There’s some similar work done with the Pretendo network for Nintendo systems, but my understanding is it’s just for server-hosted and multiplayer game features and not copyright authentication.

I think it’s inevitable that someone creates an online server that authenticates online games, the lawsuits will be swift and vicious. The best solutions will probably be to create a local network authentication method, but who knows if it’s even possible.

Honestly, this is the best time to snapshot it, because even with the slop already there, the exponential increase that’s about to happen will absolutely dwarf what’s there now.

I hope we get there. But even that would be a return to status quo.

The typical cycle is democrats come in, do crisis control, enact stable (if lacking ambition) policies and leadership, and at year four or eight, the voters have forgotten the crisis and… Promptly vote back in republicans, who spend the next years systematically dismantling all progress until we’re back in crisis. Repeat. Happening since at least 1992.

This is the correct list, having lived through it. BBS services in the mid-1980s were the start of Razor1911, Paradox and other distro and cracker groups. I’d edit 2 to include FTP which is what BBS evolved into with secret dropsites for new releases.

IRC is 2.5 on this list. You can group that alongside the pre-web internet services, like AOL which had slightly IRC-like chat rooms dedicated to serving warez and videos in the same way (requesting a list from a chatbot, and then requesting sequential files).

Some light history here, though like all warez-related scholarship, there’s a ton missing that you had to have seen to know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_scene

https://archive.org/details/b904a8eb-9c98-4bb1-bf25-3cb9d075b157/

I don’t know if this meme is fully ironic, but kind of strange to think “torrenting” is considered the OG piracy method now.

Interesting. So you have *arr set to auto-download from certain lists and see it in Plex for the first time, as options? What kind of lists? How do you cull content you don’t end up liking so it doesn’t fill up your server?

What? Do you have a link? That’s a gut punch if so…

CD-R and CD-RW discs use different methods of data encoding, and were never advertised as having similar longevity.

I mean…sorry, but this is wrong. Mitsui CDRs for example are still being sold on retail sites advertising 100+ (and sometimes 300+) year longevity. Similar to bitrot, internet rot makes it hard to find advertisements from the 90s, but I am comfortable that was true then too and not limited to “gold” high quality discs like Mitsui.

Remember that CDs, CDRs, and so on were originally pitched as surviving 100 years. Turns out they last a highly variable amount of time but potentially as little as 2-3 years before they degrade, depending on the construction.

So I’ll just say, this is clearly a theoretical value.

Edit: Words.

JD: Why won’t they stop doing it? I specifically demanded it.

Very interesting. I followed BD circumvention on the doom9 forums from that link decades ago, but it looks like the VUK database method is more reliable now.

Is there some version of Handbrake or workaround for BD copy protection? This is the excerpt from the site, and matches my understanding that it isn’t a circumvention tool:

Supported Input Sources:

Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or BluRay sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.

Yeah, but did you hear? Spez is a billionaire now! The last step of the business model! Great job everyone!

Yeah, this 100% only works (but I think does work) with a reliable physical chain of trust, since we’re not yet in an age where you can Mission Impossible mask social engineer trust face-to-face. Not a great plan if this isn’t a USB drive handed directly to them, though.

You could always package them with everything they need to watch, like VLC (which should be able to read most formats anyway). Not clear if they are all on Windows, but perhaps you could include the portable VLC version that doesn’t require an install and make an obvious-named VLC playlist file for them to open.

Oh, sure, if your horses are all in the same place.

Since we’ve all enjoyed SaaS allowing us to pay monthly fees until death for everything from our word processor to our sleep tracker, get ready for Compute as a Service to take over everything else once none of us can afford home computing.

This is the internet, you can’t swear here.

Ok, that is much closer to half (or, let’s just say effectively half) than I thought. I’ll go eat some crow.

That is so technically accurate, I love it.