litchralee

@litchralee@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is streetwear a joke?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’ll have to provide some examples – ideally as photos – of streetwear fashion. Without any prior research, I only know the term to mean “comfy clothes” that would fall below the typical bar for “casual” dress code

  A quick web search shows examples ranging from perfectly reasonable outfits consisting of normally-proportioned shorts, jackets, pants, and shoes. To some outlandish outfits that are prominently displaying designer brands.

  And perhaps that’s the crux of the matter: what shows up on the fashion runway or “haute couture” magazines is never descriptive but prescriptive: a designer brand has a vested interest in getting the masses to believe that something is fashion so that they can move product.

  Taken to the logical extreme, there is an idea that designer clothes is intentionally outlandish, precisely so that said clothes would never be worn by “normies” in day-to-day activities, and thus can always (and persistently) be projected as high-end.

  Commercialized fashion is not a democratic experiment to see what most people want to wear. It is to move product every season. “Designer streetwear” is a poor approximation for what normal people wear when they just want to grab a sandwich from the bodega and then return to watch another episode from Season 2 of The Rehearsal. Maybe this should be called “real streetwear” to distinguish it from so-called designer goods.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you ever give up your right to leave a bad review about a company?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Whoops, you’re right. I misread the first sentence as though OP’s brother was hired by the company. In that case, yes, this act would appear to void any clause that would restrict writing a review, whether good or bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would you ever give up your right to leave a bad review about a company?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Sadly, this act only covers “form contracts” for the sale of services or products, and doesn’t look like it would extend to contracts of employment. That is, a consumer cannot be bound by a clause that prohibits writing reviews. And if a consumer of the company’s products is also an employee, then this act doesn’t prohibit a “no reviews” clause in the employment contract.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking to get a new phone with FOSS on it. What should I look into?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A phone with battle scars!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Been looking into getting an "Indexed Universal Life" insurance policy. Are these trust worthy?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The other comments correctly explain why an index fund is probably better suited, and will preserve more value by having lower fees. But I will propound on why “universal life insurance” (whether indexed or not) might not be a good fit for you.

  To explain, I have to start with what the point of life insurance even is. At its core, life insurance is supposed to provide some benefit to replace your life. That is, if when you die, you would no longer be generating income to support your family or to honor your debts. Without the benefit of life insurance, the consequences might include destitution for anyone that depends on you, as well as possibly a forced sale of the family home if the mortgage goes into default. In a nutshell, if correctly set up, life insurance should approximate the value of your life, the same way that car insurance should make you whole if something happens to the car.

  (I recognize that this sounds extremely morbid, to put a price on your life. But with the current socio-economic system, this is a necessary exercise)

  A reasonable approximation for how much life insurance to buy is to consider how much monthly income would it take so that your family could continue as-is financially in the event that you disappeared from their lives. If the amount will cover everything from inflation, to future college funds, plus retirement savings that you would have made, then that’s probably the upper-limit for the correct amount of benefit to purchase.

  If you have no debts, and have no family to support, there’s little point in buying life insurance. Indeed, it’s not terribly profitable for insurance companies to offer just life insurance, which is why they market other types which are partially life insurance, and partially an investment. Every form of life insurance – except fixed term life policies – have this mix.

  So the question is, do you need life insurance? If no, then a dedicated investment vehicle – like an index fund – would make more sense. And if yes, then fixed term life insurance makes more sense because it’s cheap and doesn’t muddle your investment portfolio.

  I’m of the opinion that mixing one’s insurance objectives with one’s investment objectives is a recipe for disaster, with the extremely narrow situation where the quirks of USA tax law means that wealthy, savvy people that plan ahead could save some tax dollars. Maybe.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The practice of handwritten paystubs is deeply suspicious, in an era where even the most basic of business payroll software can easily generate and print out a paystub directly. But I want to focus on the request for $1232 for 8.8 hours of apparent effort.

