Melody Fwygon

It occurs to me that adding a visual watermark might actually serve to obscure a visual watermarking scheme that is otherwise invisible by providing data that scrambles or breaks the watermark decoder itself.

Audio watermarks can be distorted in any number of ways; and it could be that some of the wildly poor audio quality in most cam-rips is probably the only way you can defeat the watermark; by using a LQ microphone and encoding the audio to a very limited bitrate and then re-upsampling; to defeat any subtle alterations a digital watermark might make to the audio waveform.

Watermarks are only an issue in-as-much as it is used to trace down which copy was leaked.

With modern digital projection systems; you don’t get a reel of film; you get a briefcase of [SS/HD]Ds containing the raw, encrypted, footage. The digital projection system will decrypt using provided keys. There’s no output except the standard ones for the theatre projectors and sound systems…so capturing the output is difficult.

If you do intercept the signal; the projection system might detect it; and refuse playback or wipe the decryption keys. Watermarking is also a danger; since your theater can get identified as the leak source and sued.

I’m not accounting for State laws; which may in fact be stricter. I’m talking about Federal Laws which might not explicitly forbid such things; so long as they’re done in an actually safe manner by professionals.

But, as I said before, if the DEA believes it has the power to stop that none-the-less; that’s what they will do, without respect to if the law is actually legally unclear or borderline. Unfortunately many pharmaceutical places don’t care to invite the wrath of the DEA; even if what they’re doing could be considered permissible; so long as they do not synthesize an exact drug that the Feds specifically name as a controlled substance.

Again; IANAL either. But I do think there’s a lot of room for small compounding pharmacies to synthesize various drugs to meet a patient’s needs quickly while waiting for proper shipments to arrive. There’s lots of compounds that are life-sustaining that do not fall under the DEA banner of authority.

Depending on how Vyvanse is Scheduled; it might be legal to privately make. If it’s not scheduled like a standard amphetamine; the DEA is powerless.

I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not illegal to compound this stuff. But IANAL; and it doesn’t matter if the DEA thinks it is and will hassle anyone trying.

I firmly think this would be a boon for many people; owning one of these is likely a lifeline that even small town physicians could utilize to dispense drugs freely or cheaply to patients in need.

This is something that I think small-town pharmacies could use to create compounds in cases of drug shortages. I think tools and programs and small labs like what are discussed in the article are a positive force for good; and that they should be not only allowed, but encouraged, for many drugs that are expensive, unavailable to someone in need and can be readily synthesized safely with a basic college level of chemistry training by someone in a pharmacy.

I think the potential risks and downsides are small right now; and I think more of it should be encouraged gently so that we can find out quickly what the flaws and limitations are so that we can put regulatory guardrails around it so that people do not harm themselves.

I’m certainly concerned that now that this software has been covered in PopSci; that it will certainly suffer a needless onslaught of DMCA and other lawsuit-related shenanigans. >_>

To be clear; the Nintendo Switch tends to trade fluently in cryptographic certificates.

The MiG Switch has one of these certificates; one it’s creators likely copied from a legitimate Nintendo Switch game title. All games have such certificates and they are uniquely serialized; much like a GUID or UUID would be. These certificates are signed by the Game Dev studio, and then Nintendo in a typical certificate signing chain scheme; Nintendo signs the Game Dev Studio cert, which signs the Title certificate, which signs the unique cart or digital copy cert.

This banning is usually achieved by banning either the lowest certificate in the chain or the one directly above it; or even the Dev Cert if it was compromised.

So the MiG Switch carts are likely hardware banned. Your Nintendo Switch probably advertises to Nintendo which cart(s) were inserted into it recently by sharing the fingerprints of the certificates. Then Nintendo can basically kill the certificate assigned to your Switch system and prevent you from connecting online; as your Switch uses it’s own system cert to identify itself to Nintendo services.

In all cases this is un-evade-able when connecting to the internet; as Nintendo Switch system certs are burned into a PROM chip on the main board at manufacture. This chip is a WORM chip, which can only be written once and read many billions of times.

A critical part of the way they try and curb cheating in online play is checking the integrity of the runtime environment; which includes checking what titles were launched recently; and if that happens to include a certificate they’ve banned for being cloned by the MiG Switch; then you’ll quickly be banned by their anti-cheating hammer.

Most important is those checks typically don’t take place naturally; they only occur when you’re connecting to the EShop, or connecting to NN to play multiplayer online. The devil therein unfortunately lies in the details; and if you’ve ever purchased a Digital Title that means your Switch is regularly connecting to the EShop to renew Digital License Tickets needed. They tend to expire every 72 hours and must be renewed by presenting an expired Ticket, a valid Ticket Granting Ticket (given to your Switch when you buy the title) and contacting “Mommy Nintendo” and asking “Mommy, May I?”. Yeah. DRM sucks.

If all goes well; your Switch gets a shiny new set of tickets. Unfortunately Nintendo was paying attention to requests and will issue out regular waves of bans for systems detected cheating. You won’t know when this will happen, and it won’t prevent Nintendo from letting you play your games; you’ll just suddenly find your Switch banned from online play after such ban waves.

