Notices by Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to), page 3

@x_hace I responded on a whim, because I wanted to practise my Dutch. I said, in my original post:

pvv is evil. wilders is a foolish bastard.

Don't worry, I'm not falling for such rhetoric. I take a general interest in politics worldwide. I've been following Dutch news. You have some dangerous people running your country.

Indeed, I am also aware of the stages of genocide, and Wilders has used such demumanizing language for years; it is the first prelude to genocide.

The Dutch deserve better.

TFW when you're trying to do research on something and you find your own research.

I discovered something hilarious:

https://libreboot.org/docs/linux/grub_hardening.html

I didn't discover the link. This page was written by Fedja Beader in 2017 and tweaked by myself plus others ever since, so I've known about the page for quite some time, and it's deadly serious. No, what's hilarious is this:

When I searched "linux grub hardening" just now on Google search, this is the first result. I did check Tor Browser and it was the 5th result. 1st result in DuckDuckGo on Tor.

To be clear, I'm Libreboot's founder.

@royaards pvv is slecht. wilders is een domme klootzak.

@ladystarstreak Altered Meme

@RL_Dane yeah i already saw it. pretty hilarious. they banned my friend from it!

the friend lives in texas, which is banned.

i'm just mildly annoyed that they didn't mention me by name, in their ban list, though i am inexorably linked to coreboot which they banned, so therefore vicariously i am also banned. i consider it a badge of honour, personally.

@jschwart @kaia @mangeurdenuage I sell Libreboot, and Libreboot accessories.

https://minifree.org/

https://libreboot.org/

@SuperDicq @n0toose I agree with you, but like I said, I'm thinking about how to socially hack their world, and how to technically implement what we want within it. what i'm proposing would be infinitely better than what we currently have.

plus, there's always room to pick away more parts you don't like later on.

@SuperDicq @n0toose my sentiment exactly, but "the suits" would probably want something like that; the trick is to give them just enough of what they want

it's really more of a symbollic thing if i'm being honest. i'm sure all these companies know that their shit's gonna get hacked on day one

but think about the normies. you and i know how to access whatever we want, but someone like my dad doesn't know shit about computers and feels more secure with a big cable company telling them what to do

@SuperDicq @n0toose I said it's a bad idea (well, I said I "wouldn't recommend it"), but it is naturally something they might want to do. For example, preventing you from downloading the video easily, so that you have to stream it again;

In practise, such restrictions are always thwarted anyway, by the more wily of us, and we are then able to access those videos on torrent sites for example.

It'd basically be a very half-assed thing for all the "normies".

@SRAZKVT @n0toose Perhaps, but I'm not some wishy washy idealist. I mean, I am also that, but I like to think seriously about real solutions to problems, that are practical.

Creative people all need to be paid, and it'd be nice if we had more and better services available.

Doing it in an ethical way that respects consumer rights, is perfectly feasible, and it's possible that a lot more profit could be made (lower operating costs).

YouTube could also do this; Google is in the perfect position.

@SRAZKVT @n0toose Since these services would be using free software (for example a fork of PeerTube), it's likely that free software projects (such as PeerTube) would also get a lot more funding, and a lot more code contributions sent back.

Contrary to what some people believe, the big streaming services and studios aren't evil; they're just capitalists, and their mission is to make money.

Netflix heavily uses FreeBSD on their infrastructure. They send a ton of patches to FreeBSD all the time.

The problem with "legal" streaming services is you don't pay £8 per month. You pay £80 because not everything you want to watch is on a single service.

You might pay for Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, and a number of others. They still do geo restriction and DRM limits quality even if you pay, and they often still serve you advertisements.

People who pay for gigabit internet and expensive computers that do 8k would not mind paying for streams but it's just that these companies don't do good service.

@n0toose Maybe all the streaming services should just do something similar to the old Usenet.

You pay a subscription fee to any Usenet provider and you have access to all the same files.

Obviously, this is far less efficient. I basically think all the streaming services (official ones) should use PeerTube, and provide unified access to videos between them. They could fork the network for themselves.

Money isn't the issue; it would be nice if these companies simply gave a shit about customers.

@n0toose Yes, lack of software freedom is also a big downside. Though, many unlicensed streaming sites also require you to run non-free JavaScript code to watch; the same is even true of many torrent sites nowadays. However, it is to a lesser extent.

They serve you *more* ads than the authorised services, but Ublock Origin or other decent adblocker mitigates that and those services don't cap quality so your Linux computer will get the highest bitrate you can handle.

Most TV is garbage anyway.

@n0toose Perhaps I should fashion some proof of concept? Make a PeerTube site that is just full of meme videos. It would only federate with an approved whitelist of other servers, and have some DRM-type mechanism, and take payment.

Then make another such service to complete the proof of concept. The companies would check each other to make sure they all implement the same DRM. An established minimum charging fee would exist, and some algorithmic method would give funds appropriately to studios.

@n0toose I'm 100% OK with paying for services, but as I've said in previous posts, these services are shit. You can't access everything on any one service and they're all completely non-standard.

Free software isn't about freedom of cost; I can perfectly see PeerTube being used by the big TV studios to stream shows.

They'd charge money to legally watch TV and film, but all the studios would federate with each other.

They'd save bandwidth too. PeerTube is awesome. They could lower their costs.

@n0toose DRM in web-based Free Software is perfectly feasible, and still not something I'd recommend, but you could absolutely do it. In practise, the user does not control the server they're connected to, but any number of streaming services could pop up this way.

If all the streaming services used a single unified method of streaming, it'd be much cheaper and the services would be higher quality. It would lower the bar to entry for any small studios that want to sell their shows to consumers.

@n0toose The benefit to consumers, if all the big streaming companies had two brain cells each, would be:

* Much lower bandwidth and infrastructure cost, but they'd still charge the same - but more money would then be available to fund more (and higher quality) shows.

* More unified access to TV and film; could also do it for news and such. Anywhere in the world.

* More competition. Companies make more money and consumers would spend a lot less (they'd only need one provider).

Everyone wins.

I mean, you *can* read arbitrary memory very easily with a small amount of JavaScript on your website, from the visitor's machine if the visitor does not have sufficient security; for example, the Spectre/Meltdown bug and others. Mitigations exist for many of these.

I don't advise against watching TV shows for free but maybe do it on a secondary machine that you use only for that purpose.

Then again most people don't lug 2 and sometimes even 3 computers around with them on a bicycle like I do.