Blocklists are ineffective by design. Each and every member of the swarm can collect all the data necessary to flag you to your ISP. Obviously any professional collecting this kind of data can avoid a blocklist. There is no such thing as a better blocklist.

Teach us then 😭

I think this hits on another big generational difference. Those who grew up in the early days of personal computing and the Internet didn’t have teachers or a hallucinating language model to spoon feed them instant answers. They had to actually RTFM thoroughly before they could even think of asking in some arcane BBS, forum, or IRC for help from elders that had absolutely zero tolerance for incompetence or ignorance. MAN pages and help files came bundled, but the Internet (if you had it) was metered and inconvenient on a scale more like going to the library than ordering a pizza. They had to figure out how to ask the right questions. They had to figure out how to find their own answers. The Internet was so slow that all the really interesting bits were often just text. So much indexed and categorized one might need to learn a little more just to find the right details in that sea of text. There was a lot less instant gratification and no one expected to be able to solve their problems just by asking for help.

I’ve seen way too many kids give up at the first pebble in their path because they are so accustomed to the instant gratification that has pervaded our culture since the dawn of smart phones.

A decade ago we figured out blacklists were ineffective. What’s changed?

Downloading from YouTube or Spotify is still piracy. And those sources offer mostly shit quality far removed from the artist’s intent.

Believe it of not, there are things that aren’t on Spotify, YouTube, TIDAL, Apple Music, Bandcamp, or any streaming service. Sometimes when a streaming service does have a song or album, it’s either not the best quality or only a radio censored version available, even if Spotify claims it’s the explicit version. And that explicit tag feels like a slander because the original intent should be default and the radio edits should be the one’s with the CENSORED tag.

There is great music out there you can’t purchase or stream a digital release of.

There are old and often played CDs in my collection that can’t be ripped properly (by me) for one reason or another.

There are some really high quality vinyl recordings out there, done by people with better hardware and more skill than I. Again, many of these vinyl releases are not available in any other format and are no longer available for purchase anywhere.

The real primary reason I got into it, in the long ago times of Napster, was that I liked to make mixtapes/discs. When radio was no longer playing songs I wanted on those tapes, the wilds of Internet was the answer.

I still regularly support the artists I like as directly as I can: buying albums and merch directly from them at shows or their own websites. And I spend more of that money on more artists and especially less popular artists specifically because of the habits listed above.

Original? No. Usenet, BBS, IRC are the originals. Napster made it hip. Soul seek made it better. Then there was Limewire, DirectConnect, and some others. Then there was BitTorrent, which I really did use to download Linux ISOs before the rise of popular public and private trackers.

If youre running it under your current user, theoretically anything your user can do (which usually means all your personal files)

That would be poorly configured permissions. There’s very little reason you should let any game run under a users own permissions, especially if you got it from a less than reputable source. Proper permissions would give it only enough access to run, nothing more.

Proper permissions would not give the game access to anything it didn’t actually need to run. It should be running either as it’s own user or wine. You don’t need a container. How did you think containers get locked down anyway? They run as a user with very limited access.

And that would achieve what exactly? The exploits won’t be the same. The permission structure shouldn’t allow it to do anything that would compromise the system. Maybe it can phone home, but to what effect?

It’s kinda trivial to limit their ability to do anything in Linux though. It’s not as if virus authors are gonna waste their time trying to exploit a demographic that is both small and extremely fragmentary when they can just write for windows.

Removed by mod

I didn’t downvote you, but I think know why you’re getting downvoted. Your comment tipifies laziness and your reaction to the downvotes smacks of entitlement. I’m sorry if that feels rude or offends you. I’m really trying to not be mean about it.

You’re not actually trying to gain knowledge; you’re just begging for a knowledge handout for something that would be obvious even from just a cursory web search and a quick review of the relevant Wikipedia article (which is probably the top non-sponsored result). That shit gets old real fast. Sometimes you really do just have to RTFM.

