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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • The most elite trackers perhaps.

    Trackers on /r/opensignups ? Nah they open their doors to the public every now and again.

    Would not recommend it to anyone who can’t dedicate a seed box or machine uploading torrents most hours of the day every day. It’s possible to do it without those but difficult. With them it’s merely a matter of using free leech and building a buffer up as well as taking advantage of points systems to get free upload just for keeping torrents seeding even without uploading.

    If you only ever grab free leech then all you have to worry about is meeting seed time and activity requirements like logging in every 90 days.

    An old computer with an external drive. A raspberry pi, a nas that can run a BitTorrent client. Any would work if one doesn’t want to pay for a seed box. (Most trackers ban shared seed boxes though so you will have to get dedicated)


  • Take a look here for some alternatives:

    https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#good-alternatives

    • Matrix
    • XMPP
    • Briar
    • SimpleX

    Also just because there are no alternatives doesn’t mean your default position should be we just have to trust whatever exists now because it’s good enough. Or that we can’t criticize it ruthlessly, distrust it. Call it out and as a result of that build perhaps the desire for something better, a fix as it were.

    The evidence and history clearly points towards Signal being very suspicious and likely in bed with the feds. This is not conspiracy thinking. Conspiracy thinking is thinking that the country/empire that gave away old German engima machines whose code they’d cracked to developing countries without telling them they’d cracked it in the late 40s/early 50s, that went on to establish a crypto company just to subvert its encryption. That’s done everything Snowden revealed has in fact changed suddenly for the first time in half a century for no particular reason and not to its own benefit. That’s fanciful thinking. That’s a leap of logic away from the proven trends, the pattern of behavior, and indeed the incentivizes to continue using their dominant position to maintain dominance and power. They didn’t back down on the clipper chip because they just gave up and decided to let people have privacy and rights. They gave up on it because they found better ways of achieving the same results with plausible deniability.

    Also why is everything “tankies” with you people. Privacy advocates point out the obvious and suddenly it’s a communist conspiracy. LOL


  • No.

    HDMI does have a feature called Ethernet over HDMI that in theory could allow that.

    Thing is though it’s literally never been implemented in anything. It died because cheap WiFi became common.

    For it to work you’d need both the TV and Chromecast and HDMI cable all to support it. It’s not uncommon on cables and a surprising amount of them include it in features list (probably to trick low info people).

    But I believe that’s a hardware design thing so not something even a software update could enable. It costs extra money and they’re already paying for a WiFi chip so why bother?


  • Just FYI. Comments nearly exactly like yours on Reddit were used in copyright troll lawsuits against ISPs as evidence they didn’t do enough to enforce copyright and were negligent and legally liable.

    Further when that didn’t work the copyright agency sued Reddit to try to unmask the identities of those people to bring legal proceedings against them to coerce them into testifying against their ISP at threat of being in trouble for their activities. Reddit was big enough to fight off the lawsuit luckily but be careful.



  • Lot of cope and denial in these threads. Yes the same-day is probably a rosy estimate based off people using 6 digit codes or something easy to crack, doesn’t mean it’s false or that they can’t hypothetically target longer alpha-numeric passwords. For all we know they might not even be brute-forcing and could be conducting some sort of exploit that over time reveals the encryption keys themselves in some way.

    I’m still very curious about the nature of the mechanisms of action. I assume they manage to bypass the basic lock-out against entering too many passcodes too quickly somehow which is what enables this. If throttling could be properly enforced (to say nothing of something like 10 attempts and it refuses all future attempts and erases the key type of thing) this type of attack wouldn’t be practical for anyone using anything above a 6 digit numerical passcode in any reasonable timeframe. I wonder if they exploit wireless radios including cellular, wifi, bluetooth and force some code on the phones via these usually-on chips that enables this via exploiting problems in their architecture. Perhaps something that locks up, prevents functioning or resets certain checks via flooding parts of the hardware/software from these points of access. Or if it really is purely phy/log access to the lightning/usb-c port.



  • Politely agree to disagree and I’ll elaborate. Thanks for your input.

    LTH are all marked as such. MABL normal (non LTH) discs such as verbatim sells for less than half the cost of M-Discs have the same physical properties as M-Discs, the protective layers are the same, the recording methods are the same using the same materials. Therefore the longevity is the same or near the same without getting into M-Disc’s ridiculous marketing claims of 1000 years (when NIST and others agree the poly-acrylic protective layer would degrade and decompose after a century or two at most even in ideal circumstances).

    /r/Datahoarder has had this argument several times and the consensus so far seems to comes out to the fact that M-Discs were a DVD-era innovation that in the BD era offer no meaningful advantages in technologies.

