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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah, setting up qBittorrent plus an RSS feed and VPN takes very little time and effort. Not much harder than signing up for a subscription service. Then maintaining it is as simple as updating your RSS feed with new anime you want to watch at the start of the season or when you find something you’d like to see.

    Plex can be a bit of pain to setup to properly scrape anime, but there are some good guides out there. Jellyfin is easier, but setting it up for remote access is more difficult.

    All in all, it’s a bit more up front effort for an overall better experience than having to juggle several monthly subscriptions every anime season just to watch everything you want to watch.

    If you want to support the creators, buy the blu-rays when they come out.









  • Changing the default settings wouldn’t mean changing any individual user’s settings. It would mean changing the default settings you get the first time you login. Which the user could then change to their preference.

    If you have a bunch of elderly/non-savvy people who are using your server, being able to change the default settings to something sensible for that set of users would be a good feature to have.




  • I would say the potential for misuse, while definitely present, is outweighed by the potential benefits.

    A creep watching you from their basement is less likely to act on their dangerous impulses.

    An overcrowded bar, poses a lot of risks in itself and the ability to determine how crowded the bar is without having to be physically present can mitigate your exposure to those risks.

    In a crowded bar you have a higher risk of being drugged or assaulted because security and staff will likely be distracted or simply unable to notice and intervene. Also, in the event of an emergency that requires you to be able exit quickly, such as a fire or earthquake not only will it be much more difficult to leave it’s also more likely that people will panic and exasperate the problem.

    Is a camera with a public live feed the best way to achieve that? No, probably not. But it’s simple, cheap, and gets the job done.

    A bar is also a public venue. In a public place you have absolutely no reasonable expectation of privacy. So, while in most circumstances it’s unreasonable to expect that you’re being recorded, it’s equally unreasonable to expect that you’re not.





  • The candy crush thing, or more generally the fact that since Windows 8 they preload third-party applications, is a relatively speaking small problem. However, the fact the specific applications that get preinstalled are based on a targeted advertising profile for the user signed into the PC, assuming you sign in with a Microsoft account is a bigger problem. While I’m sure they take every possible effort to make those profiles anonymous the data in aggregate is impossible to anonymize. There is a setting in Windows to disable that data collection, at least for advertising purposes, but it gets toggled back on “accidentally” after some updates.

    They also have a number of features, like copilot (the chat bot), previously they had Cortana, that do similar kinds of data extraction. Mostly, in order to actually process the user request, but also to be used to train the model. They store it in an anonymized form, but again, it’s impossible to actually do that in practice.

    That’s just two things that are installed and enabled by default that: collect user data for, what I and many others find to be unwanted purposes, don’t give the user the option to disable that data collection (only limit it), and seemingly doesn’t even consistently respect the users choice in that matter. That is by definition spyware.

    They also place advertising on the desktop for things like OneDrive subscriptions, MS Office, and other paid Microsoft services. Those preinstalled apps I mentioned before are effectively ads for those applications, many of which are paid apps or have paid components to them. That is by definition adware.

    Spyware and adware are forms of malware. Which makes Microsoft a malware vendor.