Is 4chan the perfect Pirate Bay poster child to justify wider UK site-blocking?

The free internet might be gone in the next decade. Probably time to buy a few hard drives and do some archiving. I don't just mean piracy. Articles, blogs, anything you find precious.

Bought some drives recently having come to the same conclusion. Future of the internet looks bleak.

It's a good time to get an RSS reader and build some direct connections to your sources. They're coming for the "aggregators" next.

I think about the same. Right now we are at the normalizing the ID verification stage and banning specific content in certain countries/states, once we are desensitized, VPNs will come next, and then some government solution to track everything you do online.

They can go after hostings as well and everybody can take down a lot of things out of fear.

rss is dead. and aggregating won't be your main issue anyway.

The Internet was philosophically designed to move information, and for every effort to prevent that there is a workaround. There will always be a free protocol.

RSS is alive and well. I use it daily with dozens of sites and authors. It's incredibly useful, widely used, and well supported.

Finding content is the issue. Unless I go directly to each site every day and scan for new articles I'm likely to miss them. If not for aggregators and RSS how else would this be accomplished?

Same as market; anything that does not use it will use less efficient alternatives like politics. Sadly market like tao and politics has no moral either.

If you don’t use rss, just say you don’t use rss. I assure you that many of us do. It continues to deliver me hundreds of articles from dozens of sources day after day, decade after decade. my services that check rss, continue to run their automated tasks. It’s an amazing protocol and even when big corpos try and take it away, hacks come up to restore access.

I suspect that in some places they might start requiring ID when purchasing large volumes of storage.

"Only a criminal would need 10 terabytes of storage!"

Something stupid like that.

Most news sites have RSS feeds. Wordpress ships with an RSS feed.

And for sites that don't you can make your own feeds by selecting links on pages (such as how AP News doesn't have an RSS feed).

> RSS is alive and well

That's a stretch.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss/

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=r...

Thankfully streaming video games never took off, otherwise we couldn't really use that excuse.

The Conversation feeds say otherwise.

RSS is the technological backbone that enables the distribution and subscription of podcasts...which by the way is massive at the moment.

As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.

> As others have stated, plenty of websites have RSS feeds.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag though - whilst some big websites still have an RSS feed, you can’t get the full article text, smaller blogs etc seem to be better in that regard.

What do people think about email as an ever-lasting censorship resistant protocol? It's federated and encrypted at source (in some cases - see Protonmail, etc). I can run my own email server on my own domain, so for example I could have my news letter be an email subscription. Any attempt to censor me would require blocking my domain and/or blocking my email server - both of which could be moving targets.

I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.

> [RSS] is a standard that websites and podcasts can use to offer a feed of content to their users, one easily understood by lots of different computer programs. Today, though RSS continues to power many applications on the web, it has become, for most people, an obscure technology.

arguing that RSS is dead because the average person doesn't understand it is like saying HTTP's dead for the same reason. neither are dead: we've just abstracted them to the point that they're no longer the front-facing part of any interaction.

There are RSS readers which can automatically download the full article text. I use Handy Reading on Android which can also do so on-demand.

I got casually questioned by the clerk in Berlin Mitte last month when buying 20x 20TB drives for cash.

“Industrial-scale piracy” is what I told him, truthfully. I think he thought I was joking.

Pretty soon it’ll only be hyperscalers or large enterprises that have data storage. You’ll have the 4TB max in your phone or laptop and that’ll be it.

It sounds just as unfair as including a levy on blank CDs paid to music copyright holders, regardless of how the CDs are used. But being unfair doesn't mean it can't happen in your country.

holy shit it's real

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

Back in another life (videography), I had acquaintances who would throw looks when they heard I’d purchased a single terabyte. Seems that narrative might already be - at least mildly -pervasive.

Which then allows you to download without being sued because you already paid.

And notice it’s not being destroyed by the (largely fantastical) “fascist threats” constantly being whined about; rather, this is all the direct act of a decidedly left-wing government. Shocking to no one who has even a passing familiarity with the history of the 20th century…

This has been brewing for years. The international network will not survive multiple independent governments all attempting to impose their own laws on it. It's bound to fracture into several regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders.

I am glad to have known the true internet before its demise. Truly one of the wonders of humanity.

Wow

It's almost like an uneducated public is easier to control..

Praise anti-intellectualism, change the media landscape so that everything is either consumed through short bursts of dopamine or presented in a way to manipulate you, and you'll have a society of people who are driven by their emotions with a very short memory.

