Why would anyone use Mastodon for this stuff? It would be private Telegram groups or something like that. This kind of “research” is barely a step above trolling or low-effort clickbait.
While I don’t agree with the author’s use of “major CSAM problem”, if you browse instance federation list, you might notice a few mastodon instances that suggest they might be a MAPs community at best (domain name like pedo-school, mapsupport, etc usually with cute dolls in their banner image). They are closed community so can’t see what happening inside.
The researchers are looking at actual posts on actual servers. The research itself is not made up. The speculation and handwaving that the tech press feels the need to introduce into it? That’s made up.
As for why would anyone use Mastodon for it — your typical Internet pedophile isn’t any smarter than your typical Internet user, and half of those are below average.
I’m not fully sure about the logic and hinted conclusions here. The internet itself is a network with major CSAM problems (so maybe we shouldn’t use it?).
According to BlueSky’s own timeline - the original account was deleted 18 days after it was created. They were quick to react once they knew about it, but they took too long to find it.
That was also followed by almost two weeks of activity without clearly making any statement about what was going on. Better late than never but this “Letter to the Community” should have been written over a week ago.
As for how long it should take to take an account offline on Lemmy - personally I’d like to see some kind of karma based system. If an active account that’s been around for years is flagged… maybe ignore that unless there are multiple flags. But if a brand new account or an old account that hasn’t been very active is flagged, kill it instantly and flag it to be investigated (and potentially restored).
Good question; it doesn’t seem misleading to me. Here’s the relevant bit:
Willner is staying on in an “advisory role” but has asked Linkedin followers to “reach out” for related opportunities. The former OpenAI project lead states that the move comes after a decision to spend more time with his family.
Hope it has some more settings. It’d be nice to get rid of the verbose mode by default and not have to prompt for succinct answers every new chat or when it forgets the instructions
i mean i would get it if the platform wasn’t trying to take advantage of you, but considering youtube’s moves in the past few years and especially recently with some people getting adblock-blocked, yea i don’t think supporting them further is a good idea
You can get it in a bundle with YouTube music It’s not that bad of a deal. Music and YouTube are the two pieces of media I consume most, so it makes sense for me.
Also the fact that they were sneaky about it. But this is just how YouTube does things. They know being loud is the best way to get hate, just like what happened to Netflix. They have pushed longer ads in sneaky ways over the years. Now they are evaluating blocking ad-blockers, also in sneaky ways, they are never loud about it.
I kinda wanted to for awhile because I’d much prefer to have a service like that be paid instead of driven by ads, but it’s getting harder to do that with how they’re operating.
I recently started paying for it when I realised the only reason I wasn’t already was the fact I didn’t want to give Google my money.
You agree with me in this or not, but I use youtube more than any other video service. I pay 10 euro a month for Disney+ and maybe watch an episode or two maybe once or twice a week, while I’m constantly on youtube (I use it a lot for podcasts while travelling hence why I want background playback). I use youtube more than anything else and since I do wanna support the creators I watch, paying for youtube was the logical thing to do for me.
Yes, i don’t like giving Google my money, but Disney is just as terrible of a company. At least when buying youtube premium I get benefits on a service I’d use anyway and support people I like, be it through Google.
I was in the same position until a few weeks ago; mainly used YT for podcasts, downloading videos to watch while travelling etc.
If you have an Android phone, get the NewPipe app from F-Droid. It has pretty much everything that YT Premium offers, but free. It’s been working really well for me.
I’ve had new pipe before switching over to premium. After coming from vanced, new pipe still just feels too clunky for me and like the recommendation feed and using shorts here and there. If new pipe was more like vanced was, I’ll probably switch back but until then I’ll think I’ll cough up for premium
yeah, ad-free youtube, downloads, and background playback is only a couple dollars more than spotify. it’s one of the easiest subscriptions for me to justify.
I was paying $90 a month for cable TV. Something that I hardly watched. When I did watch it, half the time I was watching OTA channel that I could just pick up with rabbit ears.
