zarenki

@zarenki@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Feds Say You Don’t Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This argument is even more ridiculous than it seems. During the copyright office hearing for this exemption request (back in April), the people arguing in favor of libraries talked about the measures they have in place. They don’t just let people download a ROM to use in any emulator they please. It’s not even one of those browser-based emulators where you can pull the ROM data out of your browser cache if you know how. It’s a video stream of an emulator running on a server managed by the library, with plenty enough latency to make it very clearly a worse gaming experience.

  It’s far easier to find ROMs of these games elsewhere than it is to contact a librarian and ask for access to a protected collection, so there’d be no reason to redistribute the files even if they were offered, which they aren’t.

  On top of that, this exemption request was explicitly limited to old games that have been long unavailable on the market in any form, which seems like an insane limitation to put on libraries, places that have always held collections of books both new and old.

  All of that is still not enough to sate the US Copyright Office, the ESA, AACS, or DVD CSS. Those three were the organizations that fought against this.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nintendo Is Now Going After YouTube Accounts Which Show Its Games Being Emulated⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Anbernic devices in particular are known to ship with an SD card that’s preloaded with a fairly large game library. I own a RG351M which did indeed include a cheap card loaded with both the OS and a collection of games by Nintendo, Sega, and many others, plus some strange rom hacks. I immediately swapped that card out for a better one with a better CFW and my own files.

  Most other notable names in the emulation handhelds space like Retroid, Ayn, and Ayaneo expect users to be able to provide their own files instead, which I’d say makes more sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Some basic info about USB⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For that portable monitor, you should just need a cable with USB-C plugs on both ends which supports USB 3.0+ (could be branded as SuperSpeed, 5Gbps, etc). Nothing more complicated than that.

  The baseline for a cable with USB-C on both ends should be PD up to 60W (3A) and data transfers at USB 2.0 (480Mbps) speeds.

  Most cables stick with that baseline because it’s enough to charge phones and most people won’t use USB-C cables for anything else. Omitting the extra capabilities lets cables be not only cheaper but also longer and thinner.

  DisplayPort support uses the same extra data pins that are needed for USB 3.0 data transfers, so in terms of cable support they should be equivalent. There also exist higher-power cables rated for 100W or 240W but there’s no way a portable monitor would need that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Irony of 'You Wouldn't Download a Car' Making a Comeback in AI Debates⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The whole point of copyright in the first place, is to encourage creative expression, so we can have human culture and shit.

  I feel like that purpose has already been undermined by various changes to copyright law since its inception, such as DMCA and lengthening copyright term from 14 years to 95. Freedom to remix existing works is an important part of creative expression which current law stifles for any original work that releases in one person’s lifespan. (Even Disney knew this: the animated Pinocchio movie wouldn’t exist if copyright could last more than 56 years then)

  Either way, giving bots the ‘right’ to remix things that were just made less than a year ago while depriving humans the right to release anything too similar to a 94 year old work seems ridiculous on both ends.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google pulls the plug on uBlock Origin, leaving over 30 million Chrome users susceptible to intrusive ads⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I switched from Chrome to Firefox in 2019 because that’s when Google adopted Manifest V3 and I never looked back. There were already articles then describing how it’d break ad blockers, and Firefox had at the time just recently released their “Quantum” overhaul which drastically improved responsiveness.

  I’m a bit surprised it took five years for Google to drop support for Manifest V2, but the threat has long been there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Legitimately playing 4K blu-ray video on a PC without cracking the DRM requires an insane combination of requirements:

  • Windows 10 (not 11)
  • An Intel processor between gen 7-10 (nothing newer because Intel ditched SGX in 2021)
  • Intel integrated graphics (no nvidia/amd)
  • Monitor that supports HDCP 2.2 for DRM (some 4k ones don’t)
  • An approved optical drive
  • Proprietary playback software which costs about $100 USD, separate from the cost of hardware and Windows
  • Miscellaneous other requirements for the motherboard features, bios settings, etc.

  Meanwhile MakeMKV can rip them on basically any Windows/Linux/Mac system with a compatible BDXL drive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Likewise, I’m far less hesitant to accept buying digital console games than video because I generally can expect that once I download a game on my one device that I’ll pull out the same device whenever I want to play it and it’ll keep working when offline and even after the servers are gone, until the hardware fails. Modern games’ physical releases rely so heavily on updates and DLC that the cart/disc you get isn’t complete anyway; buying physical effectively becomes a digital game with an extra point of failure (and partial resellability). PC gaming complicates things but at least some games are available completely DRM-free there.

  With video content sold online, streaming directly from some server is always the focus. As soon as the server disconnects you become unable to watch by default. Even if some service lets you pre-download within its app and watch offline (which probably won’t work indefinitely without checkins anyway), that’ll defeat the portability expectations for watching your videos on any device interchangeably.

  Blu-ray video isn’t ideal considering you cannot watch it on a phone, tablet, or linux system without cracking its DRM, but that’s still way better for lasting access than anything else major movie/TV studios are willing to let consumers access without piracy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Chinese startup launching RISC-V laptop for devs and engineers priced at around $300⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is a Linux machine. Runs a Debian derivative, and it’s not like Windows or anything else that isn’t Linux/BSD can run on a RISC-V laptop.

  This isn’t the first RISC-V laptop, but the significance of a RISC-V laptop existing is primarily for developers who work on software targeting RISC-V systems. The ability to run RV64 programs without emulation and to natively compile RV64 software without cross-compilers is valuable to some people. Also, China in particular sees value in having computing products that aren’t affected by sanctions; the processor in this is designed and manufactured by a Chinese company without licensing any intellectual property from US or UK.

