Age verification is a great success I see. I feel so much safer now with this shit in place so kids can’t watch porn…
…on major/regulated sites only.
The worst was watching porn on spotify…
It has absolutely nothing to do with kids watching porn.
Of course.
*so that the government can say kids won’t watch porn.
Rule 1 of computers that everyone who has taught an ICT class learns - if little Timmy wants titties, he finds a way.
God forbid people teach their kids sex/getting off is a drug and can be abused.
Who taught you sex is a drug? As long as words mean their definitions, it’s categorically not. Plus it’s probably kinda harmful to pile on the stigma already surrounding sex by conflating it with drugs and all the stigma that comes with that.
Hopefully I’m wrong, but it’s kinda giving a nofap pseudoscience red flag to me.
Parents definitely should be teaching their kids about this stuff at the appropriate time, but they should stick to the facts.
First they came for the sex, then they came after the drugs. Now they’re trying to take my rock and roll
I’ve heard music is a drug, too. It was all drugs, all along. We probably should’ve known, honestly.
Life is a drug if you hit it right
I thought life was a highway?
Life is the highway you boof
Did you know that rock and roll is actually a plate of spaghetti?
Spaghetti = Carbs = Sugar = Addictive Drug
yeah but I lost my poor meatball.
A fellow Bread Harrity super fan I see? I’d like to get all up in that beautiful man’s wet spaghetti 🍝
I mean… it is a rush of dopamine and can become addictive. Same as a videogame or gambling though. Not a drug but can get unhealthy if it leads to maladaptive daily functioning.
Sex on drugs is awesome…
ah from shady porn sites, like spotify and wikipedia. definitely protect kids from porn there. /s
Is wikipedia on the list? I see reddit is, lol. We might see an influx soon.
not yet, but the wikimedia foundation has been fighting against it expecting that it would be a class 1 site and require it.
We have to protect wikipedia
Here’s one way to help: https://kiwix.org/en/about-us/#our-story
Download Wikipedia to your own device. If it’s ever blocked or taken down you still have access and can help share information with others.
You can download different versions (e.g. without images) and different languages based on your needs.
There’s other resources available via kiwix as well but I’ve not really explored them to be honest
Does it run a local web server or is it all static files? Is it searchable?
We turn various online educational contents (such as Wikipedia, for example) into ZIM files, and these can be opened by Kiwix even if you have no connectivity whatsoever.
https://flathub.org/apps/org.kiwix.desktop
The ZIM file format is an open file format that stores website content for offline usage.[1] The format is defined by the openZIM project, which also supports an open-source ZIM reader called Kiwix. The format is primarily used to store the contents of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, including articles, full-text search indices and auxiliary files.[2][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIM_(file_format)
Edit:
All content files are indexed and compressed in ZIM format, which makes them smaller, but leaves them easy to search and selectively decompress.
The ZIM files are then opened with Kiwix, which looks and behaves like a web browser, or with a suitably enabled conventional browser. Kiwix offers full text search, tabbed navigation, and the option to export articles to PDF and HTML.[8]
So I feel like I’m now hearing more successful pushes for censorship through this stuff.
Just last week I learned how Texas has a bill that makes it so if anyone ever invested in green technology that they wouldn’t be allowed
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/24/texas-boycott-companies-fossil-fuels/
I saw a post saying /r/period required an age check.
They’re gonna censor as much as they can with this.
That makes no sense, surely everyone has invested in green energy through workplace retirement plans, no?
Let this be a reminder to never turn away from piracy. It needs to constantly be in the background and if any company gets like they always do, then it comes back out. But if we let the knowledge fade away then it’s impossible to rebuild it.
Piracy preserves media.
Piracy preserves art.
Piracy makes sure, that future generations still have access to the creations of humanity.
Data hoarding is a service to the public.
“Keep circulating the tapes!”
I initially perceived piracy similarly to how or perceive reading about archaeology and such, so the fact that someone is sincere in hating p2p copying and calling it immoral just felt preposterous.
Yet now it seems plenty of normies will agree. Then go listen to something they didn’t pay for on YouTube or Facebook or whatever, because “everybody uses that”. What “everybody uses” is fine, see. What they condemn me the pirate for is using ed2k, torrents and such other technologies. Even when I’m literally downloading public domain stuff or abandonware.
It doesn’t take much for media though to parade out the “lil guy and change the opinion of people about how your basically attacking small indie creators”
Or you know you could punish parents for not parenting. Like if kids are watching porn and caught and if it’s actually against some law then go after the parents.
It’s not hard to teach parents how to implement a filtering DNS. But no, countries think they need to be the nanny.