  That divides out into an hourly rate of $140 per hour! Such a high rate is the near-exclusive domain of a lawyer’s billable hours, as suggested from this 2002 survey by the Oregon State Bar. It is patently absurd to request the services of a lawyer for 8 hours when all it would have taken is an hour for a skilled accountant, or two hours if performed by even the most confused of small-business entrepreneurs.

  Unless your employment records extended for decades across multiple corporate entities that went through mergers and acquisitions, that is an unreasonable charge. Your former employer may be confusing the “reasonable fee” provisions for preparing documents persuant to a subpoena.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Looking to get a new phone with FOSS on it. What should I look into?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I legit ran it over with a forklift the other week

  I have to ask: what circumstance led to this particular incident?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How can I easily convert rs-232 serial to TTL levels ?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I suppose the first question is whether you had the baud rate set correctly. The photo of the “cleaned up signals” (not entirely sure what you did, compared to the prior photo) seems to show a baud rate of 38400, given that each bit seems to take about 15 microseconds.

  As for the voltage levels, the same photo seems to show 5v TTL. So it doesn’t seem like you would need a level converter from 15v RS-232 levels. This is one of the few times where the distinction between a “serial port” and an RS-233 port makes a difference, but a lot of data center switches will deal using 5v TTL, because the signals aren’t having to travel more than maybe 5 meters

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Self hosting Signal server⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This doesn’t answer OP’s question, but is more of a PSA for anyone that seeks to self-host the backend of an E2EE messaging app: only proceed if you’re willing and able to upkeep your end of the bargain to your users. In the case of Signal, the server cannot decrypt messages when they’re relayed. But this doesn’t mean we can totally ignore where the server is physically located, nor how users connect to it.

  As Soatok rightly wrote, the legal jurisdiction of the Signal servers is almost entirely irrelevant when the security model is premised on cryptographic keys that only the end devices have. But also:

  They [attackers] can surely learn metadata (message length, if padding isn’t used; time of transmission; sender/recipients). Metadata resistance isn’t a goal of any of the mainstream private messaging solutions, and generally builds atop the Tor network. This is why a threat model is important to the previous section.

  So if you’re going to be self-hosting from a country where superinjunctions or the right against unreasonable searches is being eroded, consider that well before an agent with a wiretap warrant demands that you attach a logger for “suspicious” IP addresses.

  If you do host your Signal server and it’s only accessible through Tor, this is certainly an improvement. But still, you must adequately inform your users about what they’re getting into, because even Tor is not fully resistant to deanonymization, and then by the very nature of using a non-standard Signal server, your users would be under immediate suspicion and subject to IRL side-channel attacks.

  I don’t disagree with the idea of wanting to self-host something which is presently centralized. But also recognize that the network effect with Signal is the same as with Tor: more people using it for mundane, everyday provides “herd immunity” to those most vulnerable in society.

  If you do proceed, don’t oversell what you cannot provide, and make sure your users are fully abreast of this arrangement and they fully consent. This is not targeted at OP, but anyone that hasn’t considered the things above needs to pause before proceeding.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Lowering power consumption on Opteron⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, at the USA average price of electricity of $0.13 per kWh, then for a halving of 70 Watts, it’s about 11 cents per day, or $40 per year. But at the California average price of $0.35, then the savings is 29 cents per day, or $107 per year.

  That’s not small money, especially if it’s free to make these gains by ripping out unneeded functionality. But the point is taken that it’ll be hard to find savings from older hardware, which simply didn’t prioritize energy efficiency.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do i tip my bartender $2 per drink and per bar food order but 20% when I order food from a waitress? Am I tipping wrong?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  if you do go to an establishment that pays based on the assumption of tips

  In the USA, there are only 7 US States (and Guam) which mandate that the minimum wage be paid prior to consideration of tips. All other states permit some fraction of tips to be considered as part of minimum wage, with some states limiting the employer contribution to as low as $2.13/hr.