    I’d rather have two BD’s from a reputable company like Verbatim (not fly by night plain white discount bulk BD’s from who knows where) from separate batches bought 6 months apart stored properly than rely on one overly expensive M-Disc that isn’t going to last any longer and probably isn’t made to meaningfully tighter tolerances.

    NIST only estimates the lifetime of M-Discs, real world abuse tests on BD’s (non LTH, should have mentioned that to be honest) show good endurance that far exceeds DVDs. It comes down to however burning it right and storing it right. A pile of M-Disc left in a window in your uninsulated garage year after year and burned at 16x are not on the whole going to be in a better state in 20 years than a pile of BD-R’s burned at 4x, stored in protective sleeves in a case in a temperature controlled, insulated environment. Add in having a back-up copy and the chances of total data failure on both primary and backup disc and you’re looking at better survivability. NIST numbers generally assume things like storage in archival quality environments such as old salt mines which are a controlled environment, low humidity, neither excessively hot or cool and not subject to shifts in temperature. Most people can’t store things in an environment like that and those who can usually have the finances for a better solution like multiple tape copies and/or continually updating and refreshing hashed/checksumed files and moving on a schedule to new better storage mediums (e.g. keeping files in a raid array in a plugged in NAS, checking for failures regularly, replacing disks and upgrading disks every 5-10 years one at a time).

    I wouldn’t trust any media not professionally stored in a purpose-built archival environment and with at least two copies to last more than 25 years without degradation or loss. Anyone trying to store stuff really long-term and cannot afford degradation or loss needs to have a plan to update their archival copies every 15 years or at least do an assessment that often and survey the options as well as the physical and ideally logical state of their chosen back-ups.



  • There is just no excuse for not even salting or SOMETHING to keep the secrets out of plaintext. The reason you don’t store in plaintext is because it can lead to even incidental collection. Say you have some software, perhaps spyware, perhaps it’s made by a major corporation so doesn’t get called that and it crawls around and happens to upload a copy of a full or portion of the file containing this info, now it’s been uploaded and compromised potentially not even by a malicious actor successfully gaining access to a machine but by poor practices.

    No it can’t stop a sophisticated malware specifically targeting Signal to steal credentials and gain access but it does mean casual malware that hasn’t taken the time out to write a module to do that is out of luck and increases the burden on attackers. No it won’t stop the NSA but it’s still something that it stops someone’s 17 year old niece who knows a little bit about computers but is no malware author from gaining access to your signal messages and account because she could watch a youtube video and follow along with simple tools.

    The claims Signal is an op or the runner is under a national security letter order to compromise it look more and more plausible in light of weird bad basic practices like this and their general hostility. I’ll still use it and it’s far from the worst looking thing out there but there’s something unshakably weird about the lead dev, their behavior and practices that can’t be written off as being merely a bit quirky.


  • I wish they would just push all the big mainstream porn sites to remove the most abusive misogynistic content rather than slapping these checks on everything.

    Also this will never be okay until there is a zero knowledge version that means neither the government, nor the sites, nor any other party can establish a given person’s habits which is probably not something they’ll ever do because tracking is probably part of the point.

    I’m not a fan of the easy access to porn that kids have or the proliferation of the industry in general but I am worried that as part of this harmless things like erotic roleplaying websites will be swept up as part of it and well I use those. And their point is not porn though some people host and share porn as part of it (which is why it’d get swept up with it eventually probably), it’s about writing, smutty, erotic writing. And I’d rather not have to tie my identity to my desires to roleplay out an elf who ends up making “friends” with the wolf-men tribe to my real life identity (I’m not claiming that’s something I do there but it’s an example of something that would be kind of embarrassing for others to know and it’s far from the weirdest stuff that goes on in places like that).

    Government having credits for how often I could say log in and continue a long-term erotic writing campaign with someone is just weird but that’s the end point of this kind of thing. Having credits seems not helpful anyways, the true porn addicts are just going to download stuff then share it in private forums, discords, p2p, etc. If the point is to stop kids from accessing this the credits thing seems odd.


  • M-Discs had merit in the DVD era. It’s a common refrain of those who don’t know the intricacies and read a wired article years ago to claim they mean anything in the Blu-ray era. They don’t.

    Standard Blu-ray Discs have all the technologies that supposedly make m-discs so long lasting and as far as media that isn’t continuously updated and hashed from live storage medium to live storage medium (cold, archival storage unpowered) they are about as good as you’ll get.