“Protecting children” is just the pretext under which governments can sell increased surveillance. The fact that there are more effective ways they could act to protect children, yet governments everywhere continue to push for ID checks and monitoring online activity, shows that the aim isn’t what they say it is.
Protect from what? I mean seriously. Most of us (guys at least) probably saw porn way before we were old enough and most of us probably didn’t end up as rapists or pedophiles. It’s not a good thing by any means, but it really feels like we’re trying harder to keep sexual material from entering their brains than we are trying to keep them fed, clothed, educated, housed, healthy, loved, and physically safe. Of all the things I mentioned the last seven have a monumentally greater affect on their success and well-being as an adult.
I’m convinced sex is used as a leveraging tool to control society.
🌏👨🚀🔫👨🚀
That’s just the pretext they give to justify it. The real reason is surveillance. Now they have a way to confidently tie your accounts to your individual identity. And most of these solutions use third parties which will then sell that data as well, so now anyone can tie your account to you without you ever knowing.
Even if the government is barred from surveilling citizens in these ways, third parties aren’t, and the government can just buy that information, no warrant needed anymore.
And these laws never stop at porn, it’s drugs, LGBTQ information, etc. and they can always easily add additional things later with little fanfare.
This is it. Theyve been going after encrypted messaging apps for a long time, ig they realized theyre not getting anywhere and figured to just hit it head on.
The internet has always circumvented this kind of shit, just look at TPB. The ones who are getting really beaten up by this is the older generations and the ones lacking technical know-how.
Yep. “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
LOL, wrong on that last point! Gen X and Millennials are generally hot shit on tech. It’s the young folks who don’t have a clue if something doesn’t “just work”. Present company excluded of course. :)
It’s not about kids and never has been, it’s about surveillance of the internet and the death of anonymity.
Going against the parents is impopular and would make the parents vote against you in the next elections.
As a parent, that’s my take as well. If my kids break a law, I should be the one to fix it. Don’t do my parenting for me…
They could just offer a child protection browser where parents could set to child mode and require adult material offering sites to check if user has something like “attention not 18 year old user” in the headers.
Would be way cheaper, I think.
Don’t threaten, just do it. Enshittification must end.
The only reason we have mainstream paid video streaming now is because early Netflix was genuinely better than dodgy, pop-up riddled mirrors on movie4k.to. The convenience was well worth 8 bucks a month. Same for Spotify.
Fast forward 10 years and Spotify wants me to pay 15 €, scan my face and listen to forced podcast ads AND pay extra for paywalled audiobooks that used to be free? Meet my good old friend youtube-downloader, then.
The news can’t easily report on users actually returning to piracy; who would admit to it? And how would you get data on it? Much easier to truthfully report on users who talk about returning to piracy.
Don’t threaten, just do it!
I don’t get why people are so stubborn to move away from corporate products.
Personally, the open source community’s aversion to algorithms is what’s holding me back. Say what you will about them, but I’ve found many great songs thanks to Spotify’s algo.
Soulseeks recommendation algorithm is top notch, almost organic. You click the ‘browse users files’ button.
If you’re just looking for an engine that recommends you music based off your likes, the FOSS community could utilize the Music Genomoe Project to build a tool too do that based one a folder or Playlist of music provided to it. I would be surprised if there already wasn’t a FOSS tool to do that.
I was dragging my feet because I really liked the algorithmic features. As much as I hate “AI” being jammed into everything these days, I really liked their DJ feature, and the “crate a playlist from a prompt” was a lot of fun to play with!
My favorite generated playlist was “Determined music for poopwalking home from Taco Bell”
That being said, they’ve been corrupting their music exploration tools with corporate interest for a while, so it’s been becoming less desirable as a result
I hate Spotify and would like to stop paying them even 1/5th of a family subscription. But I have researched alternatives and haven’t found one that meets my need to manage offline files, playlists, and the current playback session across many (and I mean many) devices.
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Well… with streaming services people don’t actually have anything, because nothing in there is theirs to own ;)
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what’s even the point of age gating “explicit” music?
“oh no! “Speak To Me” by Pink Floyd has the fuck word in it! can’t let my kids hear it!”
We live in a rural part of Canada that has been left behind by modern times. Mostly by the choice of the residents. I grew up during satanic panic. It was crazy here. My wife and I let our kids listen to anything they want. They always have. They’re 10 and 12.
Their friends often comment about swear words and “sex, drugs and rock and roll” themes of the music they listen too. As an old man I get to regale them with stories of how crazy the Christians were over heavy metal and punk rock when I was a kid, including their grandma.
Now I yell “you’re gonna go to hell!” As a joke to them every time their friends bring it up and I am around.