  This is indeed an absurd situation outside of those seven states, but it also means that it’s nigh impossible to avoid establishments that rely on tips to supplement wages, in the other 43 states.

  With this background, I can understand why the earlier commenter views tipping as exploitative, for both the consumer and the staff. The result of either choice – boycotting places that pay less than minimum wage, or not tipping at those places – doesn’t change the fact that the staff are being underpaid, which is the root exploitative practice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does the AGPL license allows not disclosing the source of third party scripts indirectly interacting with the main software?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My understanding – IANAL – of the central thrust of the AGPL is that if there is software that runs somewhere else and serves the result to a user, then that is considered a “distribution” of the software and thus requires the source to be made available to said users, if they want a copy.

  So for your title question, I don’t think the dividing line is whether your software is directly/indirectly interacting with existing AGPL software, but rather the question is whether your software affects the service provided to the user.

  Starting with your first scenario, I presume that you mean a server-side NodeJS script, and that would modify the results returned to the user. Thus, I would think this is indeed a distribution and the AGPL’s provisions would require your NodeJS script being made available to the user.

  For your second scenario, I’m not entirely sure if you mean a server-side or client-side theme or overlay. If you modify a CSS file that is served to the user, I would think that’s a distribution. But if you’re writing a browser extension that overrides the default CSS file from the server, then no distribution of the server software has been made, I think. If you edit a JavaScript file that is part of the Mastodon package, I suspect that is a distribution, because that file is loaded to the user in order to use the service. But I’m not entirely certain on this.

  In the third scenario, a scraper would be consuming the result returned by an unmodified AGPL software package, so there is no obligation to offer the source code for your scraper.

  The fourth scenario is also a “use” of unmodified AGPL software, and so you have no obligation to offer your custom script to your users.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I got a VPO against me, how fucked am I?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  With no other info, I think the only advice available is that you should consult a lawyer for their advice. We neither know your legal jurisdiction, nor the timeline between “trying to get an abusive TTI investigated” and “I got a VPO against me”.

  The details in-between matter, but ultimately, if you’re subject to any type of restraining order, that will be controlling for whatever actions it prohibits you from doing. And the only way to lift that is to seek a lawyer’s help to challenge it in court.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I got a VPO against me, how fucked am I?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What is a VPO? What is TTI?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is "mythology" in the public domain in the first place?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  OP could make up a new story based on mythology and it’s not in the public domain.

  I believe this is generally true. But as I read your comment, I started to think about what scenarios it wouldn’t be true for. So now I’ve lost 20 productive minutes of my evening. But to salvage its value, I’ll share what I’ve brainstormed.

  If OP decides a universe following up from Greek mythology – as an example – and then affixes that story into writing, then OP’s copyright will come into existence automatically.

  If OP instead hires a stenographer to write down his verbal dictation, and the stenographer later formats the text alongside a copyeditor that OP also hires, then OP still has a valid copyright, over both the raw, stenographic manuscript, plus the final, completed work. The stenographer and copyeditor would not share in the copyright, because it is a work-product that they are handling, rather than a creation of their own effort. Alternatively, their hiring contract waives all claims to the story’s copyright.

  If OP instead writes his own manuscript using an open-source word processor like LibreOffice Writer, and then sends the PDF to FedEx Kinko’s to print as a perfect-bound book suitable for light coffee-table reading, neither the printer operator at the shop nor FedEx Kinko’s would share in the copyright, because although they are rendering the work into a more tangible form than an .odt or .pdf file, this is a mechanical function and not one of creativity, which is what intellectual property protects.

  Finally, if OP stands at that one weird triangle in NYC and basically improvises the entire story aloud without any note cards or preparation, within full view and earshot of the public sidewalk, and it so happens that three Columbia University students – still disappointed by their school’s capitulation – decide to hear what this strange man on the corner is spouting, and begin writing down OP’s words verbatim, then it may be the case that neither the students nor OP have a valid copyright over the story or itz characters.

