I tried it but TBH went back to torrents. I found it to be very fiddly to get working, every single component seems to want you to pay for it (and not wanting to pay for and keep track of half a dozen streaming things is one of the main draws for piracy for me anyway) and overall it just didn’t seem worth it to find the ~1% of things I can’t find on torrents (and I didn’t even find all of them on Usenet either.)

Other people’s mileage may vary of course, but I didn’t really think it was worth it.

Yeah I had the same experience. Tried it out, found it way too fiddly to set up, had to pay for stuff at every turn (and managing a bunch of subscriptions is a big part of why I hate using streaming platforms in the first place) and I really didn’t find it to be worth it just to cover the tiny fraction of things I can’t find on torrents (and which TBH I didn’t even find there anyway.) Went back to torrents as it’s like 2 clicks to download something and it covers 95% of what I need anyway.

To be fair, it’s entirely possible that I was just doing it wrong and not getting optimal results, but also I don’t want to start over and pay for a bunch of other stuff to find out.

Yeah I just leave Mullvad on 24/7, and set QBittorrent to only download through the VPN connection and just leave it at that.

Also, I wouldn’t trust Kaspersky with anything important personally. It’s from an older interview but…

If you had the power to change up to three things in the world today that are related to IT security, what would they be?

Internet design–that’s enough.

That’s it? What’s wrong with the design of the Internet?

There’s anonymity. Everyone should and must have an identification, or Internet passport. The Internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the U.S. military. That was just a limited group of people–hundreds, or maybe thousands. Then it was introduced to the public and it was wrong…to introduce it in the same way.

I’d like to change the design of the Internet by introducing regulation–Internet passports, Internet police and international agreement–about following Internet standards. And if some countries don’t agree with or don’t pay attention to the agreement, just cut them off.

I haven’t tested this but Calibre has a plugin that will give you the word count of an epub, so I’d assume if you got a few copies and the word counts were pretty much the same it should be a fairly safe bet. There might be some variation for dedications, forewords etc. though depending on the version.

I really feel like we need to have a huge overhaul of copyright law in general, it seems like it’s all a mish-mash of old laws from before the internet existed, patched over with half-assed rules that we’ve just been making up as we go along since then.

Some of it is absurd to me, like the way something can be online but geographically restricted. I’ve had the situation in the past where I want to watch a movie trailer, but I can’t because I’m in Canada and not the US, even though the movie is also out in Canada. It’s so pointless and easily circumvented, and all it does is annoy people. Or that something can still be copyrighted almost a century after the author is dead.

And to get back to the point, we also really need to make some kind of exemption for archival purposes. So much information, art and cultural heritage is lost because copyright holders don’t look after the stuff they own and don’t want to pay to preserve it properly. The internet could be one of the best archival tools we’ve ever had, if we’d just let it do its thing IMO.

Yeah basically, people are using AI to write applications and cover letters, and recruiters are using AI to read and filter them, so it’s just robots talking to each other.

I’m heard some other horror stories too, like companies requesting a “one way remote interview” which basically means they send you a list of questions, and you’re supposed to record a video of yourself answering them as if you were in a proper interview and then send it to them.

At which point I’d rather be homeless personally, but that’s maybe just me lol

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My main ones are:

• Pretty much any software or games. Not really for moral reasons especially, but I mostly run Linux so most of them aren’t available anyway, and if I do get something it’s usually such a pain in the ass to actually get it working (and keep it working whenever there’s an update) that it’s usually not worth it when there’s often a FOSS alternative. Also no pirating indie games.

• Books, with a few exceptions. I don’t want to screw over authors so I don’t download books, but there have been a couple of old ones where the author is long dead and I already paid for a paper copy, so I snagged the eBook just for convenience. I figure that’s not hurting anyone except the publishing company so whatever.

Also with games I’m one of those extremely patient people who can wait years for something to go on sale, so what I usually do is set a price in my head for what I think something’s worth, and then ignore it until it ends up at that price. So like: Baldur’s Gate 3 - they did a good job and released a proper working game = full price. Cyberpunk - looks alright but it was a big mess on release and had a bunch of stuff missing = wait until it’s all fixed and has all the add-ons in a bundle, $25. Last Of Us PC = it’s one of my favourite games but it’s 10+ years old now and was also a bit of a mess on release so they can fuck off with the $70 price tag = $10 tops. No Man’s Sky - Might be decent now but they really bullshitted that one on release = wait until it shows up for free on Epic or PSPlus. And so on. There’s a lot of them lol.

The quality is often terrible too. I’ve literally been watching Netflix and the pixellation/stuttering has been so bad that I’ve shut off the film, spent 2 minutes downloading it, then just carried on watching the downloaded version from where I left off.

Pretty much lol

I have a bunch, but off the top of my head: Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft, Tencent, anything that’s Epic exclusive. I should really have Take-Two on there as well but realistically I’m never not going to play Civilization so my principles fail me there.

I agree fully. I basically never download music anymore, because I can get all the music I can think of on Spotify for a few bucks a month. And when everything was on Steam I just got everything from there. Now that all the games companies are bringing out their own stores and launchers, that’s starting to change again.

This is a lesson that the movie & TV industry seems hell-bent on not learning.

You can use sponsorblock with yt-dlp, if that helps at all.

Doesn’t QBittorrent already have its own setting for that? Like you can set the network interface to wg-mullvad or whatever and then it won’t work outside of that? Or is the docker thing just for an extra layer of protection on top of that?

Reddit has started getting a bit fucky with VPNs lately so maybe that’s the cause? I mean you could obviously go there without the VPN on, but also fuck them lol.

As much as I don’t like recommending people go to reddit, tbh r/panelshow and r/tv_bunny tend to cover most of it pretty well, and quickly too. TV Bunny has been a good source for old British sitcoms like Bottom and Blackadder as well.

Mullvad I think is very good for this. They have an extensive description of their no-logs policy on their site, and have also been raided by the police before, who apparently were unable to find any customer information.

Shenanigans are always possible of course so you shouldn’t 100% blindly trust anyone, but all the available evidence seems to point to them being pretty legit IMO.

There’s actually quite a lot of the supplemental stuff (Tardisodes etc.) just hanging around on YouTube, many of them sorted into helpful playlists, which I’m not sure if I’m allowed to link to.

Also for the newer show, I recommend grabbing the torrents from a user called QxR. They’re good quality and most have a folder of featurettes that includes Confidential and various behind the scenes stuff that I was having a hard time finding. I definitely can’t link directly to that but they should be easy enough to track down.

For the older show, there used to be a BIG torrent (like ~250Gb IIRC) with all the existing old episodes in it, but I don’t remember where that came from right now. However, a lot of the old episodes are on the Internet Archive so that might be a good place to start.