You’re parenting the right way. Let our kids know about our past and how it compares to theirs, live it. And joking with my kids and their friends without immediately jumping to “that’s bullying”, you can tell my kids are a bit happier than the rest because everything is a joke to them. I applaud you.
“you’re gonna go to hell!”
if where all the “christians” go is heaven, then i’d rather go to hell
My parents only let me listen to Spanish language music when I was little, so I wouldn’t understand the cursing. 😂
I’ve been cursing a lot lately, and I blame what I listened to in Spotify. By no means was it because I was playing my pirated Eminem music all weekend 🤣🤣
Just get me the kid bop version
what are “spotify fans”? Spotify paid 150k $ for Trump’s inauguration party, f them. They do not deserve my money
I left Spotify for many reasons including this. They’ve only proven that they do not care about artists at all. I remember before I left, many of the tracks that came up “based on my playlist” were just random AI generated crap.
Back to Piracy! ✊🏴☠️
Really though? It isn’t necessary. Use Bandcamp, you probably have half your artists covered. The rest - one of those Spotify alternatives: Tidal? Qobuz?
Personally I do selfhost btw. Jellyfin, though I heard of a better alternative specifically for music recently - and forgot the name again 😥 Something lowercase,
like a verb… “normalize” or some such.Navidrome! Thanks @0konomiyaki@aussie.zoneGo to shows, buy the albums from the merch tables and use the events (to the best of your individual ability) as a means to connect with like minded anti-fascists.
That is of course even better. Just wish any band I’m interested in would ever come to play this quiet corner *sigh*
Thanks for recommending Navidrome. It looks really interesting.
I was using Spotify, but switched to Spotube. After Spotube was crippled, I was kind of aimless. I really liked having my music available on my cellphone and desktop. It looks like Navidrome will fill the gap perfectly.
You’d mentioned ripping CDs. Would you have some software, you’d recommend (Windows or Linux)? Preferably in FLAC.
I haven’t looked at ripping software in a few years, but it was kind of tedious to set up and very manual to get the proper metadata, genres, and cover art. I’ve got a hundred CDs and that’ll take awhile…
abcdefor Linux. It’s in your repositories. Set it up once the way you want, then it’s just: insert CD, enterabcde, repeat ad nauseam. You could even tell your system to auto-trigger it on every CD insert.Don’t know if it’s still what’s recommended, but I use foobar2000 for ripping CDs to FLAC.
I want to leave Windows behind… abcde seems the way to go for Linux.
On Windows I use EAC, it’s great but requires a little work to set up. There are a lot of tutorials for it if course.
I have Jellyfin for movies/tv, and gonic for music!
Bandcamp is the best
Harmonize?
more like 3% bandcamp availability. i know this is a linux/trans/selfhost/overpayeddev/westeu/foss echochamber, but im not wasting electricity and money on selfhost if a 1tb sd card in my phone can do the same thing offline.
I switched to Deezer!
I would suggest Qobuz (if available) or Tidal. Deezer’s CEO is a hard-core religious nutjob who finances anti-trans orgs and sexual conversion “therapies”.
Ah dang. :( Thanks for the heads up, I thought I found something nice…
If I am paying for my account personally, with a card in my name, what more do they need?
They want to scan your face to get as many images of people of stated ages to feed into their facial recognition system. Do not for one moment think it is for anything else.
Edit: it is like how Facebook had a 10 years ago you looked like this! Post a new comparison photo today!’ Specifically because they want to know how people age for their AI shit.
Well sure, the real reason is always data harvesting.
Yeah, they want to be able to ‘People that look like This listen to This’ so that advertisers have more options when they are locking down commercials.
tf is spotify “fans”? more like spotify “users”
Fans of things that are provisioned by Spotify.
doesn’t make them fans of spotify though
I guess that’s why I didn’t say that, or agree with that framing.
I mean, fuck Spotify and all that, but this one is really the UK government’s doing.
And soon, this shit will come to every country. They’re all drafting laws to mandate real age verification for adult content. The UK is just the first to implement it.
I mean, fuck it. At this point we might as well put our passport numbers in the HTTP headers.
Coming to a pop up near you. If they even bother to ask any more.
I think there are going to be a whole lot of phishing and blackmail scams in the future, preying on the stupid computer illiterate masses putting in their personal information into fake “age verifiers” to access porn or other adult content.
It’s a good thing it’s so easy to tell them from the “trustworthy” ones…
Its not like every industrie can somehow lobby every consumer right away when someone wants to make a new law… oh wait they do…
Actually, I don’t think this is industry mandated. I don’t think it’s in the interest of tech and content companies to create more friction to access their services. This one seems to have more to do with the governments wanting to exert more control over online affairs, and of course, over its citizens.