  What can happen is that although OP’s story is a creative expression, it wasn’t rendered by OP into a tangible or concrete form. And what the students did was the mechanical operation of taking dictation, so their scholarly efforts also don’t imbue any creative effort that copyright laws could protect, apart from maybe the exact sequence of grammatical symbols and guesses on how certain character names might be spelled.

  In essence, a public creative process may end up depositing the meat of the story into the public domain, save only for the actual rendition on paper which merely records it. This is no different than republications of older public domain novels, where the only valid copyright is upon the copyediting done to clean up some old words and make it palatable for a modern audience.

  IANAL, but I’m beginning to see why the job of IP lawyer might pay so much.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can I self-host on old iPhones?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A Nintendo Wii would also work, as exemplified by this blog running on a NetBSD Wii.

  But in all seriousness, the original comment has a point: using a mobile phone as a server is possible but also wastes a lot of the included hardware, like the cellular baseband, the touchscreen, and the voice and Bluetooth capabilities. Selling the phones and using the proceeds to purchase a used NUC or an SFF PC would give you more avenues to expand, in addition to just being plain easier to set up, since it would have USB ports, to name a few luxuries.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why is "mythology" in the public domain in the first place?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I understand the question to be: “why does cultural folklore, passed from person-to-person through the ages, fall into the public domain, in modern conception of intellectual property?”

  If that is the question, then the answer is multi-fold: firstly, since folklore predates any organized notion of private rights to certain renditions of an idea (aka intellectual property), they are grandfathered in.

  But supposing that making an exception for folklore or mythology isn’t palatable, the practical issue is: who would own said intellectual property for a particular myth? Property – in the Anglo-American sense – must have an owner. Even public property like parks and highways has an owner: the state. Without an owner, assigning intellectual property rights for myths is a pointless exercise.

  And finally, remember that intellectual property does not cover ideas per-se, but their rendition in some tangible or concrete form. A book, a movie, an MP3 file, etc. If it’s solely an idea without a creation to go with it – or for patents, the plausibility of producing such a creation – then intellectual property rights cannot attach.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could I just create my own drive format?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I vaguely recall what was effectively a delay-line implemented using terrahertz-modulated lasers aimed at the retro reflector on the moon from Earth’s surface. The data storage capacity was something in either the hundreds of GBs or low TBs. But I can’t find the reference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could I just create my own drive format?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I wish to advocate in the name of DIY minimalism. That is to say, it’s true that none of us – Linus Torvalds is not in the room, right? – can hope to churn out anything approaching a full-blown filesystem on the order of ext4 or NTFS if we worked our entire lives. But if those filesystems were the end-all-be-all of innovation in those spaces, the richness and intrigue of computer science would have died out long ago, relegated to only the pinnacle of engineers and no one else.

  But I feel like that can’t quite be the case, because all engineering is about achieving careful balances. And as fine as ext4 is, it must be said that it’s anything but minimal. It’s full-featured, which also implies that it might have more than what any one person requires. If OP wants to write a very compact filesystem designed for 8-bit microprocessors, I can’t badger them with ext4’s existence, because that’s not going to be usable on an 8 bit machine.

  Much like how Python includes a really tiny HTTP server, and we can all agree that it’s order of magnitudes less sophisticated than nginx, such implementations can have their time in the sun. And I think a tiny, absurdly minimal, almost code-golf of a filesystem, might have a place in this world, if OP really wants to undertake that effort.

  Computer science, I wish to believe, still has doors awaiting exploration.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if a billionaire wants to help you?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) in the USA are made to track both potential tax evasion and money laundering. This is where the $10k cash “limit” comes from, but SARs can/should be filed for higher amount that create suspicion.