She’s such a narcissist that she couldn’t stay out of the spotlight. lol.

Regardless; I doubt that any game she could develop would be any good; and I shudder to think of what deranged DRM scheme she will cook up to protect her own game. It’ll probably be worse than Denuvo, knowing how unstable she is.

Genuinely, the scene is better without her hate filled screeds polluting the web. Her abilities might be appreciated more if she got some mental help and she could rejoin the scene as a positive force; not someone who lets their ego run rampant and spews hate at the slightest provocation.

Unfortunately the scene is too cowardly to NUKE her output into obscurity until she cleans her spew up.

This is why technologies like DoH and DoT are needed. To prevent this kind of tampering.

With all likelihood; it would have been 3 to 5 whole years before anyone could have purchased a localized, legitimate copy of the movie in Lat.Am.

So no; I do not blame them for doing this. Considering that this movie was even broadcast as a “Public Screening” and likely nobody paid anything in admission but for food and drink…I’d even argue this was a 100% non-commercial use. Depending on the laws in Brazil it might even be “fair use” for a city official to do this; as informational and educational arguments can be made for it depending on the audience.

…Assuming the flash drive isn’t loaded to the gills with malware alongside of every game it offers to install…that sounds fair.

But let’s be real; No legitimate company stands a chance of doing this without getting sued into oblivion. Unfortunately that means the risk of getting viruses and malware with your purchase, likely ransomware or cryptominer droppers, is really high.

…but let’s assume you’re technical enough that you can disarm all the malware on the USB stick and clean the cruft out of it. Then; yeah…maybe you’ll get your value’s worth.

This actually doesn’t surprise me. Valve is getting greedy.

But; to be clear; by using these tools, to unlock the DLC without paying for it, you are cheating in the game. That’s a mere fact; and not a moral judgement of anyone choosing to do so.

Personally, I don’t judge anyone for doing so; and would use these tools myself if I thought a DLC were too predatory, expensive or otherwise unfair to not have it available.

That’s not saying it’s fair or right for Valve to do so; nor is it saying the VAC bans or account suspensions are deserved. If you get hit by this; you absolutely should pirate every title you already own/purchased via Steam right away, and pirate anything else you want in the future.

The only way to make them regret doing things like this is voting with your wallet; and asking others to do the same. Stop spending money on Valve. Once their earnings fall they’ll be forced to hear people’s concerns.

In most sharing channels you could possibly just report those to the channel ops (@/&/!/~) and get them kicked or devoiced (removing their (+ or %) state depending on the channel)

I don’t know any channel that would put up with people who wasted your time with DRM’ed files back in the day. It’s less problematic now yes; but still something they don’t want people doing…since you have to be signed in as the purchasing account to de-drm something.

What happens is what’s intended.

Everyone is going to do it; and it will cause companies, artists and creatives to step back and rethink a bit on how they monetize their creations responsibly. The ones that refuse to rethink and adapt will fail and flounder under the tiny handful of straw that Piracy adds to the load.

That’s a GOOD thing.

What’s unfortunate is that companies and people still think it’s productive to worry and handwring over piracy as if it’s killing someone; instead of being the thing you “don’t fly too close to, lest your wax wings get melted off and you plummet to the ground.”

You can automate this; but you have to make sure that the automation you create is going to respect the ratelimits. I’d recommend something simple like using a command alias or short script written for your specific IRC client.

It’s what I used to do with that sort of thing; and there are plenty of well known Open Source scripts in the wild as well

As an example; I would use mIRC with it’s scripting system and write my own event trigger scripts to automatically request, wait for and then accept the DCC chat requests and route them appropriately in the interface. There were also scripts that helped with getting the lists; unpacking them, and displaying those lists in my client…so I didn’t have to extract the text from the zip myself, and could select what I needed from the bot.

All of this was lightweight automation that was intended not to flood the bot with commands and fed into command queueing modules that let the bots have time to process.

Sometimes in those days you could get actually (+b)anned, Auto/KILL’ed or /(G/K):LINE’ed for causing a bot to crash…so you had to be careful and respectful with regard to scripts.

TL;DR; know your bot, source channel & network rules, and write your own scripts for safety or read any scripts you import in carefully and understand what they’re doing.

Aye; I remember GPM, and before they enshittified it into the ground, it was damn near comparable to Spotify.

While this feed issue is manageable if you Pause Your Watch History and Clear Your Watch History before doing so; it does disable a lot of suggestions.

Unfortunately Google and YouTube do not make these options easy to find and they are quick to nag you about turning them back on; and You Must Refuse This and ignore the errors and whines at every prompt for a while before they leave you alone.

So by it’s very nature NewPipe completely defuses this garbage by simply being a much saner front-end than using the “Native” YouTube apps ever were.

You know I think YouTube might start learning their lesson if more and more people began refusing to use their scummy front-end more than strictly necessary. Unfortunately they’re going to go through the usual stages of grief while doing so and they absolutely are currently trying to attack apps like GrayJay and NewPipe with spurious lawsuits.