Maybe if you’re new to all this and/or have no interest. But if you’ve been tinkering for more than a few years, it’s just a PC version of project car. It’s something you tinker with on the weekends, adding and refining as you go. I would never be able to negotiate multiple streaming services in a unified way to my satisfaction. So it’s not as if I really even have the option of paying for what I actually want from a service.

Well, I’ve tried both (yes over twenty years) and writable optical discs have been pretty flaky in comparison to HDDs. I never suggested SSD was good for anything but temporary storage. But you’re totally missing the point about medium mattering much less than consistently making copies.

The storage medium you choose really isn’t as critical as making multiple copies, storing them in separate physical locations, and testing that you can recover the data when you need it. Diversity in the physical medium you choose is probably a good thing too long term. Archival discs aren’t really that long lived though. You could try, but unless you are regularly checking the discs and making additional copies, you’re going to loose data eventually. I gave up using discs as any kind of backup because it was too much hassle. Copying hard drives was much more straightforward and reliable.

Better? Yeah, the fluff is gone, but I’ve seen better quality streaming from a potato.

You’re wording is a little weird, so hopefully we’re understanding your situation and desire. Symlinks won’t work, since they’re basically just links to files or directories, i.e. they do not contain the actual data. Most the software you’d use to torrent or to play media is going to struggle with following a bunch of symlinks. Hardlinks are better suited to seeding a torrent from one directory, while maintaining a copy elsewhere to fit in with your media filename standards, without double the storage size.

If symlinking is like forwarding your mail to a new address, hardlinking is like having one house with two or more addresses. Each address brings you to the “real” house. Deleting one address (maybe because you’re done seeding) does not remove the house or the other addresses. If you move or delete the target of a symlink, that link and any other symlink pointing to that location also breaks. The actual data of a file doesn’t get deleted until ALL of the hardlinks have been deleted.

Once you get Plex setup you can have all your videos, photos, and music with you wherever you are. You can stream via the Plex app on the firestick, Chromecast to any supported device with the help of your phone, or download media for offline viewing from your phone via a USB to HDMI adapter. The firestick Plex app is basically just a client, but the Plex app on an nvidia shield can additionally act as a server whose library resides on a USB drive connected directly to the shield or any samba/windows share the shield can see on your network.

What do you mean by professional made? The color of any dyes doesn’t really enter into it.

Mass produced CDs were physically stamped foil laminated with plastics. Writable discs regardless of quality, professional or otherwise, worked on a completely different principle which would fade (or rot) over time. Pretty much every other problem is physical and not rot.

It sounds like a physical hardware problem, not software. If you played it once and there is no apparent physical damage to the disc it may be a problem with your disc drive. If you can, try playing it on another piece of hardware like a dedicated DVD player. Also, you could try playing a known good disc (that you don’t mind losing) in your PC drive. This will help narrow down the cause to either the disc or the drive. I’ve had more drive failures over the years than disc failures. The discs that did fail were usually writable discs or obviously damaged. Most of the damage looked liked scratches of the read side or label damage.

You’re half right for the wrong reasons. Disc rot just doesn’t happen to stamped original discs, only writable discs rot. Old cheap discs might degrade for other reasons of course (like scratches or labels delaminating and tearing away at a substandard construction), but the data layer of original stamped discs doesn’t decompose because it’s mechanically stamped into the data layer. Original discs would have been stamped foil pressed between two layers of plastic. Cheap discs sometimes just skipped the top layer of plastic so that the data layer was just under the painted label. Writable discs especially using this cost saving technique. Thus any damage to the top label would damage the data layer. Writable discs rot because the bits are burned into a different kind of data layer film that can fade or otherwise decompose, but I doubt you’d be able to actually see dots from rot. Using the wrong kind of pen or using sticker labels could easily damage the data layer. If you hold a disc up to a light source and see dots of light through it, the foil layer has been scratched and it will be unplayable, but this is physical damage not rot.