besides games

Yeah, same here. I haven’t pirated games since I was a broke university student. There’s simply no need to when digital storefronts make it easy to get the games I want in the format I want. Some even offer DRM-free offline backups, or in the case of Steam the games stay in my library even if the publisher decides to remove the title from the Steam storefront.

TV and movies are completely different from this, and so much worse. So many different streaming services, some with intrusive ads, and every one wanting their own monthly subscription. I shouldn’t need to search “where is X streaming.” Ever. Titles disappear from these services all the time. Even if you “buy” a digital movie or show, the rights holder can yank it back from you because… reasons?

TV and movie distribution is such a garbage deal for consumers that open source developers have created a complete software stack (the servarr stack) to automate the process of finding and downloading media. Once you get it set up, it’s about million times more convenient than corporate streaming services.

TL;DR: Getting digital games is easy and feels like a fair deal for the average consumer. Getting movies and TV shows is a pain in the ass and feels like an absolute shit deal for the consumer. I’ll continue to pirate movies and TV shows because as Gabe Newell famously argued, piracy indicates a service problem.

I did almost the exact same thing, on the same timeline! Installed Bazzite on a second NVMe sometime in the spring, and it’s been my daily driver for months now. For the first couple months I was swapping back and forth due to some graphics driver instability, but that’s because I got a 9070XT at launch and it took a bit for the Linux drivers to get to where they needed to be. That’s pretty much sorted now though, and I can’t remember the last time I booted into Windows.

Guess who just gained a 1TB drive to install more games?

I might use mine to try other distros. Bazzite has been great so far, but I’m not sure I’m sold on immutability and I might try a non-Fedora based distro.

I switched to AirVPN about 6 months ago and I’ve been really happy with the service. Was previously using NordVPN, which was fine, but I was looking for a VPN provider that offered port forwarding and AirVPN does that. I don’t have hard stats on this, but I do feel that having access to port forwarding has improved my overall torrent speeds since switching.

I’d recommend AirVPN. Here’s why I’d recommend them, in their own words:

No traffic limit. No time limit.

No maximum speed limit, it depends only on the server load

Every protocol is welcome, including p2p. Forwarded ports and DDNS to optimize your software.

Not the person you replied to, but I’m in agreement with them. I did tech hiring for some years for junior roles, and it was quite common to see applicants with a complete alphabet soup of certifications. More often than not, these cert-heavy applicants would show a complete lack of ability to apply that knowledge. For example they might have a network cert of some kind, yet were unable to competently answer a basic hypothetical like “what steps would you take to diagnose a network connection issue?” I suspect a lot of these applicants crammed for their many certifications, memorized known answers to typical questions, but never actually made any effort to put the knowledge to work. There’s nothing inherently wrong with certifications, but from past experience I’m always wary when I see a CV that’s heavy on certs but light on experience (which could be work experience or school or personal projects).

I’m all for de-Googling, but… is it possible that Restricted in this context mean those apps have no data usage because they’re restricted from using it? It could be trying to say that the app is restricted, not that you’re restricted.

Tl;Dr the protocol requires there to be trusted token providers that issue the tokens. Who do you suppose are the trusted providers in the Google and Apple implementations? Google and Apple respectively, of course. Maybe eventually there would be some other large incumbents that these implementers choose to bless with token granting right. By its nature the protocol centralizes power on the web, which would disadvantage startups and smaller players.

Private State Tokens are Google’s implementation of the IETF Privacy Pass protocol. Apple has another implementation of the same protocol named Private Access Tokens. Mozilla has taken a negative position against this protocol in its current form, and its existing implementations in their current forms. See here for their blog post on the subject, and here for their more in-depth analysis.

It’s likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It’s not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered “too new” at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is… not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it’s still considered “at your own risk” (source).

He was a raging alcoholic who hid his illness from the medical professionals who examined him as part of his Super Size Me “experiment.” A lifetime of booze did way more damage than 30 days of McDs possibly could.

This seems a lot more plausible to me. Exit wounds tend to be pretty gory.

Jesus, what a bunch of needless “security”

I disagree with this part. Ticket theft is an actual issue, there are lots of ways to get a copy of someone else’s barcode and either use it before they do or (more likely) sell it to someone else online. TicketMaster’s marketing is talking up the increased security to distract from their true purpose, which is of course to find more ways to take more money from fans. Of course it’s debatable whether the increased security is worth the decreased convenience for ticketholders. That is the inevitable tension when it comes to security, where any increase in security always incurs at least some cost in terms of convenience.

This is all for personal data mining.

TicketMaster might be selling user data, but I don’t think that’s their main aim. They want control of the resale market so they can take a cut when tickets are resold. Note how they don’t allow direct transfers between two mobile wallets, they only allow transfers using their app. That’s so they can monitor transfers. If they see someone transferring dozens or hundreds of tickets to many other TicketMaster users then that person is likely reselling and they can clamp down on their account. TicketMaster’s true intent is to force all resales onto their ticket marketplace, because that’s where they get to take a cut of resales.

