Random Dent

Yeah I literally just close the tab. Same if anything comes up with a paywall or login or weird capcha thing. Just like “ah fuck this” and move on lol.

I bought a quite expensive piece of animation software (that cost over $1000) to use professionally. The specific term it was sold to me under was a “perpetual license.” I took this to mean “never ending”, which is the dictionary definition of the word “perpetual.” You can probably guess where this is going.

A few years later, in the middle of a professional project, it stopped working. I contacted support, and was told that they changed the way they were doing licenses so I’d have to buy a new one (at almost double the price) or eat shit. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.

So yeah, if you’re thinking of buying a Toon Boom Harmony perpetual license, maybe save yourself a lot of money and hassle and just pirate it instead. Or tell them to get fucked and use their direct competitor. I have done both.

As with most irritating Windows features, I assume there’ll be an option to turn it off hidden in some obscure place, which will either not work, or it’ll turn back on after a random amount of time.

That’s what I do. I’m in a place that really doesn’t give a shit about Piracy (the worst they’ll do is send a letter, one of my friends got one and called up his ISP to complain about it and they told him to stop seeding so much lol) but I still run a VPN 24/7 anyway just to be safe. It costs peanuts and doesn’t slow down the internet hugely so I figure why not.

I got exactly that number too, but also when I looked at the detailed results section lots of it was incorrect. It got that I was on some sort of Linux and using some sort of FF variant, but things like time zone, plugins, screen resolution and system fonts were all wrong.

So sending out 17.49 bits of largely identifying bullshit is still okay I think lol.

Plus the two aren’t mutually exclusive. You could just as easily go to prison and then just be abandoned there once the climate becomes uninhabitable anyway. Wouldn’t be the first time:

Back in 2005, when Katrina hit New Orleans, prison guards abandoned prisoners in locked cells as the floodwaters rose chest-high. Several thousand of those inmates were eventually rescued, but then miserably housed on a broken piece of interstate, directly exposed to the Southern summer sun.

The laptop is a little faster, and this way I can still play games on the Steam Deck while the installer runs on that lol

Yeah same here, I just install on my laptop using Lutris and then copy the installed folder over to the Steam Deck and add the main .exe as a non-Steam game. (And turn wifi off just to be safe.) Always worked fine for me so far.

Yeah my Kobo is great. Plays nicely with Calibre and DeDRM, reads pretty much every eBook format, and doesn’t seem to be sketchy about privacy as far as I can tell.

Well, 50% of young people asked were willing to admit to their piracy lol

I probably will end up with tons eventually, I haven’t been doing it for too long and I don’t sign up for many things lol

I use addy.io to create aliases for different things, and then set up filters in Thunderbird to mark them as they come in so, for example, if I make an account at xyz.com and then I get a bunch of unrelated spam marked as coming from xyz.com, then I know they’ve been selling my info.

I probably have about a dozen or so aliases currently, but they’re pretty loosely organized.

I assume this is the same reason why they want to ban TikTok but not Facebook - it’s not so much that they object to the data harvesting, they just object to non-American data harvesting that they can’t readily influence.

I’m still using my old Pixel 4a because I refuse to get a phone without a headphone jack lol

It’s harder to measure of course, but I wonder how that compares to the amount of sales they lose from people who just don’t bother buying the game when they find out it has Denuvo? I know I recently lost all interest in two games (Civ VII and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II) when I found out they were launching with Denuvo and I assume I’m not the only person who does that.

I was a teenager in the 90s and there was a whole pirate video game ring going around our school that worked this way! Someone would buy a game, and everyone would bring in their blank floppies and it would get distributed around the computer lab. Also a separate ring of banned VHS movies taped off Swedish TV for some reason.

Here ya go! it’s a Japanese fork of FF that’s more focused on privacy. I prefer Librewolf personally but it’s good to have options I guess.

Yeah it’s been kind of legally proven that Mullvad keeps no logs too, they were raided by police last year and they came away with nothing.

From the article:

However, Swedish police left empty-handed. It looks like Mullvad’s own lawyers stepped in and pointed out that the company maintains a strict no-logging policy on customer data. This means the VPN service will abstain from collecting a subscriber’s IP address, web traffic, and connection timestamps, in an effort to protect user privacy. (It’s also why Mullvad VPN is among our most highly ranked VPN services.)

“We argued they had no reason to expect to find what they were looking for and any seizures would therefore be illegal under Swedish law,” Mullvad said. “After demonstrating that this is indeed how our service works and them consulting the prosecutor they left without taking anything and without any customer information.”

Even if his vision for the future worked perfectly (which it won’t) and wasn’t abused (which it will be, rampantly and immediately), it’s still a complete dystopian nightmare lol

I get blocked from Google and reddit on Mullvad, but I see that as a Google and reddit problem, not a Mullvad problem lol.