It’s actually very easy. Don’t use your TV as anything but a display. Don’t connect it to the internet ever.

If you need to watch content on it get an appropriate device. If you want to watch BluRays buy a BluRay player. If you want to do streaming buy a streaming device at a price point and privacy level to your liking. Yes the streaming devices collect some data too but they don’t have mics and cameras and they can’t tell corporations and the government the contents of the vacation photo slide show off your laptop which you plugged in. Also you can in future often neuter many of the more expensive streaming devices and if you get sick of the streaming device you have, you can just buy a different one and sell the old one.

As to librelec and “sucking”. If you’re trying to do yo-ho stuff with free streaming sites and services it isn’t going to be great. Frankly if you want some quality and good experience either pay for a commercial streaming service (or a good IPTV one*) or invest in learning how to host your own content with an Arr stack. This used to be a lot cheaper but AI has ruined everything. Nothing we can do about that.

*yeah good ones are hard to find and one should never pay ahead as many of them vanish suddenly.

Read the freaking date:

HEADLINE JUN 23, 2021

Please read Yogthos reply here: https://lemmy.ml/post/49690377/26558932

It basically encapsulates most of the important reasoning.

Why do we support Iran against the US? Objectively Iran is a theocracy that is socially backwards, it oppresses women, it oppresses LGBTQ people, it has a reactionary social character. Why then do we support it? Because it is the lesser evil. And importantly we would support it if it aggressed first against the zionist entity because it’s not about aggression or simplistic victim/aggressor dynamics but about liberation for the region and the world. And because Iran exists the way it does today because of western meddling and it cannot move beyond its present character as long as the west is there serving as a foil. Take away that, take away the zionist entity and the aggression and siege situation, allow development and these things have an opportunity to change.

Anyways you use the term “totalitarian” which was itself invented by a Nazi apologist zionist to equate communism to Nazism. But why do you suppose that Russia is this but the west with its vast surveillance nets, its ICE, its camera systems, its global communications intercept network run by the eyes groups with NSA, GCHQ, and its brutal wars with atrocities against civilians across the middle east is not? I mean you can be arrested in Britain for the most trivial of things. You can be sent to prison for saying “I support Palestine Action” while peacefully protesting. How is it that these countries are not also “totalitarian” but Russia is? It cannot be and people only think that way because of propaganda. You have been blinded to the police state and brutality of the west while the brutality of Russia is hyped up, they hide the atrocities and human rights violations of the west and play down the problems while playing up, highlighting every instance and pounding the drums in your ears that scream “this is totalitarianism” to convince you of this fact.

Kleptocracy is also a meaningless term to communists. It’s almost like a slur which is selectively applied to the designated “bad guys”. All capitalist nations are run under a dictatorship of capital and capitalists to serve their interests. This is true in Russia and it is true in the US. If some places are a little more brazen with their corruption and others a little better at hiding it behind “lobbying” that doesn’t change the essential character in our opinion. People starve and sleep on the streets in every major US city while the wealthy sit atop their 12th mansion and party with models and use private jets to private islands. The wealthy do things like rape children and get a slap on the wrist because prison would be bad for them. The wealthy run pedophile networks like Jeffery Epstein and the government buries the evidence and ensures no one is held to account while fabricating lies about what really happened. They crash the economy like in 2008 and the government bails them out while shafting the average person. Does that sound like “kleptocracy”? Because that’s the US. Russian capitalist elites are no different, they steal from the people, they live lavishly while others suffer, they commit crimes and use connections to get away with it. It’s no different.

Then you’re very ignorant.

Apple’s presence is good because it’s a privacy anonymizing service that obscures your email and forwards anything to an email of your choice and logins/connections can be deleted at any time.

And it was introduced in response to the long existing proliferation of login with Google and Facebook and similar schemes. They forced it using their App Store because otherwise no company would go for the user identity obfuscation over the already existed for years privacy invasive alternatives. Apple came late and forced companies to allow their privacy obfuscation alternative. Note: though it often is more private some sites can request additional data from Apple same as from Google and Facebook such as your name. Apple is no worse and often better overall as a choice just the same though it’s best to avoid these types of login IMO.

I admit my mind went to this too. It’s a shame I just can’t view this thing with anything but anger since learning it is horrendous-tier dehumanizing zionist propaganda from a rabid zionist writer. The game and the show. Shame on the actors for continuing to participate in that zionist agit-prop in the middle of a genocide carried out by the people the writer is doing apologia for.

Unfortunately with AI induced RAM pricing prices are up across the board so cheap is out if you want extra functionality.