  Someone depositing a check for multiple times their lifetime transactions total would absolutely create suspicion on themselves, especially if it was a personal check. But if it were a business check from “ABC Mortgage Escrow”, that’s probably legit but a bank clerk is well within their rights to flag it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could I just create my own drive format?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Lots of good answers, especially using FUSE for experimentation. One thing I’ll add is that if you just didn’t want to use any filesystem at all … you don’t have to!

  At least in the Unix realm, a disk drive is just a bunch of contiguous blocks, and you can put whatever you want in them. Of course, Unix itself famously needs a filesystem for itself, but if you want to just store all your giant binary blobs – cryptocurrency block chain? – directly onto a drive without the pesky overhead or conveniences of a filesystem, that’s doable.

  It’s not generally a useful idea to treat a disk drive as though it’s a tape drive, but it does work. And going further into that analogy, you can use “tar” to collect multiple files and fit them onto the drive, since a tarball preserves file metadata and the borders between files, but not much else. This is the original use of tar – “tape archive” – for storing Unix files onto tape, because the thought of using tape as working storage with a filesystem was – and still is – a terrible idea. And that’s basically the idea with a filesystem: it’s better than linear access.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if a billionaire wants to help you?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Banks can and do get into hot water if they’re found to have handled – inadvertently or not – funds which ends up with banned entities, like DPRK or terrorist groups, or are the product of fraud AND that they ignored reasonable suspicions.

  The classic example is the so-called “703 account” of fraudster Bernie Madoff, held at JP Morgan Chase bank. Although a humble checking account, it saw huge money inflows and outflows, with one reference showing a single withdrawal of $1.3 billion. For their wilful disregard of the obvious red flags, the bank was fined $461 million of their own money, separate from the seizure of the account to pay the victims.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Server sorted, on to switches⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From my limited experience with PoE switches, how much power being drawn in relation to how much the switch can supply has a notable impact on efficiency. Specifically, when only one or two ports on a 48-port switch are delivering PoE, the increased AC power drawn from the wall is disproportionately high. Hence, any setup where you’re using more of the PoE switch’s potential power tends to increase overall efficiency.

  My guess is that it has to do with efficiency curves that are only reasonable when heavily loaded for enterprise customers. In any case, if either of those two candidate switches meet your needs today and with some breathing room, both should be fine. I would tend to lean towards Netgear before TP-Link though, out of personal preference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨anyone have personal experience with industrial tourism?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The larger town next to mine has monthly tours of their wastewater and water processing plants. Although they’re scheduled to be amenable for K-12 student field trips, they also see adults who wish to understand how their tax dollars are being expensed for the public good.

  For other municipal services, you might also reach out to the director of that department, since as public servants, they can also schedule special tours of the facilities for members of the public. It can’t hurt to ask.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I determine what a mystery dongle does?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve never had a need to use a Yubikey, but is that the button which spews gibberish into DMs? I’ve seen that a lot at work on Teams lol

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I determine what a mystery dongle does?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It looks a lot like a Yubikey, which is used to securely authenticate to company resources like a VPN. Fortunately, unlike losing a hard drive, a Yubikey can be deauthorized by the company and this the device becomes useless for malicious use.

  So if you want to use that USB port for something else, it shouldn’t be a problem to remove a Yubikey for the prior user’s employer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Couldn't big-tech shut out non-monopoly laws by saying that it's meant to be like that on "their" product?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  aren’t these kind of laws; telling a maker to make the product in a specific way, eliminating creative freedom?

  In the realms of monopoly regulation, product liability, energy efficiency, or pollution emissions, to name a few examples, the objective of the law is to define a floor (read: minimum requirements) that balance competing interests. In a democratic society, the government holds the public interest in high regard, but solely focusing on just that would lead to some very strange results, some of which are too philosophical to distill into practice.

  Laws on anti-competitive or unfair business practices serve to level the playing field, so that businesses cannot assert an undue advantage over competitors, often to the hindrance of a competitive market for consumers. So there are two harms: other businesses have no hope of breaking into the market, and consumers don’t get as many choices as they could have had.