Oh yes, I don’t mean to absolve them of any blame. They treated it as an expensive lesson, which is probably the best way for them to process it.

Also while TicketMaster is going to sell this as being an “enhanced security” thing, it’s pretty obvious that increased security is only a side benefit for them. Their angle in this is getting more control over the tickets they sell. As long as there are many people who want to go than can physically fit in a venue, there will be a reselling market for event tickets. TicketMaster wants to take a cut of these downstream transactions.

While the security of rotating barcodes does hinder outright scams, mobile wallets normally allow wallet users to transfer items like tickets to another user if the ticket issuer allows it. TicketMaster does not allow this for their tickets, of course, because it could allow someone to resell tickets while cutting TicketMaster out of the transaction. Currently TM allows transfers using their app, but I’m sure they monitor usage of the feature and clamp down on anyone transferring many tickets. In other words if you try to resell in bulk without using TicketMaster’s own platform (where they get to take a cut), they drop the hammer on you.

The reason you can’t use screenshots or printouts is because they’re now using rotating barcodes. Much like the rotating codes in an authenticator app, the number values behind the barcode are changing on some regular cadence. Only the most recent barcode value is considered valid.

The only other option is to use a mobile wallet, but that prevents me from sending my friends their tickets, since I purchased them all together.

Some ticket sellers allow you to transfer tickets from one wallet to another wallet, but of course TicketMaster isn’t one of them because they’re fucking TicketMaster. What TicketMaster does allow is transfers from one TicketMaster account to another. Of course then everyone needs to have a TicketMaster account, needs to have the app, etc. It’s either that or leave all the tickets in your app or wallet and go in together. If you tell the door person “I have the tickets for these X people,” they’ll be able to handle that.

Yes because the security of barcodes and screenshotted tickets were such a huge problem before.

I think what you just described is actually a problem. Friends of my parents were visiting somewhere, bought tickets to a show from a reseller, met up with the seller (normal looking guy, no red flags, gave some plausible story why he was selling) and paid cash for printed out tickets with barcodes. Printouts looked legit, dates on the printouts were correct, etc. Went to the doors, tried to scan their tickets, got told that unfortunately they’d just been scammed. The impression they get from the box office worker is that this sort of bad news is something they’ve had to deliver frequently. Anecdotal, but I doubt those friends of my parents were the only ones to get scammed in this way. TicketMaster still sucks as an organization but the extra security of rotating barcodes does serve a legitimate security purpose, just like the rotating security codes generated by an authenticator app.

Airlines have recently been having problems with stowaways using screenshots of boarding pass barcodes or QR codes too. Such stowaways should get caught before departure by passenger headcounts or boarding ID checks, but clearly there are gaps or breakdowns in these procedures because some of these stowaways are getting caught at the destination. Others may have successfully flown for free. If it keeps happening I bet we’ll see rotating barcodes come to mobile boarding passes too, if that hasn’t already happened.

I’m sure there would be a way to do this with Debian, but I have to confess I don’t know it. I have successfully done this in the past with Clover Bootloader. You have to enable an NVMe driver, but once that’s done you should see an option to boot from your NVMe device. After you’ve booted from it once, Clover should remember and boot from that device automatically going forward. I used this method for years in a home theatre PC with an old motherboard and an NVMe drive on a PCIe adapter.

Containourboros!

You can do this with custom formats. You’d want to create a custom format that gives a score if the file is below a certain size threshold (say 1.5GB per hour), then add minimum custom scores to the release profiles you use (e.g. Bluray 1080p). You can also add custom filters for release groups that prioritise file size. YTS for example keeps their releases as small as possible.

Indie game developers have been getting hit with chargebacks for years. To be clear, not every key on the resellers’ sites are illegitimate. There are lots of legitimate reasons to want to resell a key, for example a key for a game you’re not interested in that’s received as part of a Humble Bundle or something. However when someone uploads 1000 keys for a newly launched game, it’s highly unlikely that those are legit but the key reseller sites don’t ask any questions about where the keys come from. The resellers just want to sell the key and take their cut, and they don’t give a shit if it was purchased with a stolen credit card because the original key seller is the one left holding the bag when a chargeback occurs.

Key resellers are really, truly awful. In many cases the keys are purchased from legitimate sites using stolen credit card numbers. The key resellers plead ignorance as to where the keys come from, but it’s an open secret at this point. If you don’t want to pay the Steam/Gog price, piracy is less awful because you won’t be fueling a criminal enterprise and there’s no chance your Steam/Gog account will get a stolen key revoked.

Credit card fraud and software keys actually ends up being paid for by the rest of us. Fraudulent transactions and chargebacks lead to higher merchant fees, and those costs end up getting passed on to legitimate purchasers.