I was spending more time watching YouTube (everything from car crash videos, to videos of people doing lawn care, to reviews of tech stuff), and I was getting fed up with the ads.
So, I stopped paying the $90 for TV, bought a new HDHomeRun with a new antenna, downloaded the Pluto TV app, and subscribed to YouTube Premium.
Now I get my OTA shows, get some of the stuff I liked with cable (The 24/7 Tosh.0 channel on Pluto TV is pure delight), and I can binge all the dumb shows I want on YouTube without a single ad getting in my way.
So I’ve had YouTube premium for years now, going all the way back to when it was still called YouTube red so I’ve been on the legacy $10/month plan and because I got to keep my old pricing it’s stopped me from canceling at any point when I was rebudgeting and it even stopped me from getting the cheaper $8/month student plan as I didn’t want to lose my legacy pricing once I was done with college but considering they’re hitting all subscribers and not just new subscribers I’m going to jump to that student plan to pay less each month instead.
It just doesn’t quite make sense why they’re increasing prices besides greed(or they know they can with the roll out of ad blocker blockers). If it was still during the YouTube red era they could have at least used the argument that they were re-investing in originals but they stopped creating YouTube originals. The only real new thing to YouTube premium since the rebrand from YouTube red is PIP and you can join the beta program.
YouTube premium is their way of hedging bets against advertiser revolts they don’t want a controversy like Elsagate or Logan Paul’s forest adventures to cause their profits to tank.
I love that I learned about Google Domains being shut down from a Lemmy comment~ I was debating moving those away from Google anyway. Has anyone else already done research and narrowed down the list of decent registrars worth using?
Feel like we’re watching a lot of tech companies making a lot of bad decisions all at once. Reddit, Google, Netflix, Meta, Twitter, Hulu, etc. Regardless of the individual circumstances and bad actors in each case, it feels like they’re all being fueled by a shared, low-key desperation.
Easy money pipeline has been cut off, makes sense we’re all seeing this kind of thing at the same time when you consider it from the POV of the investors bankrolling these companies.
I know it sounds a little silly to blame this on one person, but honestly think it’s Elon’s fault.
A bunch of tech-bro CEO types idolize him and are jealous - thinking he is cool for getting to “say whatever he wants” to the public, his detractors - Hell… even the SEC… and he “gets away with it.”
Not only that, but he has gotten to present to cheering crowds on stage for companies people still mistakenly think Elon both founded and runs single-handedly like Tesla and SpaceX… and he has been positively referenced and guest appeared over the past decade in Marvel films and other “cool” pop culture like South Park and Rick & Morty.
…And so when Elon just said “fuck you” publicly to a bunch of his workers by firing a bunch of them… The Elon wannabes loved it.
Worse - they are influenced by his actions. Some have even openly said it.
So not only do people like spez go and fuck over their devs, their users, and advertisers… but the folks at the heads of lots of companies are doing the same. For example - and I don’t know if it was mentioned here but - Plex recently fired like 20% of their workforce.
I have had that since day one. I used to have normal Vanced. But it has stopped working and I wanted.to figure out ReVanced. But I have not succeeded so far
Generally it’s agreed the best way to stop piracy is by offering a more convenient alternative. I generally for example don’t pirate video games available on Steam. With streaming services being so disjoint and expensive now I’ve gone back to pirating, at least with cable you can bundle channels.
For about the same price as it currently costs to bundle all the major streaming platforms. Plus, cable never had anything near the amount of content we have now on streaming.
I think people who compare cable to streaming don’t remember what it was like before streaming
A lot of it is the same we saw with the rise of Steam and the like in gaming
“People are just looking for a more convenient way to buy games and all this DRM is making it easier to pirate. Steam is awesome, but I might need to play in an airgapped environment in Iraq and steam’s offline mode is bad. So I might as well just pirate everything. Fucking Valve”
That said: Tinfoil hat and all, but I really do think the increasing rise of “Ugh, this streaming is so expensive and confusing. I should just get cable” is an astroturfing campaign. Because the two big elements of the SAG side of the strikes are streaming residuals and AI. And the advantage of cable tv is that the networks control who get the residuals. Take a look at where the cast and crew of Friends ended up, and you start to get an idea of why TBS will never stop airing reruns of that show. Same for Seinfeld and, to much lesser extents, Frasier and King of Queens and the like.