    They are much tougher than DVDs. Of course a variety of things go into how long a disc remains readable and without damage to data including luck with regards to no impurities in the batch. Even m-disc themselves based their longest claims off storage in ideal situations like an inactive salt mine (commonly used for archives by governments). Kept out of sun, away from extreme heat (including baking in uninsulated 120 degree F heat all summer year after year), away from high humidity and away from UV exposure to the data side of the disc as well as scratches and such and they should last a quarter to half a century, some more.

    In the Blu-ray era m-discs are just an overly expensive brand.



  • It should be considered illegal if it was used to harm/sexually abuse a child which in this case it was.

    Whether it should be classed as CSAM or something separate, I tend to think probably something separate as a revenge porn type law that still allows for distinguishing between this and say a girl whose uncle groomed and sexually abused her while filming it as while this is awful it can (and often does seem) be the product of foolish youth rather than the offender and those involved all being very sick, dangerous, and actually violent offending adult pedophiles victimizing children.

    Consider the following:

    1. Underage girl takes a picture of her own genitals, unfortunately classified as the unhelpful and harmful term “child porn” and she can be charged and registered as a sex offender but it’s not CSAM and -shouldn’t- be considered illegal material or a crime (though it is because the west has a vile fixation on puritanism which hurts survivors of childhood sexual trauma as well as adults).

    2. Underage girl takes a picture of her genitals and sends it to her boyfriend, again /shouldn’t/ be CSAM (unfortunately may be charged similarly), she consented and we can assume there wasn’t any unreasonable level of coercion. What it is unfortunately is bound by certain notions of puritanism that are very American.

    3. From 2, boyfriend shares it with other boys, now it’s potentially CSAM or at the least revenge porn of a child as she didn’t consent and it could be used to harm her but punishment has to be modulated with the fact the offender is likely a child himself and not fully able to comprehend his actions.

    4. Underage boy cuts out photo of underage girl he likes, only her face and head, glues it atop a picture of a naked porn actress, maybe a petite one and uses it for his own purposes in private. Not something I think should be classed as CSAM.

    5. Underage boy uses AI to do the same as above but more believably, again I think it’s kind of creepy but if he keeps it to himself and doesn’t show anyone or spread it around it’s just youthful weirdness though really he probably shouldn’t have easy access to those tools.

    6. Underage boy uses AI to do same as 4-5 but this time he spread it around, defaming the girl, she/her friends find out, people say mean things about her, she has to go to school with a bunch of people who are looking and pleasuring themselves to fake but realistic images of herself against her consent which is violating and makes one feel unsafe. Worse probably being bullied for it, mean things, called the s-word, etc.

    Kids are weird and do dumb things though unfortunately boys especially in our culture have a propensity to do things that hurt girls far more than the inverse to the point it’s not even really worth talking about girls being creepy or sexually abusive towards peer-aged boys in adolescence and young adulthood. To address this though you need to address patriarchy and misogyny on a cultural level, teach boys empathy and respect for girls and women and frankly do away with all this abusive pornography that’s super prevalent and popular which encourages and perpetuates abusive actions and mentalities towards women and girls, this will never happen in the US however because it’s structurally opposed to being able to do such a thing. Also couldn’t hurt to peel back the stigma and shame around sexuality and nudity in the US which stems from its reactionary Christian culture but again I don’t think that will ever happen in the US as it exists, not this century anyways.

    Obviously not getting into adults here as that doesn’t need to be discussed, it’s wrong plain and simple.

    Bottom line I think is companies need to be strongly compelled to quickly remove revenge-porn type stuff (regardless of the age of the victim though children can’t deal with this kind of thing as well as adults so the risk of suicide or other self-harm is much higher so it should be treated as higher priority) which this definitely is. It’s abusive and unacceptable and they should fear the credit card companies coming down on them hard and destroying them if they don’t aggressively remove it and ban it and report those sharing it. It should be driven off the clear-web once reported, there should be an image-hash data-set like that used for CSAM (but separate) for such things and major services should use it to stop the spread.


  • So first it’s client-side scanning for CSAM. Not without some nobility. But the problem is once you wedge open that door it’s technically possible to do it for other things and so you become compelled to.

    It’ll move from just CSAM to stopping and tracking “propaganda” as deemed by them which will be narrow-ish at first (anything pro-Russia, RT links, etc) but gradually expand over time to anything outside the mainstream branded as extremist (and guess what, privacy advocates will definitely fall within that label). And once that’s in place the private stake-holders, copyright holders will come knocking, they’ll say rightly so “hey you have the capability right now, we demand you implement client-side scanning to detect copyright violations” and then that will be ordered by a court, further enshrined by a law and oh look now you can no longer send political thought that the ruling regime disagrees with, can no longer surf the high seas, and so on and so forth. Congratulations and please enjoy living in the “garden” of Europe.