As for the UK OSA, I think people are waking up to the fact that politicians will do what they want, use the enemy of the day to justify it, and group you in with that enemy if you oppose them, but I'm afraid without significant change to the system that this will continue to occur.

No, it doesn't. From that Wikipedia entry:

> A common misconception is that levies are compensation for illegal copying such as file sharing. This is incorrect, however, levies are only intended to compensate for private copying that is legally allowed in many jurisdictions. For example, uploading a purchased CD on to another personal device such as a laptop or MP3 player.

"Private copying" is generally allowed under copyright law -- except that under DMCA, it's only allowed if you're not circumventing DRM. So for example, you can legally make a private copy of a CD, but not a Blu-ray disc.

> "Private copying" is making private copies of is generally allowed under copyright law -

Private copying is not generally allowed, but private copying levies tend to be adopted alongside specific exceptions for certain cases of private copying in the copyright law of the jurisdiction adopting them (e.g., in the US, those in the Audio Home Recording Act.)

I'm always disappointed that the geometric growth in spinning magnet disks slowed - if the growth curve from the '80s to 2010 had continued to today we'd have petabyte HDDs now.

Right, what I meant is that private copying is allowed because these levies exist -- but the fact that they exist only allows you to make private copies, not (as was stated) download anything.

Can we count on ISPs not mucking with stuff at the transport layer? I feel like at some point the only way is to create new networks entirely.

I've been downloading YouTube videos for the past few years. Not randomly, from specific channels I select. Today I passed 12100 videos.

It's getting harder. YouTube keeps making yt-dlp work worse. (And I started when it was youtube-dl!) I limit my downloader script to no more than 2 videos at a time, every 3 hours, hopefully in order not to trip any rate limits. All good so far.

That used to be the case few years ago. Now it seems that all popular podcasts are hidden inside commercial services such as Spotify.

Not at all according to booru admninistrators. They-re specifically pointing fingers at Russel Vought.

This is really important. It's time to take history into our own hands given the penchant for erasure by the elites and how dumb the elites have become.

That's my suspicion. An internet governed to the least common cultural and legal denominator will be bland, boring, and useless.

Hmm ironically it's how I'm reading this rn

Nope

Still get all of my podcasts via RSS. Several dozen.

Isn’t an official downloading functionality part of their premium offering? If you’re a power user perhaps it’s worth just paying.

On mobile (iOS), it requires maintaining a subscription… and, once a month at least, internet connection.

I am a premium subscriber, but "downloaded" videos are trapped inside the app. You can't actually get them out.

When I try to capture a few friends videos of events I had run from instagram stories with yt-dlp, I get nice friendly warning that to avoid my account being restricted or deleted i should stop using tools.

I’m pretty sure I’ve seen an open source project that uses email as an encrypted chat app in the last months.

Edit: this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44335065

I see I had no idea.

Podcasts tend to be available from different sources to extend their reach YouTube and Spotify don't offer RSS feeds, however other services like redcirle.com, megaphone.fm, anchor.fm, and audioboom.com all offer RSS feeds. Even Apple should as it has a set of iTunes extensions for RSS to annotate things like the episode number.

I've been able to find RSS feeds for all the podcasts I listen to.

Apple hearing they have an excuse not to add more storage, cue happy shareholder noises

Interesting - thanks. It looks like at least the Android and iOS apps have been updated in the last few days - so it is under active development:

https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-ios

Doesn't work with all email providers though, from their FAQ:

https://providers.delta.chat/

Proton mail isn't supported (I'm guessing because of the way Proton encrypts your email at rest?).

I use a browser extension that simply gives me the download button in the interface and haven't experienced any such warnings: https://github.com/TheKonka/instagram-download-browser-exten...

Thought you might find it helpful.

„If I Were The Devil“ (1965)

https://youtu.be/jnPE8u5ONls

The free internet is mostly gone already. Most people already only browse the same 5-10 sites belonging to big tech, thus already part of the surveillance apparatus.

I don't get it. What do you need 400TB of storage for? (To be clear: I am not saying that you should not be allowed to buy it.) I assume this is for personal use. I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year. Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations?

Also: Why did you pay cash, in the center of Berlin, Germany? Even if you are paying rock bottom used prices around 100 EUR, why carry 2,000+ EUR in cash?

Depends on the jurisdiction. In several personal use rights are broad enough to download almost anything (eg except software or databases), and the levy is explicitly described in law as a compensation.