Which is why I expect the outcome will be to do hybrid models. And a lot of the current discourse is about making people think they want to have to “record” an episode of Becker rather than just choose to watch wherever they left off as a VOD.
It was a genuinely bad show. But Ted Danson is magical and can make the most unlikable and obnoxious sitcom characters into reflections of the soul that stick with you in ways they really shouldn’t.
It isn’t the same, but it is well worth catching some Curb Your Enthusiasm clips on youtube. Ted Danson is a recurring character and his interactions with Larry are magnificent.
I’m not sure how you mean the last paragraph, but P+ already removed Star Trek Prodigy, and I think it just stopped “airing” so people might rightly want to “record” the show.
And a lot of PC gamers have Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to Steam.
Glacially slow and pathetic customer service. They have an F rating by the Better Business Bureau. Offline mode sucks. And Valve bullies developers into agreeing to exploitative pricing terms:
You know what would fix this? Competition. But when Epic created a game store and implemented the same tactics that Valve is using - Steam fanboys cried.
People don’t really care about these issues - they want their “team” to win.
yeah, exclusives are the big one for me. I choose to game on PC because it’s less bullshit. exclusives decidedly fall into the bullshit category and the EGS is full of them
GOG is good if the game you want is on there. I got the ultimate edition of Fallout New Vegas for like £5. It was like £10-15 on Steam at the time. Great deal. The main issue is they’re strictly anti-DRM for offline games so the bigger developers are less inclined to put their games on there, but whatever.
The way Epic handled competition was by strong-handing exclusives constantly without actually providing a better service. Last time I bought a game from Epic, it didn’t even have a cart system to buy games in bulk. Couple that with the tolerance of cryptocurrency/blockchain and acquisitions of sites like Artstation and Bandcamp, and yeah - people have reasons to not like Epic. I’ve heard stories of people getting locked out of their banks because of the lack of a cart and they were buying a lot of games in a short amount of time. I’ve also heard stories about people’s Epic accounts getting breached because of Fortnite BS.
And I’m saying this as someone who uses multiple launchers. I hated Steam back in the mid-2010s (skipped the middleman and bought GTAV from Rockstar directly) and they were in quite a bad rut with Steam Greenlight and the paid mods fiasco. People were rightfully loudly critical of Steam and at a time, Valve really did not deserve taking a 30% cut. They’ve done a lot since then to recoup that lost trust and deserve the 30% cut, Proton and the Steam Deck being a massive part of that for many people.
People don’t really care about these issues - they want their “team” to win.
Yeah the amount of “No steam no buy” fanboys is absurd. They act like having to open a different program to see their games is like hacking into the matrix. Not to mention that there are already programs like GOG Galaxy that compile all of your games from all your services in to one GUI.
I used to be annoyed about the memory usage of running multiple game launchers but now it’s a bit of a non issue with 32gb ram. I don’t even remember what I had when it was an issue.
I think Hulu has a decent bundle with Disney, and Paramount with Showtime isn’t bad.
That’s like 4 for 20 bucks. And lots of cell plans come with one free. So it wouldn’t be hard to get a lot of options for 20-40, which is still way cheaper than cable.
Netflix is just starting to get real expensive. If they’d have kept some of their originals from the last couple years I wouldn’t think of canceling, but since they cancel those shows a week after a season drops, I’ll probably drop Netflix soon.
Streaming black flag tv and movies has become the easiest option for me. I can watch anything from any streaming service just by searching the name of the show I want. I don’t even need to login, let alone login and pay for multiple services.
I buy steam games, even ones I’ve already pirated, for a few reasons.
Quick and easy downloads
Seamless updates
Almost all my other purchased games in one place.
Cloud saves
Durability, just knowing my games will be available to download on my next PC for the foreseeable future.