  • What are you average file sizes for movies and series?

    Movies? 4-8GB for most 60-120 minute features. TV shows. For live action 800MB/episode, 500MB/ episode for animation. For hour long stuff probably 1.2-1.6GB/episode.

    What would you do? what’s your target size for movies and series? What bitrate do you go for in which codec?

    HEVC 10 bit. I target in the 7000-9000kbps bitrate range generally. For animation that can be as low as 3000-5000kbps. Sometimes a bit higher for very grainy old films, occasionally a little lower for grain less modern digital camera work that hasn’t had digital grain added.

    If you want to maximize space savings without losing quality you have to understand what needs more bitrate and what can do with less. Across the board you could do something like CRF 20 but you’d have outliers where you don’t get enough bitrate and those where you still end up with rates of 14,000kbps.

    The above is for 1080p content.

    If you can stand HD video content at 2-3000kbps more power to you but on a large TV I can tell. I think even being reckless and not caring about future-proofing less than 6000kbps is a bad idea for anything but TV shows. Even those I think outside animation you want minimum 2000kbps for 1080p.


  • DVD’s max out at about 580p (for PAL, NTSC is 480p), resolutions are measured by the number of horizontal lines of pixels (counted from top to bottom of video/screen), not vertical which at 4:3 square aspect ratio on dvds does tend to be 720 pixels (by contrast full resolution HD video’s number of vertical lines is 1920 while it’s horizontal lines are of course 1080, hence 1080p). You’re not the first person to be confused by this.

    Professional encoders who fully understand the encoders and the schemes in use and care about not seeing artifacting or low quality would never intentionally go as low as 300mb for a feature length movie of even an hour. Yes there are people who do such things but they’re not well regarded and it won’t look even passable on anything larger than a phone screen.

    Recognized quality groups that seek low sizes might get an animated feature (less bitrate needed due to lack of fine detail in animation vs real film) in SD quality down to around that. But for most live action content the sizes I see from the best of the best concerned with smaller release sizes are in the 900mb to 1.5GB range for 60-90 minute features.

    300mb for a 90 minute live action feature even in SD is just not going to look good, some of the groups who get those sizes make them look even half-passable by running pre-filters in virtualdub that smooth, reduce grain and detail, etc before passing to the encoder. That kind of thing is way beyond anything you’re going to learn in a few youtube videos though, that’s advanced stuff with scripting.

    Think about it this way, if you shoot for 1GB encodes with 265 or AV1 you can store over 900 movies on a 1tb drive which can be had for well under a hundred dollars.

    I would like the best and fanciest algorithms to have least dataloss.

    There is no magic that will get you where you want. If you want detail preserved you need more bitrate which translates to larger sizes. Modern codecs like HEVC and AV1 mean you need as much as 1/5th the bitrate you needed with old MPEG2/4 encoding schemes used on DVDs, that’s darn good savings but it has its limits.

    Do as you will but anything live action (non-animated) significantly under 1000kbps average bitrate is going to look awful on a 1080p screen and much worse than what it would look like if you popped your dvd in the disc drive and played it from there.

    Opus is fine if you’re not worried about compatibility and just playing on a computer.


  • I really like the one I have. A relative has a much older model and it still works fine too.

    It’s very responsive and the 4k models are quite powerful and future proofed IMO. If you have an iPhone you can quickly use it as a remote too.

    Paired with infuse app it even does local streaming from my media server well.

    And it’s cheaper to get this year’s top of the line Apple TV than it is the 2019 Nividia shield pro.


  • Disgusting that the shutdown note tried to play off their serious issues with grooming and sexual abuse and claim they did a lot. Fuck that asshole.

    Edit: Uh oh I’m being downvoted by his fan boys. The article (and successful lawsuit) say’s exactly what I’m saying and anyone who at scale enables mass sexual abuse of children is an asshole. Omegle had no other uses for most of its existence, hypotheticals sure but as the article mentions in practice it was overwhelmingly full of naked men trying to find women and children to interact with sexually. The site runner was flagrantly negligent.

    Gosh I love certain types, you’ll rightly jump on a pastor who looked the other way for sexual abuse happening in his church as being responsible, yet a guy who runs a big website for years full of abuse is taken at his word as a sweet, innocent, helpless, benevolent advocate for a better web because he talks right. (Never mind he deliberately obfuscated the horrors happening on his website with his closing statement which people here ate up. It takes a lot to lose safe harbor)