  Explaining what RISC-V is

  RISC-V is a relatively newer CPU instruction set architecture that competes with x86 (Intel, AMD) and ARM (Qualcomm, Ampere, MediaTek, etc.). Its current designs don’t really match those two in general-purpose performance yet but has the distinction of being a free, open, and extendable standard. Whereas x86 has only two CPU vendors and ARM has many vendors who all need to pay per-core license fees to ARM Holdings and have limits imposed on what they can do to it, RISC-V processors can be made by any hardware vendor with the means to make a processor and can be custom-designed to better fit specialized use-cases. Its use in general-purpose CPUs is catching on fastest in China but it sees use across the world in academia and in special-purpose processors by companies like Western Digital.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you encrypt your data drives?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes.

  My home server has dropbear-initramfs installed so that after reboot I can access the LUKS decryption prompt over SSH. The one LUKS partition contains a btrfs filesystem with both rootfs and home as subvolumes. For all the other drives attached to that system, I use ZFS native encryption with a dataset that decrypts with a keyfile from that rootfs and I have backups of an encrypted copy of that keyfile.

  I don’t think there’s a substantial performance impact but I’ve never bothered benchmarking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Roku has patented a way to show ads over anything you plug into your TV⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with those TV apps is DRM. All the major streaming services require that you either use a locked down platform (probably checking SafetyNet and more on Android TV) or settle for their browser UI which lacks dpad support and gets quality throttled to 1080p or lower.

  Circumventing that DRM is possible, but doing no project at the scale of a platform like those would dare the both legal risk and support headache of making those circumventions (which are very liable to break) a core part of the OS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My Overconfidence Killed Me and My Immich Installation⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Something I’ve noticed that is somewhat related but tangential to your problem: The result I’ve always gotten from using compose files is that container names and volume names get assigned names that contain a shared prefix by default. I don’t use docker and instead prefer podman but I would expect both to behave the same on this front. For example, when I have a file at nextcloud/compose.yml that looks like this:

  volumes:
    nextcloud:
    db:
  
  services:
    db:
      image: docker.io/mariadb:10.6
      ...
    app:
      image: docker.io/nextcloud
      ...
  

  I end up with volumes named nextcloud_nextcloud and nextcloud_db, with containers named nextcloud_db and nextcloud_app, as long as neither of those services overrides this behavior by specifying a container_name. I believe this prefix probably comes from the file-level name: if there is one and the parent directory’s name otherwise.

  The reasons I adjust my own compose files to be different from the image maintainer’s recommendation include: to accommodate the differences between podman and docker, avoiding conflicts between the exported listen ports, any host filesystem paths I want to mount in the container, and my own preferences. The only conflict I’ve had with other containers there is the exported port. zigbee2mqtt, nextcloud, and freshrss all suggest using port 8080 so I had to change at least two of them in order to run all three.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux distro for selfhosting server⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s actually a choice you’re offered during Debian’s interactive install. When you’re offered the option to set a root password, if you leave it empty the system will disable direct root login and instead give your first normal user sudo access.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux distro for selfhosting server⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Debian. I was in a similar boat to OP and just a couple weeks ago migrated my almost 8-year-old home server setup from Ubuntu LTS to Debian Stable. Decided to finally move away from Ubuntu because I never cared for snap (had to keep removing it with every upgrade) and gradually gained a few smaller issues with Ubuntu. Seems good to me so far.

  I considered RHEL/Rocky but decided against them largely because I wanted btrfs for my rootfs, which their stock kernel doesn’t have, though I use a few Red Hat developed tools like podman and cockpit. Fedora Server and the like have too fast a release lifecycle for my liking, though I use Fedora for my desktop. That left Debian as the one remaining obvious choice.

  I also briefly considered throwing a Debian VM into TrueNAS Scale, since I also use this system as a ZFS NAS, but setting that up felt like I was fighting against the “appliance” nature of what TrueNAS tries to be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The main reason people use Fandom in the first place is the free hosting. Whether you use MediaWiki or any other wiki software, paying for the server resources to host your own instance and taking the time to manage it is still a tall hurdle for many communities. There already are plenty of MediaWiki instances for specific interests that aren’t affected by Fandom’s problems.

  Even so, federation tends to foster a culture of more self-hosting and less centralization, encouraging more people who have the means to host to do so, though I’m not sure how applicable that effect would be to wikis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sustaining Proton’s mission over time | Proton⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re planning to subscribe to Proton Unlimited or Proton Family regardless, you might as well try Proton Drive. They try to be fairly privacy focused similar to Proton’s other products.

  Mega has a similar privacy-oriented design. Such that the server side shouldn’t have direct access to your unencrypted file data or its decryption keys.

  Still, any web-based service necessitates trusting the JavaScript you receive not to leak out your password or keys. Both Proton and Mega have a good track record so far in that regard, but the best practice for privacy with raw data storage is to encrypt your own data with local tools and treat any remote server as untrusted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 11 24H2 goes from “unsupported” to “unbootable” on some older PCs⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I would not count on all major distros maintaining support for processors as old as Core 2 forever.

  RHEL 9 in particular (and by extension CentOS Steam, Alma, Rocky) already dropped support for all of the processors affected by this breakage since 2022.

  Linux systems often group these CPU feature set generations into levels, where “x86-64-v2” requires SSE4 and POPCNT (Nehalem/2008 and newer) and “x86-64-v3” requires AVX2 (Haswell/2013 and newer).

  Ubuntu and Fedora are already evaluating optimized package builds for both v2 and v3 but haven’t announced any plans to drop baseline x86-64 yet; I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen within the next two years. Debian is a relatively safer bet for old hardware.