So instead; maybe those of you who “Pay” for YouTube Premium should simply cancel your service and start donating that amount to projects like NewPipe, when that is possible. (Yes I know Team NewPipe will not accept donations for legal reasons, but similar projects do exist, like FreeTube or Invidious, that can and do accept donations to cover costs for server hosted things in their developments.)

Copying is not theft. It does not remove the original.

If I send you a PDF copy of a book that I own, that I scanned into a PDF myself; that is not theft, that is ownership. So long as I make you pay nothing for that copy; and I do mean $0.00, I cannot charge you for any costs incurred while making that copy; I am not breaking the law until a judge summons me before them and tells me I am abusing my rights and are summarily breaking the law in another manner as is judge’s right to do.

I own the physical book and I am allowed to enjoy it in any manner I see fit…including loaning the book to you physically or digitally in perpetuity.

The law supports and recognizes fair use and ownership. It is up to us not to abuse that ownership. I do not recommend making 1,000,000,000 copies of a book and giving them away just because you are mad at the author. That’s an asshole move and likely to get the metaphorical judge I described involved in the matter.

Similarly; it is an asshole move for a content creator to sell you a copy of a book or some other media and then go about trying to tell you how you may or may not enjoy the material you just purchased. They can recommend ways to enjoy it; but they do not have an enforceable right, even through contracts, to tell you that you cannot exercise your ownership rights in a certain way…unless you overdo it to asshole levels and a judge and/or the police get involved.

In most cases either they filled option 1; or having no access to a purchase option they feel is reasonable fills option 2.

Few people, if any, are truly rank 15. I don’t give a damn what the corporate folks say or think. Most of the time they’re basically blaming the victims of their own poor decision making anyways.

I don’t agree that Rank 10 should be placed where it is; it is more akin to Rank 15 in similarity…the attitude is more entitled than it should be. Ripping your own copy should be something you are not only allowed; but encouraged to do…as it often nullifies any content protection that might interfere with your right to enjoy the content that you purchased in a way that the rights holder didn’t expect. Furthermore it removes all doubt that your digital copy is legitimate, as you derived it from a physical copy that you already own…and have fair use doctrine as well as purchase license and access to.

Ripping your physical copies is also a further message to creators that DRM and Copy Protection is an unacceptable format.

As an additional note: I firmly believe that people who sell copies of things they pirated are ranked at 15. They are blatantly ignoring the law for no justifiable reason. You as a customer purchasing from those people are not liable for their law breaking however; similar to how you are not liable for people who are ignoring the law by handing out free pirated copies to everyone. The burden of breaking the law is upon the one committing the crime.

The reason I advocate ripping your own copies; is simple. If you got caught with a copy you obtained from someone else’s physical copy; you could be reasonably ordered by a judge to “Forfeit (delete all copies in your possession of) that illegitimate copy”. It’s likely to happen when they catch the person making the illegal copies. Ripping your own personal digital copy from your physical copy is provably not piracy. It’s a different act altogether; as you are using something you already own within your rights of possession and property. Instead, ripping your own copies is legal preservation.

Ranks 1 through 9 Is Not Piracy as you’ve paid for your copy in some manner typically. Rank 11 & 12 is not piracy

Ranks 10, 13, and 14 are JUSTIFIABLE Piracy. You are free to debate the merits of doing these things or choose not to do them yourself.

Rank 15 is blatant piracy and is arguably socially unacceptable and fully subject to full penalty of law. Don’t be that guy!

My ethics are simple; You must fulfill one of two conditions:

1. You pay for a legitimate copy (license) in some format. How much you pay does not matter as long as the transaction is for a permanent (indefinite time length) license and not blatantly a rental. This legitimate copy does not have to be purchased directly from the IP Rights holder or their designated and authorized (re)sellers.
2. You are 100% unable to obtain a reasonable, purchasable, legal copy in your city of residence through any physical or digital means. Any Digital options available to you must not be reasonably obtainable due to unreasonable cost of buy-in.

Notably:

Both rules exclude the ability to “Rent” a piece of content from somewhere, “Borrow” it from a library and “Buy” it online from a digital market place that is exclusive to a piece of technology you do not own and do not plan to, and would not elect to purchase.

As an example; any and all content that is exclusively available on iTunes or exclusively through using an iDevice is not reasonably obtainable; I do not own an Apple device, I do not wish to buy or own one. I would be within my rights to pirate any content I see as desirable. I despise Apple and refuse to use their products; so I am within my rights to pirate anything that requires you to use an Apple device or account to access the right to purchase it.

This would not be acceptable if the content were available through Google Play; as I already own an Android Smartphone, and the marketplace is reasonably accessible and reasonably priced in most cases.

This does not include situations where accessing the ability to purchase content requires a large number of convoluted steps. For example; I shouldn’t be required to mail in a letter only to obtain a temporary credential necessary to access the purchasing front-end, submit more personally identifying information than necessary to fill an order in an account creation process, or be required to call a specific phone number to support to ask for an exception to a policy or permission to purchase or retain access to a purchase.

As a final clarification: Streaming == Renting.

No ‘ifs’, ‘ands’, or ‘buts’ about it. A streaming service is renting access to a specific batch of content for an agreed upon price, paid at a regular interval. This is not a purchase. Instead it is a patronage agreement.