Valve argued in court that you do not own any title in your library and that they are a subscription based service. That’s not very ethical.

Windows being easy to pirate wasnt the reason for it’s popularity. It had market share because they allowed for it to be preinstalled on machines for virtually nothing. They allowed it to be preinstalled on machines for virtually nothing because the OS wasn’t the flagship product.

MS Office has always been the major flagship product for the company. This was true in 1994 and still is today. Office is so important to their revenue streams that it’s fairly common knowledge and has been mentioned by former employees that OS development would focus on compatibility with Office programs, not the other way around.

Specifically if you look at the years around Office XP and 2003, that suite is used very much as a CVS. They deprecate their operating systems using Office.

On an unrooted phone, you would have to use block connections without VPN. That’s the only way you can tell for certain that traffic is going over the VPN and that the VPN torrenting connection is not intermittently dropping.

If the device is rooted, then you could do actual packet analysis via tools like tcpdump to actively check the traffic is routed to the tunnel.

Even if it is not being done for a malicious reason, it is still a malicious practice. Websites can help prevent this by adopting wildcard Subject Alternate Names in their certificates thereby making the redirection much less likely to succeed, but you shouldn’t have to view your own ISP as a threat actor.

The DNS modification is slightly off. Some ISPs check UDP packets since they are insecure and will modify query results regardless of the DNS server you are sending to. Mediacom is known to do this for their billing and DMCA systems. They use DNS redirection to assist in MITMing the connection to load their own certificate to your browser. With that done, they can prepend their own Javascript to the response they receive from whatever web server you are trying to contact. That’s how they get their data usage and DMCA popups loaded when you load up whatever site.

How does a private tracker ensure that it hasn’t been compromised though? From my understanding they largely disallow the use of VPNs, although perhaps that isn’t true of all private trackers. Still, this user for example could be a bad actor and he was just given an invite code without any sort of check being done.

I think the issue with what you’re saying here is that you’re assuming an ISP is going to pay the same amount that residential customers pay. They will ultimately pay several times more than what would the same amount of residential customers of your own pay. There is a general rule that you do not build fiber where fiber already exists. It is just that expensive. So if a city’s fiber network is laid down first, ISPs typically will not cross those boundaries. They would rather pay for hand off as that is actually cheaper than building and maintaining the infrastructure.

One of the big differences between backhaul carriers and ISPs is the amount of actual personnel required as well. Backall carriers don’t need giant call centers filled with customer service reps and residential techs. They don’t need an army of field services to go out and install local services for residents.

Final point I can make to that is that regardless if it’s an ISP or it’s a city-based service, nobody builds fiber networks with residential in mind. When you build a fiber network you build it to businesses because the same service that you could sell to a residential customer you could sell to a business customer with a 10x multiplier on it. After you establish business services, you backfill residential. I worked accounts where one business client equaled 10,000 residential.

In the end, cities that establish themselves as backhaul carriers make more money for the city because they will cost less to build, less to maintain, and have the advantage of business billing.

I spent many years working building and maintaining fiber networks, and I can unequivocally tell you that the answer to this is maybe. Normally you can treat city fiber just as any other ISP. A lot of them have different rules and different thresholds on what they allow and what they do not allow. Fiber networks are extremely expensive to build. So while you definitely need to protect the multi-million dollar investment you’ve made, depending on how you’ve built it it can be a little tricky to police what everyone is doing.

What’s interesting is just because you are not receiving notice of a DMCA infraction, that does not mean that your ISP has not received a notice. There is this idea that if you are not set up for it it is difficult to track out what account held what IP 30 days prior or 60 days prior. That is kind of a BS excuse, but I have been at companies that did not have logging because they did not want to have logging.

We did collect email notices and pass them around though weekly to see who could find the most absurd DMCA takedown. So I will say, if you were pirating some weird ass mommy fetish furry porn everyone in that call center knows it and is laughing about it.

While I understand the sentiment, I kind of disagree with this. Cities implement fiber in different ways. Not all of them focus or care about residential service. In my city, they essentially set themselves up as a backhaul carrier. So when ISPs move into town rather than building out large infrastructure they connect into the city’s and pay the city for interconnect. That money then goes to city services which is why we have so many parks and different programs.

Usually resellers are allowed to use it. It might be prohibitively expensive for them, but there is availability. Again that depends on how the city has it set up, but typically you as a citizen are getting a return on that investment either way.

It’s been a while since I’ve ever ripped a DVD, but I’m pretty sure Handbrake still does that and that has automatic naming for output: https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/technical/automatic-file-naming.html

The best is Yahoo Messenger. Copyright trolls would never see it coming.

Despite the obvious red flags here, I would just like to point out that this person is asking a pirate group where to buy something.

If you really want to kick mpv up a notch you should check out the uosc UI for mpv: https://github.com/tomasklaen/uosc

Hah, it still tries with the right-wing conspiracy garbage though every so often though. Its like “Hey…you wanna watch some hate crimes? No? Uh… uh… ok, here’s the 37min of LOTR facts you asked for…”

No, the way you did it is the only way I can think you can. Otherwise it opens up things to arbitrary code execution. I’m not exactly sure how qutebrowser gets away with it, but I know it’s built on QT so maybe it just isn’t running sandboxed or had some special method for calling external binaries/scripts. You might take a look at that project and see, but Firefox/qutebrowser is probably like comparing apples and oranges.

What does the “000” mean? 1427 is impressive also!

Yeah, I was referring to the field that takes in dat files. Honestly, it sounds like the OP is more interested in just outright blocking countries completely with Qbittorrent just one application abidding by that. At that point, OP should take the IP ranges and script them into iptables statements. I’ve never created 1000+ iptables configurations though so I don’t know what kind of performance hit that creates if any.

They all have pros and cons. For me, I wanted something that would be accessible from one central point across a zero tier network. This way I wasn’t having to maintain database copies of free tube via rclone or other tool and handle merges. That pretty much just meant Invidious. Someone had actually made a tool to automate docker container deployment and build out the PostgreSQL tables. It turned out to be the simplest solution for me.

Here is a link: https://github.com/tmiland/invidious-updater

I don’t think they can really. I don’t work in that stuff, but skipping isn’t included in YT analytics from what I’ve read. I would bet they rely on something like average view percentage to just make assumptions. For example, if a content creator places the sponsor bit in the first 10% of the video, and average view percentage for that video is 80%, then it is assumed the sponsor bit was watched. I wouldn’t be surprised if sponsors require some form of transparency in analytic reporting for content creators to get paid.

I also would figure that YouTube, as it has no bearing on their revenue, is probably not going to add in analytic features for Skip just for the sake of some third party.

It’s not automatic, but you can technically block countries. From the Connections tab in Options, there is an IP Filter option for data files. I believe the format is X.X.X.X-Y.Y.Y.Y

Country IP assignments are handled by ARIN in North America and RIPE NCC for Europe. Those are the two main ones, but LATAM, Africa, and APAC territories have their own respective groups as well. So, every main German IP block is known and searchable via RIPE. You would have to format your lists using that info.

It may not be super effective as IPs can somewhat float, but that would be the method.

EDIT: Here is an example using Germany again that shows the data you’d have to format - https://lite.ip2location.com/germany-ip-address-ranges?lang=en_US

That would be a lot simpler if Qbittorrent accept CIDR notation like any sane human should be using.