And I pirate just about everything I watch mainly because I’m not willing to play musical subscriptions to watch the shows I want to see at the end of a long day.
If the film industry had a service that offered a similar experience to a Plex share, I’d pay quite a bit for it. But instead they have this system designed to extract maximum value from every viewer, and I’m tired of it.
Gabe Newell was right on the money when he said piracy is a service issue, not a price issue.
To add onto this, when someone who can’t afford something pirates something, there is no lost sale because there never was a sale there to begin with. It didn’t take any money away from the company since they were never going to see any money from that.
With that said, the only piracy I partake in is for archival purposes, and like you I buy Steam games regardless because it’s too convenient like you said.
They could let you share your login with your family members that don’t live in the same house for a start, rather than making them create their own account having to pay $8 (or whatever it is in your country) per family household on my account.
As that person said, it should be like Plex - I pay for access and then I can share it with family without an extra charge. Netflix is now costing me like $50 a month just so myself and some of my family members can watch it. We probably won’t be subscribed for much longer, and will just rely on my Plex library.
Convenience would be knowing whether the show I’ve queued up to watch will remain on the service, or getting warned well ahead of time if it’s going to expire. Or having every season of a serialized show available or at least something showing that not all of it is on the service before you get deep into it and suddenly cut off halfway through. Or easy access to my watch history and likes, as well as more robust settings (or heck, any settings) to tailor the way content is shown so I can get a consistent user experience whether I’m browsing new shows or diving back into the next episode of something.
Yep, and when netflix took off piracy took a dive because of how good it was. Then every studio decided they wanted their piece of the streaming pie so pulled all their content off netflix and released their own streaming service, so now we’re basically back to having to pay $100 a month to get access to everything, just like we were with cable before netflix changed the game. Shockingly, piracy has shot up again.
These companies are so stupid and greedy.
The only games I’ll pirate are ones that are no longer available to buy, because what else am I supposed to do?
It’s morally positive to pirate games that are no longer available for sale. Piracy is stealing, but in this case, you’re stealing from the void so there’s no harm done, and preserving the game is a morally good thing to do.
Also stopped pirating games when steam came around. And I stopped pirating shows and movies with the rise of streaming services. Now though, I’m looking into standing up a media server.
I respect that. I’m not setting up a media server because I would expose myself to legal liability, but the people brave enough to actually distribute the content I’m consuming have my full respect.
best way to stop piracy is by offering a more convenient alternative. I generally for example don’t pirate video games available on Steam
I have towed this line for years. Recently Battlefield 2042 was available on steam for a great price so I snapped it up. I’d played it at release via a 1 month trial of EA play and it was absolute trash.
The game is totally fixed! The problem I have, is that I bought it on steam…and it forces me to install and keep myself logged in to the EA app anyway. It fails to launch the game every single time. I have to reboot my computer, manually log out of EA and log back in. It is an absolute shitfight, because EA gargle balls all day.
My point is, I bought the game on steam and I got absolutely duped. I’m all for a bigger library, but not if it means I have to install and use the other crappy apps anyway. Such a disappointment, I won’t be so quick to buy on steam anymore unless they implement a great big flashing red warning that the game is not actually on steam at all.
Not big enough, red enough, or flashing enough. I like steam a lot. I don’t like EA one little bit, or battlenet, or any of those other half-built apps.
Yeah, I get that stuff like that sucks. Funnily enough, I think it’s a little better on Linux because the EA games app is incapable of running on Linux so Proton boots it just long enough to get the game working, and then it fades back into the background. While Linux gaming is still not perfect, that kind of thing is one of the reasons I prefer it over gaming on Windows.
I think with gaming that is a factor, but personally I think the larger deterrent for pirating games is at least for multiplayer games you can’t really pirate them while still being able to play online most of the time.
I think a much better comparison than Steam would be Spotify.
I use Plex for all my movies and TV shows for the same reasons you mentioned. All my stuff can be in one place instead of having to pay for Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and whatever other fucking shit is out there.