Yea my point was if people stopped using the apps then the big players will lobby the governemt to revert shit like that. But i also think that long term all big players would love to normalize taking your picture to open their app. Every bit of information they can sell is a win for them.
Ah I see, misunderstood your point then.
I guess that’s also why Google is going to use some kind of AI to determine whether or not a profile is underage. That way, existing adult users of their services are (most likely) not affected.
In my opinion, draconian government overreach in matters of civil liberties is one of the few instances where we should be on the side of big tech companies.
A VPN is a must if you wanna go down this route
Soulseek (and I recommend the Nicotine+ client over the official one) is a fantastic source for all music in all formats, and particularly obscure off-label shit you won’t get anywhere else. You’ll even have some success finding audiobooks there, although this is very hit-and-miss. I wish audiobook pirates would use it more heavily. It’s P2P, like Napster used to be. You’ll have to share something or you’ll get auto-ignored by most users.
RuTracker is a great non-private/non-ratio-monitoring torrent site for music (does require a free account though). I’ve never had a single torrent from there that wasn’t seemingly seeded by a Godzilla’s dick. Obviously it’s in Russian, but there’s really no difficulty navigating around. The only thing you might struggle with is signing up for an account, but just have your favourite translation tool open in another tab 👍
If you don’t mind slow download speeds (from the likes of RapidGator), I enjoy Exystence. It’s a blog that shares link to the latest albums and offers both lossy and lossless versions. Nice RSS subscription to have.
If you do find yourself using RapidGator a lot, don’t waste money buying a sub directly from them, it’s insanely pricey. Instead, get a reseller like Real Debrid, which costs like 10% as much and also covers you for about two-dozen other file hosters. I highly recommend putting as much distance between your credit card and the company as possible, just for safety reasons. Using PaySafeCard is fine, as Real Debrid will never see your details in that case. I don’t have any specific reason to be weary of them, I just don’t trust random/small/hitherto unheard of companies as a rule.
It’s P2P, like Napster used to be. You’ll have to share something or you’ll get auto-ignored by most users.
Oh, reminds me, you should also sort your share. I once got march-horny, added some German marches to my download queue (no judging pls), and then got a PM from the guy sharing them that I should keep my collection in order. And yes, the jerk ignored me.
Also not really p2p, there is a central server. The downloads are p2p.
RuTracker is a great non-private/non-ratio-monitoring torrent site for music
It was ratio-monitoring, that’s how it became great. Just after being banned in Russia they decided that those who try hard enough to even reach there can be trusted to behave.
It’s not only for music, it’s for everything.
I’ve been using RuTracker for years and it usually has all the music I need. And it has more than music, great site.
All good advice. I used to find a lot of stuff by entering “site:rutracker.org” behind my query in my favorite search engine - don’t know if that still works but I never needed an account there…
Here’s a reliable, free VPN: https://riseup.net/en/vpn
Remember to donate to them tough - and btw. they are actually running their services for radical left activists, not filesharing… so I guess it would be cool to please not strain their servers too much.
Never stopped. Get your own mp3s kids.
Why mp3?
Usually when someone still use mp3s it’s for the ubiquity of the format. Every device that has a USB port handle mp3s. I personally use opus and it’s not common at all.
It’s really interesting when you think about that.
In the video world, we’ve had an arms race all throughout the last 25 years for the lowest possible file size at the best possible quality, with new codecs and containers constantly coming in and out of favour. Hardware playback has always been spotty at best, with little guarantee you’ll get a file to play on any device in particular.
Meanwhile I could rip a CD and put it on even my first-generation MP3 player from the year 1999, and it would work. A blessing we rather take for granted.
I guess there just hasn’t been sufficient pressure to toss MP3 out completely. From an evolutionary perspective, just like the horseshoe crab, it is “good enough” and so it endures.
You just reminded me: A while back there was this slew of articles coming out of the tech press saying MP3 was now dead.
And why did they say that? Because the last Fraunhofer Patent on an MP3 related invention ran out.
Instead of reporting the format was now fully free, those idiots thought that meant it was now dead 😂
Opus is far better, but with MP3’s there’s been plenty of hardware players only working with that format. Also Opus is new, before it was Vorbis which was kinda as good as MP3 but far less popular.
And yes, MP3 is very “good enough”, like JPEG.
Considering how much Spotify pays artists per listens, piracy is barely any different in that regard.
Wrong
Piracy is 100x more ethical
This is the most upsetting part. If you’re a solo artist without a label, you need what’s essentially a million listens to break minimum wage. For bands, and anyone with a label, even that’s practically out of question. This shit is why everyone sells 75$ t-shirts at shows