  The word “undue” is carrying a lot of weight, because some practices definitely assert an advantage to the disadvantage of everyone else: retaining all the good engineers is one such example, because good engineers can churn out good products, meaning other competitors have a harder time producing similarly-capable products. But that’s not an unnatural advantage, unless somehow the deck is being stacked to produce that result.

  As a practical matter, flouting the law is an excellent way to get one’s products banned from the marketplace, either by mechanism of law or by alienating consumers. Take VW’s emissions scandal as an example: US State DMVs were prepared to invalidate the vehicle registrations for noncompliant automobiles already on the road, and consumers fled for other automakers, causing both the used and new prices for VW cars to drop. Many (all?) US States prohibit the sale of automobiles currently subject to a recall, with penalties for the seller. So why would anyone want to continue owning such a car, nor could they even get rid of it except by getting/using VW to buy it back.

  When a government really wants to turn the screws on a nonconforming business, they absolutely have the means to do it. And it doesn’t even require a top-down regime like what’s often said about the Chinese government.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can I put a cold oxygen plasma generator in my fridge?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I got my hands on a cold oxygen plasma generator

  My dude, very unique opportunities seem to be a common occurrence for you. I remember when I answered your question about 240v residential power. And now a plasma generator??

  Sadly, I don’t have an answer to your present inquiry, but I hope the other commenters are of aid.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could one legally get a hold of those bank bill dye security dye packs, dye your own legally obtained cash with it, and spend it places? Just to make people suspect you're secretly a bank robber.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there anything legally stopping you from making your town think you’re a gangster who robbed a bank and somehow got away with it?

  If the goal is to convince other people to think you’re a bank robber, but without actually having to rob a bank, I think it could be done with much less effort and likely more effective. But this then gets into the ethical line between little white lies and outright deception or misinformation.

  Because one way to achieve that goal is to doctor a bunch of evidence that would “incriminate” yourself, such as AI-generated video, then disseminate that to local reports, while also plastering it on social media, and might as well stuff a copy into a manila envelope and mail to the local District Attorney.

  And all of that is probably legal in most jurisdictions in the USA, with the probable sole exception of intentionally wasting the prosecutor’s office’s effort, since they had not solicited such evidence. Compare this to “tip lines”, which expressly seek info and they are fully cognizant that not all the tips will be good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hypothetically, if the police seized your electronics (for an unrelated investigation) and found out you have a lot of pirated content, what would happen?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Possession of content – with the unique exception of CSAM – in the USA does not draw a distinction between how it was acquired, whether or not it may have violated a license or copyright. The primary provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976 are to protect the production and distribution of copyrighted works. So unless your stash of content is being hosted on a server for others to access – which constitutes distribution, though one could possibly argue that if no one ever accessed it, it’s not distribution – then the mere possession does not incur criminal liability. Of course, civil liability may attach, meaning that the copyright holder could sue you for the cost of buying a legit license. Though there’s zero reason for the police to pass that info to whomever the copyright holder is. Whether police can gratuitously share investigation info with a third-party is a matter of state law.

  But the other potential criminal charge could come from the infamous DMCA, whose provisions make it a crime to circumvent DRMs. Though this provision has an out, whereby certain circumvention is permitted as exceptions for designated purposes, created and renewed through a regulatory process. Outside these exceptions, the standard defense of fair-use for copyright infringement does not apply to a charge of DMCA circumvention. So if the police could put together evidence that your content stash is the product of circumvention, and other evidence shows that you used or have the tools/software to perform that circumvention, that’s technically a charge which could be leveled.

  This would take a colossal amount of effort, for something which generally has to be brought by the (federal) US Attorney’s office, rather than a state-level District Attorney. So realistically, this would only really be considered if you somehow managed to annoy an FBI investigator enough. And even then, it’s quite petty to charge DMCA circumvention alone.