You can get as someone suggested the OSMC device. As well as various other third party streamer devices that support OSMC or CoreElec though the Vero does hit near the top for features for video watching as per the spreadsheet linked here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=385600

But if you want general purpose distros that allow emulation you probably want an N150 or similar mini-PC. The tricky part there is that while you can get lets of cheaper older used mini-PCs for emulation if you want to do hardware 4K HDR video content decoding then you need something more recently made for efficiency sake so you’re not pushing the processor to the max just watching videos.

If it has to be under $250 then your options are things like the Vero V or other streaming focused devices but you give up general purpose distro and emulation (I think, Kodi does technically offer a games feature but I’ve never used it and am not familiar) OR else you’re going with a used mini-PC that will okay for general purpose distro and light emulation may struggle with your 4K HDR content depending on video codec used and bitrate.

If you can afford a bit more >$250 but <$350 you can get an N150 or similar intel system that should handle all of the above.

A caveat on the N150 route though is currently there is no support for Dolby Vision, HDR+, etc. You only get plain old HDR and that’s not likely to change anytime soon as it’s a driver issue and no one makes one.

If streaming your own video content is your most important goal and you may need things like DV and other HDR+ formats then go with the Vero V or another item listed near the top of the Kodi list like the Ugoos or Homatics.

I’m guessing they don’t want to pay the costs of the fraud.

Still it’s a shame for children and the under-banked parts of the working class who are struggling. Anyone without a credit/debit card now in the US at least has to pay a 3 - 14% tax ($5-$7 per card activation fee) for a $50 to $200 gift credit/debit card to load up steam instead which is a pretty significant hit.

Bad for anonymity too. Anyone who wanted to maintain an anonymous Steam account is going to be out of luck as I suspect even those gift credit cards are likely going to require identity verification or face scans within a couple years before you can use them.

That employee should be fired. Part of the responsibility of a social media/brand manager is not bringing the brand into disrepute and not making it look like it supports Nazism and as part of that they should have a passing familiarity with controversial words and symbols within their market. Fire them, announce you fired them for this egregious behavior, condemn Nazism and we’ll accept it. Anything short of that is just “sorry we got caught and a lot of people got upset about our Nazi dog whistling”.

Fact is it wasn’t sent in Germany where Nazi symbols are a criminal offense and that tells you whoever did this knew. There is no defense that they did it out of ignorance. Either one person who is not being fired but defended did this intentionally or the company is run by Nazis who did this intentionally and it’s not just one lowly email marketing person to blame.

Let me guess: in exchange for a suspended sentence he will be 4x as hawkish and make 2x as many appearances on media demanding blood for the national security state.

This seems a bit silly even if you think AI is a massive fraudulent waste of resources. People have spent decades using search engines to research and plan out murders. I get the all-encompassing surveillance state wants that and all other potential wrong-think blocked and/or reported with an eye to censoring false positives and hampering the operation of these services for consumers rather than risking even a small chance someone can write their way around these blocks with clever phrasing.

The hallucination stuff I admit is definitely something they should be held to account for but it may not be possible to stop that entirely so much as limit its frequency. The US and especially places like Florida represent a deeply broken, atomized society so the problem is deeper than chatgpt. Facebook has been harboring and spreading conspiracy theory nonsense for decades without being held to account because it buoys reactionary conservative politics.

Yeah until it starts hitting widespread hardware decode support (streaming devices and phones) it’s pretty much just a curiosity to all involved as the only things traditionally powerful enough to software decode these codecs at 4k without overheating are computers and I don’t see that changing.

If h266 gets hw decode support on a bunch of common chips first it’ll be a real blow licensing freedom or not.

They’re sovereign.

American tech companies. American national security organs cannot touch them, cannot put the hurt on them. They are independent and there is nothing Meta, Google, Oracle, etc can do to them. Look at Europe, look at the rest of the world on Facebook and Oracle products with a big gun right at their temple held in the CIA’s hand if they do something the US doesn’t like. China doesn’t have that gun at its head and because of that China can be truly sovereign from the US.

Meanwhile same country: it’s the internet! It’s creating misogyny out of thin air! We have to ID check everyone for everything!

IMO it’s fair to read this as an NSA/eyes move. AMD is embedded in the western global mass surveillance architecture and by closed sourcing they can hide NSA back doors more easily.

Fact is the west is locking down all computing and doesn’t want there to be anywhere to flee for hobbyists or the Chinese. This also prevents the Chinese from benefiting from these tools if they slap sanctions on.

It’s not a fallacy when multiple countries/states have passed laws that explicitly demand some form of ID confirmation/scanning and others have stated an intent for it. It’s not a fallacy when you understand what the purpose of this push actually is.

