Melody Fwygon

…Assuming the flash drive isn’t loaded to the gills with malware alongside of every game it offers to install…that sounds fair.

But let’s be real; No legitimate company stands a chance of doing this without getting sued into oblivion. Unfortunately that means the risk of getting viruses and malware with your purchase, likely ransomware or cryptominer droppers, is really high.

…but let’s assume you’re technical enough that you can disarm all the malware on the USB stick and clean the cruft out of it. Then; yeah…maybe you’ll get your value’s worth.

0.00000003% 3 Satoshis of a percent.

This actually doesn’t surprise me. Valve is getting greedy.

But; to be clear; by using these tools, to unlock the DLC without paying for it, you are cheating in the game. That’s a mere fact; and not a moral judgement of anyone choosing to do so.

Personally, I don’t judge anyone for doing so; and would use these tools myself if I thought a DLC were too predatory, expensive or otherwise unfair to not have it available.

That’s not saying it’s fair or right for Valve to do so; nor is it saying the VAC bans or account suspensions are deserved. If you get hit by this; you absolutely should pirate every title you already own/purchased via Steam right away, and pirate anything else you want in the future.

The only way to make them regret doing things like this is voting with your wallet; and asking others to do the same. Stop spending money on Valve. Once their earnings fall they’ll be forced to hear people’s concerns.

Godspeed. May this measure succeed with all haste and become the new normal.

For once it overtakes one country; others can choose to follow suit as best as they can.

Why Not Both?

In most sharing channels you could possibly just report those to the channel ops (@/&/!/~) and get them kicked or devoiced (removing their (+ or %) state depending on the channel)

I don’t know any channel that would put up with people who wasted your time with DRM’ed files back in the day. It’s less problematic now yes; but still something they don’t want people doing…since you have to be signed in as the purchasing account to de-drm something.

What happens is what’s intended.

Everyone is going to do it; and it will cause companies, artists and creatives to step back and rethink a bit on how they monetize their creations responsibly. The ones that refuse to rethink and adapt will fail and flounder under the tiny handful of straw that Piracy adds to the load.

That’s a GOOD thing.

What’s unfortunate is that companies and people still think it’s productive to worry and handwring over piracy as if it’s killing someone; instead of being the thing you “don’t fly too close to, lest your wax wings get melted off and you plummet to the ground.”

You can automate this; but you have to make sure that the automation you create is going to respect the ratelimits. I’d recommend something simple like using a command alias or short script written for your specific IRC client.

It’s what I used to do with that sort of thing; and there are plenty of well known Open Source scripts in the wild as well

As an example; I would use mIRC with it’s scripting system and write my own event trigger scripts to automatically request, wait for and then accept the DCC chat requests and route them appropriately in the interface. There were also scripts that helped with getting the lists; unpacking them, and displaying those lists in my client…so I didn’t have to extract the text from the zip myself, and could select what I needed from the bot.

All of this was lightweight automation that was intended not to flood the bot with commands and fed into command queueing modules that let the bots have time to process.

Sometimes in those days you could get actually (+b)anned, Auto/KILL’ed or /(G/K):LINE’ed for causing a bot to crash…so you had to be careful and respectful with regard to scripts.

TL;DR; know your bot, source channel & network rules, and write your own scripts for safety or read any scripts you import in carefully and understand what they’re doing.

Your comment missed the mark entirely. Please don’t reply-guy me; I know what I’m talking about.

So much for using airplane mode to conserve battery.

Your understanding is slightly off.

Airplane mode Does In Fact Turn off your CELLULAR Radio This radio is what powers your (2/3/4/5)G and LTE (This is 4G btw) connection to the cell towers.

Most international radio communications laws can prohibit the use of Cellular Radio in flight; however they often don’t prohibit the use of shorter range radio technologies such as WIFI or Bluetooth.

It’s all about ‘loudness’. Think about it. Your phone must ‘scream louder’ at a farther away cell tower than it would need to communicate with a nearby WiFi router or a Bluetooth headset.

Is it worth it? ABSOLUTELY!

Should you lean into it harder than you absolutely can tolerate? Probably not.

Let’s face it; there’s always going to be friction until we change how companies behave.

This is factually wrong; as installed plugins aren’t accessible to just any webpage…and plugins actually exist that obscure this anyways.

Not to mention there’s more hardened forks of modern browsers that don’t share plugin information anyways.

Now snap some pics of this kitty laying in different places all over this couch; you now have a new meme: Address Space Layout Randomization.

Aye; I remember GPM, and before they enshittified it into the ground, it was damn near comparable to Spotify.

This kind of nonsense is why I bypass the NYT’s paywall, and any other paywall. If I wanted to ever subscribe; this ensures that I will want to subscribe far less intensely than I would have ever naturally done. Probably this ensures the urge to subscribe will be non-existant; and my urge to ‘become a Giant Tool and just crawl their site daily with my paywall bypass’ is increasing at a pace that might alarm some people.

While this feed issue is manageable if you Pause Your Watch History and Clear Your Watch History before doing so; it does disable a lot of suggestions.

Unfortunately Google and YouTube do not make these options easy to find and they are quick to nag you about turning them back on; and You Must Refuse This and ignore the errors and whines at every prompt for a while before they leave you alone.

So by it’s very nature NewPipe completely defuses this garbage by simply being a much saner front-end than using the “Native” YouTube apps ever were.

You know I think YouTube might start learning their lesson if more and more people began refusing to use their scummy front-end more than strictly necessary. Unfortunately they’re going to go through the usual stages of grief while doing so and they absolutely are currently trying to attack apps like GrayJay and NewPipe with spurious lawsuits.

So instead; maybe those of you who “Pay” for YouTube Premium should simply cancel your service and start donating that amount to projects like NewPipe, when that is possible. (Yes I know Team NewPipe will not accept donations for legal reasons, but similar projects do exist, like FreeTube or Invidious, that can and do accept donations to cover costs for server hosted things in their developments.)

You would be surprised how hard it can be sometimes to source batteries due to shipping rules and regulations; as well as the general difficulty surrounding just building your own battery pack…which can end badly if you aren’t an electronic engineer or similar professional who knows exactly what they are doing.

I must warn you of the dangers of pushing batteries in a failure state like this though; Lithium batteries can sometimes fail in explosive ways.

Keep an eye on the thermals and don’t let it expand or pop on you.

Either Linux has no idea what your battery is telling it; or your battery is just…toast.

Let’s just hope for your sake it’s just a funny linux bug. Replacing specific laptop batteries can be a tremendous pain if you can’t find a specific cell that works for your device.

The best way to prevent misuse of the Comstock Act is to hit them where it hurts. Find out what items their funders sell or trade in the most; then find logical ways to link it to sex or abortion.

Pretty soon you’ll gum up all trade and they will cry for mercy.