Shout out to yt-dlp, the absolute unit of software beneath lots of media scraping tools.

You can also use MPV Video player, should be able to play many URLs you throw at it.

Today I read a thread of people using the photo mode of death stranding to prove they are Norman Reedus. While this certainly won’t be the end to the story, it’s kind of funny this iteration of a clearly unfinished age verification system got out there. Makes me wonder how good they are going to protect their “customers” data.

Of course not! I will only get organic / grass fed computers with a OS preinstalled by the vendor. They only do this to protect the users and not for the fuckton of money MS shoves into their throats.

inb4 Linux users sweepingly get declared as criminals for some flimsy reason. There was some news of Facebook filtering out Linux content because it seemed harmful to them.

Will they though? Facebook has already created undisclosed bot accounts themselves before. A Platform where real users and such bots are indistinguishable (for the user) sounds like a social media corpos and authoritarian governments wet dream to me. Also reminds me of the attempts to disguise ads as natural content.

There are numerous benefits in IoT / smart home and ubiquitous computing. Used in the right ways it can make your life so much better and even save lives. It is just sad to see all the wasted potential, the greediness and straight up noncompliance with basic human rights and needs for simplicity and privacy in its design.

Funny enough, it got me into reading some threads of people reverse engineering air fryer APIs (didn’t expect that to ever happen) and it reminded me again of how great and compassionate some people are. Makes the stupid cat and mouse game seem even more stupid when 3 guys in their spare time can rebuild a 5 layer deep authentication stack with some unknown Philips / Xiaomi server that probably needed tens or even hundreds of engineers to build in an obfuscated manner in the first place.

Manufacturers: To deliver solutions to nonexistent problems. Free money.

Politics: To save our economy. It can only survive if people buy new stuff all the time. Could also come in handy as surveillance measure one day.

People: Oh how cool, I can monitor my chicken nuggets from my couch ~5m away.

This is not a selling point but rather a unfortunate but comprehensible circumstance. Nexus and later Pixel phones have not been anything more than reference hardware without significant sales until the Pixel 6. Google has been a software company that has greatly benefited by android being an “open” platform you could contribute to and use their services on.

The App / Cloud ecosystem has gained a lot of competitors, so Google is doing their best to reverse this course of action by pulling more and more functionality out of AOSP into Play services and now into Cuttlefish. We can only wait and see how other phone manufacturers react to this.

Would be great indeed, but “more neutral” in this case seems to mean vendor agnostic by abstracting the hardware away and have anything run on a closed source google container.

The GrapheneOS team is very aware of their dependence on google. They are planning to either find an OEM for their own line of hardware or a brand whose phones support their requirements other than google. That being said, it will complicate work a lot, but for now it would be to early to jump to that conclusion.

Also, Google couldn’t care less if <1% of buyers flash a custom ROM / OS on their phone, this is about tying the android ecosystem closer to google in general. Most other big phone manufacturers know this and are trying to come up with their own solution, like Huawei had to because of the ban when the orange man has been president the first time.

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There will be a lot of businesses who feel the (justified) need to hide the entrypoint to their infrastructure behind a VPN.

Wait, this can’t just be another useless DNS blocking, or is it?

Edit: Didn’t get the joke first lol

I’m shocked that this many people feel the need to disobey a rule that is only there to help the children. Next step must be to ban VPNs altogether, and enforcing all Internet users to be identified with their real identity (/s obviously).

There are already agreements that forks are not allowed to remove the premium feature stuff, they could do this to grok as well.

In other words:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Although honestly, this becomes harder to apply every day.