AFAIK they recommend using a dedicated chatmail-enabled provider to avoid problems with using a "normal" email provider.

https://delta.chat/en/chatmail

Have you considered sharing them somehow? I always thought yt-dlp would end up p2p

RSS isn't dead. I use it daily. Most podcasts — all if you subscribe to the philosophy that mp3s without rss aren't podcasts — are built on it. Most websites still provide a feed, even if the owner isn't aware of it.

YouTube, very surprisingly, does offer RSS feeds (for now).

Youtube offers rss feeds, for example: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCXuqSBl...

It's just a bit clunky to find. You need the channel id which you can find in the page source somewhere.

Note that this is a regular rss, not podcast rss.

> I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year.

You must not work with video.

Even with photography, a single raw photo can already use tens of megabytes (source: just looked at a raw photo file I happened to have around). A single raw video (or even a single already edited video) uses even more.

Now consider that you need at least twice that for redundancy (RAID-1 at the minimum). If you use things like Ceph for speed and redundancy, it's AFAIK recommended to have at least four separate nodes, each with its own storage.

Who is your HDD dealer? Hmu. Do we have HDD taxis yet?

> Can we count on ISPs not mucking with stuff at the transport layer?

That used to be common in the past, many ISPs ran transparent HTTP proxies to reduce the use of their slow upstream links. The current push to use strong encryption and authentication everywhere (for instance, plain HTTP without TLS has become rare) makes it much harder.

I doubt it. As a Brit they "blocked" Pirate Bay and torrent sites about a decade ago and I've hardly had any problems accessing them and torrenting stuff. It's all very half arsed.

> I struggle to generate more than a few hundred MBs per year

There are so many (legal) use cases for TBs of space... Photography, video editing, 3D graphics, 3D simulations (think VFX explosions, destruction), ML/AI, Dataset curation/archiving, backups, doing Rust development (each target/ directory ends up being GB large usually), and so on.

Some weeks ago GPT-OSS was released, so I wanted to play around with the 120b weights, they take ~60GB of disk space already. Imagine that same thing every time new open weights are released, and you end up with +TB large collection relatively quickly.

> Isn't the era of music and video piracy hoarding over after Spotify and Netflix went mainstream in most highly developed nations

Seems to me like the reverse. I have more and more friends asking me about how to setup self-hosting for music, tv-shows and movies, especially when Netflix et al do their monthly purge of content and some friend noticed their favorite show/music is suddenly gone because some contract with a 3rd party expired.

Flashback to Sweden, around 2011 or so. Copyright owners convince the government to add a $/GB levy to digital storage mediums like USBs, just in case people would use it for storing copyrighted material. The kicker? Personally archiving copyrighted material to your personal storage is (was?) fully allowed by law, but somehow it went through anyways. Glad I don't live there anymore :)

I always carry at least that much cash on me. You never know when you might need to flee a collapsing country on short notice or bribe a cop.

https://sneak.berlin/20191119/your-money-isnt-yours/

Can’t do that with your debit card.

In my view it is irresponsible to not carry on your person at all times your passport and enough money for a week of food and hotel and a plane ticket to the country of passport issuance. Carrying a card introduces working internet as a dependency for food and shelter, which is stupid and unnecessary.

Also, card payments are warrantlessly tracked at all times by the state, creating a location tracklog of where you go and when you go there.

Since many of the channels are monetized, my personal policy is only to upload videos to the Internet Archive if the original goes offline. Otherwise, it's better if people support the original channel by watching them on YouTube.

Wow, what garbage. Good thing to know. It was the single thing that appealed to me about that service.

Sure, but by that logic you’re saying piracy* in general is bad, but when you pirate* the video it’s okay. And if I pirate* the video the same way it’s okay. But if we cross share it’s bad, while the only real difference is via this route , google is paying for more bandwidth and yt-dlp becomes less effective because it’s redundantly executed at scale.

*pirate, for lack of a better term. I couldn’t give a fuck what people call it.

I dispute that I'm pirating them. I'm still watching them on YouTube, I'm just also archiving a copy. They're still getting my view money.

Are you watching them in a browser on YouTube.com or are you downloading the stream and watching locally?

RSS is alive and well.

Is that really a problem though? I usually want to read something on the original website anyway as RSS is a lot more limited (or at least inconsistent) in what kind of styling and media is supported. What I care about is getting notified of updates to sites/people I follow without having to rely on a centralized gatekepper and RSS does that really well.