I think I speak for most people when I say that I’m a good representative of the general population.

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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2020

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  • Yeah I don’t have an answer for the thing you’re actually asking (sorry) but this is 100% a reasonable take and honestly I fully approve of their approach here. Strawberry is licensed under the GPL, it is libre software and can be packaged in any FOSS operating system without issue. This adds to the free software community. They are explicitly only selling to people who don’t value free software enough to use a free operating system.

    And to be clear, I can guarantee that no one loses sleep over piracy of their GPL software, otherwise it wouldn’t be GPL. I see it more as a way for the devs to wash their hands of troubleshooting for operating systems they don’t want to care about - anyone on windows/mac who cares enough about strawberry to pay gets listened to, but otherwise you’ve created an easy excuse for ignoring the extra work.

    As an aside it’s my preferred player on linux, good software.












  • I remember reading that the most significant impact DRM has is on security research. Individuals don’t care about bypassing DRM, but an organization is not going to fund anything involving it because of the legal concern. So if a researcher wants to look into a file format behind DRM, or the DRM mechanism itself, being used as an attack vector, that’s not going to get funding.

    The defense that companies will make is that they’re happy to grant exceptions in these cases, but in practice the company will make the exceptions as narrow as possible to err on the side of maintaining as much control as possible, while a research organization will want to err on the side of avoiding potential grey areas, meaning the exceptions are inevitability too restrictive to allow much of anything to come of them.




  • I actually have quite a high ratio on both the private trackers I use just from seeding stuff for a long time and trading points in so I can download stuff, it just doesn’t help my ratio.

    I think this is a good way to use private trackers. Most will have occasional events from time-to-time as well. If you keep seeding everything you get from freeleech, eventually you’ll hit a point where your seeding benefits outpace the amount you care to download and you can just download whatever and not care anymore forever. One of mine I hit that point about six years ago and I just totally take it for granted that I can snatch anything I’m curious about. I do not understand the need to care about your ratio beyond being enough to download things you want without losing your userclass perks.

    I actually like private tracker forums a lot, they are communities that no organization will ever care to astroturf and that are free of bot posts. You’re just talking with people, and as you grow to recognize some of the regulars it feels like a community. Anyway, it’s weird how normal most people on those forums are about this stuff considering how if you look at r/trackers you might get the impression that the purpose of these websites is for the users to move up a ladder like it’s a game. (Also the consensus on that subreddit is never use a tracker’s forums under any circumstances ever because you will 100% be banned for no reason because the mods don’t have lives and…what?)