that the breach only affects Americans. Some records might not have an equivalent ID number associated with them at all, and some records could have similar ID numbers from other countries. They also list current address as part of the data leaked but the fact many people don’t have a current address didn’t seem to cause you any confusion. The original source lists “information about relatives”, if that was in this title would you have assumed only people with living relatives were included?

    “I didn’t read the article” is a poor excuse when you’re commenting on the believability of the article. What happened here is you saw an article, immediately assumed it was about the US, realised that doesn’t make any sense, then dismissed the article without even bothering to check because the title doesn’t fit the US exclusively. It’s crazy to me that you wouldn’t even consider the fact it’s not an exclusively US-based leak.



  • It’s possible to factually accurate with heavy bias, but since that would require selective reporting to enforce a single worldview I wouldn’t consider that “highly trustworthy”.

    Consider the following hypothetical headlines:
    “Teen Killed by Islamic Group During Shooting”
    “Terrorist Shooting at Mosque, 20 Dead”

    Both are technically factually accurate ways to describe a hypothetical scenario where a teen shoots up a place of worship before being stopped by one of the victims, but they both paint very different pictures. Would you consider both sources “highly trustworthy”?





  • I made a fair bit of commission upgrading people to much much better hardware and speed for not much more money.

    See that’s your entire problem right there, you’re in sales. Your incentive is to drain every penny you can out of customers through useless up-sells and selling hardware to get the service they’re already paying for.

    You literally just argued that if your 600mbps router only supplies an 80mbps connection then your 600mbps connection is 80mbps. And speed isn’t divided equally by the number of devices connected either, that’s just ridiculous. The impact of a connected but idle device is minimal. Also, why would you need 600mbps for only 4 devices? You could stream 4k video on all four devices 24/7 and you’re still not using even a quarter of that bandwidth; you’re looking at a recommendation of only 15mbps to 25mbps per user for a 4k-viable internet connection.

    Here’s a ping to my stock ISP-supplied router on another floor and three rooms away via wifi:

    --- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
    611 packets transmitted, 611 received, 0% packet loss, time 623436ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.647/0.779/2.105/0.110 ms
    

    It’s obviously impossible to improve a 0% packet loss, switching to a wired connection would be a considerable cost for minimal benefit (though admittedly that ping is unusually good, I’d normally expect slightly over 1ms average). I’m also getting over my advertised speeds according to fast.com and speedtest.net despite being on wifi and running through Mullvad so I suppose the problem might just be that I’m not using whichever scummy ISP you work for.

    I have a home office and have work from home (or hybrid) for pretty much my entire career, even before WFH was normalised. I can assure you a wired connection is not a necessity to work from home.


  • So the ISP isn’t to blame when the cheap ISP-provided hardware fails, and the solution isn’t for the ISP to replace insufficient ISP-owned hardware but for you to buy your own instead?

    The “wire everything” approach is a little excessive for most home networks too, outside of exceptional circumstances modern WiFi on modern hardware is more than enough for home users. It’s only worth the time and money to wire everything if you’ve identified specific issues with signal loss or noise, don’t just do it by default.