The fact is the end result isn’t going to be compliance with the least restrictive standard but the most. That’s how regulatory compliance always works. You always comply with the most restrictive because it encompasses the least restrictive as well. Further if you stopped to think and analyzed history scientifically instead of it being a series of great man events or whatever you’d understand how capitalism in crisis reacts by crushing the working class using tools like fascism. That the 5-eyes spying abuse far from being some deviation from liberalism embody the deeper desires and wants of the modern western world to spy on and control their citizens and the world and that a free internet has been an incredible threat to state power since day one.

It’s just the first big moment where their propaganda failed, where their narrative was undermined was the Gaza genocide and they will do anything to prop up the Zio-Nazi entity occupying Palestine and prevent their other narratives from suffering the same fate in future. A man in the “free speech” loving EU was unpersoned FFS and can’t be given money, buy food, stay at hotels, use banks, anything for deviating too far from the approved EU narrative. These are the people we’re dealing with.

It’s also not a fallacy when AI has created a crisis for private/government spy fusion platforms like Meta, Google, etc in both gaining ad dollars due to AI bots being hard to discern so hard identifying humans is a must for not only spying but profits from ads.

For a long time the material interests of the massive tech companies and their financial backers and shareholders did not particularly benefit from this kind of ID law and so they pushed back and disallowed it. Now thanks to AI their interests align with those of the state, the capitalist propaganda organs, the moral crusaders. There is in other words nothing major standing in their way and tons of power centers pushing for this as a result of AI, the Gaze genocide breaking containment, etc and it has gained momentum.

I’m afraid this isn’t the win you think it is.

One of two things will happen in the near future:

1. Nearly everything you do online from banking to shopping to social media (including online gaming) to paying your electric or internet bill to yes porn will require OS-level attestation to access and use the site. Linux lacking this will become an incredibly private OS that is useless for anything online making this a defeat for Linux having any hopes of real desktop market share and/or forcing it to comply. Microsoft, Apple, Google would love to push Linux as an OS option off the table.

2. Kids will start using liveboot or installing Linux and evading these controls, Christian fascists, tech overlord capitalists, and the government will take notice and write a bill to close this “loophole” and within a few years having already established the idea in the popular conception that age verification is okay will face lesser resistance in quickly ramming it through.

For less than a million dollars they’d do it a dozen times over just to make an example of people like that.

Absolute bargain for them compared to the chilling effects and satisfaction they got out of punishing this guy for a month for his speech. It should be 5 times as big.

Mini-PCs are no longer a good value. The RAM and SSD pricing fiasco has killed them.

They used to be these cheaper things for hobbies that you could get for $300-$500, now they’re like $800+ and cost as much as a full size SFF machine from a reputable major manufacturer that offers real support, warranties, etc. If you absolutely have to have the form factor for some reason sure go for it but the value proposition has completely collapsed for them as a neat little hobby system.

Quickly running out of places where VPN companies can be legally incorporated/based and where exit servers can be located that aren’t subject to advancing laws like these.

All the fools who were saying “lol they can’t ban VPNs, impossible!!!” are looking well ever more foolish and will feel very confused and shocked when the pain actually hits them and they realize it’s not so easy and they were wrong and complacent and too late now to do anything. But these are primarily westerners who’ve never had the western sanctions regime and its full power turned against anything they care about so they can be forgiven a bit for not understanding how powerful it is, its total dominance of financial exchange and how lacking a counter state interest by Russia or China in spinning up their own censorship resistant VPN for western users there isn’t really much counter to it. Russia and China are going to sit and laugh at you flailing about in the tattered remains of your liberal illusions of freedom and not lift a finger to help.

Sure you can pay for a VPS and spin up a VPN on that but that has your credit card on it with your name making it clear its you doing it and providing zero plausible deniability and as a non-residential IP you’re going to be getting increasing amounts of blocks by anti-AI-scraper methods as well as fraud alerts. Also it doesn’t hide you in the crowd so even advertisers who don’t have access to your credit card like authorities would will be able to associate all your activity back to one person and it’s just a short correlation from there via a mistake back to your real identity. Also won’t help much with torrenting copyright content as your provider will drop you at the first sign of trouble. Maybe you can find one that shrugs off DMCAs but I bet you’ll be paying through the nose. No more $5/month long term plan, get ready for $25/month and much higher than that and you still won’t necessarily be able to avoid ISP throttling of your traffic if they move to allow-listing for uncapped speeds only to known services and throttle everything else.

Very grim.

Doesn’t work. Not a Linux issue. No graphics card or motherboard maker connects the hardware correctly to support CEC on PCs. It’s an industry-wide practice.

There is the pulse eight injector which together with software can inject CEC with a USB connection with the caveat it can’t turn your computer on and it’s a hacky and imperfect solution for tinkerers rather than production ready equipment. Also it’s only HDMI 2.0 not 2.1.