Plex also supports music libraries, but I don’t use that feature. Why? Because Spotify has literally 99.9% of all the music I want to listen to, and aside from maybe like Garth Brooks, the other 0.1% is on Youtube. Spotify did it right by just having a basic service that you can pay for and get everything you want. If I had to subscribe to Spotify, Tidal, Napster (Still a thing I guess?), and 4 other services just to access all the music I listen to, I’d go back to piracy.
With Spotify slowly starting to reach a limit in subscribers, it’s unfortunately only a matter of time until they start pulling what Netflix is doing and finding new ways to get money from customers.
What does Bluetooth have to do with it? First there are lossless Bluetooth codecs and even if you don’t use one of them, good source material still helps. Imagine a jpeg that was resaved multiple times to get an idea how artifacts stack.
Spotify’s codec should in theory even be good enough to not be distinguishable from CD quality, but somehow some songs just sound like shit anyway. I suspect it’s a problem with how they were digitised.
I’m using the free version of tidal instead. In the beginning I had a problem with some things not being on there, but that has mostly been resolved.
I’m also just using Sennheiser momentum true wireless 3. No fancy audiophile equipment.
What does Bluetooth have to do with it? First there are lossless Bluetooth codecs and even if you don’t use one of them, good source material still helps. Imagine a jpeg that was resaved multiple times to get an idea how artifacts stack.
Spotify’s codec should in theory even be good enough to not be distinguishable from CD quality, but somehow some songs just sound like shit anyway. I suspect it’s a problem with how they were digitised.
I’m using the free version of tidal instead. In the beginning I had a problem with some things not being on there, but that has mostly been resolved.
I’m also just using Sennheiser momentum true wireless 3. No fancy audiophile equipment.
Plex also supports music libraries, but I don’t use that feature. Why? Because Spotify has literally 99.9% of all the music I want to listen to, and aside from maybe like Garth Brooks, the other 0.1% is on Youtube. Spotify did it right by just having a basic service that you can pay for and get everything you want. If I had to subscribe to Spotify, Tidal, Napster (Still a thing I guess?), and 4 other services just to access all the music I listen to, I’d go back to piracy.
Spotify also has a free ad-supported service, which while it does have ads, isn’t as bad as radio, or needs you to go to the effort of pirating the music you want.
I know I am gonna be one of the few, but I use YouTube as my main viewing of things. I don’t use Netflix, or any of the other services much. Premium is something I can’t be without anymore tbh, the ad free and downloading is super convenient for me and I like how a lot of my premium subscription goes to the creators I watch the most.
That’s where I’m at. I use it regularly for learning new things and for entertainment, so I don’t mind paying for it, and getting rid of ads while supporting creators is perfectly fine with me.
You can get ad free Youtube with Firefox plus ublock origin for free. There are even Firefox extensions to skip the paid sponsor ads in every youtube video nowadays. There are also countless Youtube downloader programs out there. You don’t need to pay for it at all to get the features that YouTube premium offers.
Paying to support content creators is the only reason I would consider YouTube premium unless I was very tech illiterate, I guess. YouTube music also seems somewhat worth the price, in my opinion.
Edit: This comment can come off as condescending. I don’t mean it as such, if you pay for YouTube premium that’s cool. I just wanted to make it known that people don’t have to pay YouTube money to get those features if they don’t want to.
I get where you’re coming from, however I find it is personally easier and it is within my financial means to pay for premium instead. I am aware not everyone can but I am glad I can do that. I also support some creators through Patreon for their YouTube content as well. Currently, I am almost completely ad free with the content I consume and sometimes that means I pay money and other times I use an ad blocker. I should also note that I watch the majority of YouTube on my iPhone or on a PS4 and while there are alternatives on the App Stores I prefer the native YouTube apps.
I don’t have a problem with them charging for the service. But they keep raising it dramatically over and over. You’re paying $15 a month to watch content a YouTube creator is getting 25 cents to create. If they wanted to charge $9.99 a month for a family plan I’d be all about it. At the prices they’re charging there are services running full blown movie houses
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