“If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.”

• A bunch of pirates, probably

America’s working class has a long history of buying into propaganda and acting against their own interests. It’s a huge reason why the medical industry has gotten so bad.

That being said, it’s important to keep our anger focused on the system, not people who are getting suckered by it.

I think this is why there’s a common narrative on the internet that this “evidence” was planted to frame a random dude.

It’s fair to call that a conspiracy theory at this point, but hopefully due process will reveal the truth.

I suspect the perceived morality of his actions has a strong effect here. I don’t think people are “looking past” his actions as much as they likely aren’t as repulsed by them.

For internal desktop drives, I have the WH16NS40. After flashing some open firmware on it, it works perfectly for playing and ripping BRs. Looks like I’ll be picking up a spare in case this one dies.

The MakeMKV forum has a lot of good tips and instructions on selecting and configuring BluRay drives.

I’d have no issue with digital media if there was a way to actually own it. Everything is either streaming only or ridden with DRM that can only be played within their app. Blurays, assuming you can decrypt its DRM bs, are the last bastion of media ownership left.

Never buy any hardware that doesn’t work offline.

This is a bit optimistic. It’s amazing that the tools exits to create a better, more open internet. However, the biggest barrier is convincing people to use them.

Personally, I’ve found that convincing the average user of just how much they are being taken advantage of by big tech is much harder than it should be. People are addicted to the convenience that lured them into these proprietary platforms in the first place. Humans tend to choose easier options over healthier options.

We should continue to carry the flag of open source, decentralization, and privacy-respecting platforms. However, we should be prepared that people will look at it an go… “Nah, that sounds hard. I’ll let them sell my data to save a few clicks.”

Totally. Most people are surprised at how little compute you need to make something useful if you put the right OS/software on it.