Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

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Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

founded 1 year ago
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776
 
 

I checked a few of the sites and search engines in the megathread but nothing came up so either they're not there or I'm doing something wrong

edit: Hosted Games is a studio

777
 
 

I've got some DOOM WADs I have been meaning to play so I would probably grab Trench Foot, Total Chaos, and the sequel to Ashes 2063, Ashes: Afterglow with a portable install of GZDoom to play them.

After that I'd probably bring Star Trek TOS and a MOBI copy of Neuromancer by William Gibson combined with a portable install of VLC and Calibre in case the computer didn't have applications that support the file format.


What about you?

I wanted to phrase this in a way where it isn't a prolonged or desert island style question where the responsible idea would be to bring Wikipedia ZIMs and educational PDFs. It's just an awkward amount of time to kill. The mid 2000s office desktop stipulation is just an additional challenge so you can't just bring in a copy of Baldur's Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077.


Edit: By mid 2000s I meant around 2005; the XP or Vista.

778
 
 

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/11304633

Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1,000 appetite suppressant can be made for just $5

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lavteam.org forum access (forum.lavteam.org)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by SilverMutant@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
 
 

Any idea how to access lavteam.org forum? After their hard drive crash it seems forum access is required to download any file. I tried to register but could not get the confirmation email.

780
 
 

I've been pirating for about twenty years, and now that I'm financially comfortable, I feel I should start to pay my way to help those who kept me entertained through the decades..

Really felt good clicking the "Paypal Donate" button on the QBittorrent update page 😂

781
 
 

I have been thinking about the Cerveza Crista edit of Star Wars: A New Hope that sporadically splices in beer ads and the Toy Story 3 edit alternate ending where they fall into the incinerator and it made me wonder if people have come across these kind of joke versions, in full, in the wild.

It seems like a majority of the time it's just short clips being made and reposted.


I'm not talking about the edits of movies where they do things like decrease the speed of the audio so it gradually desyncs from the rest of the movie or when they replace the entire movie with the Limewire Bill Clinton ad.

782
 
 

I want to download an article from JSTOR without paying $34. It's from 1958. That's outrageous.

Aside from wanting just text on my screen, without all the visual clutter, I want to be able to highlight & look up or translate. They've messed click-&-drag copying. If you try to copy a block of text, you don't get the 1st and last few characters from each line. If you highlight a word or 2 to look up or translate, you don't get all the characters you highlighted but you do get some you didn't want. Also, I like being able to highlight a PDF I own.

Didn't JSTOR used to give a couple of freebies/month or something like that?

Thanks.

783
 
 

For the last month I've been working on a modern, material you interface for Invidious.

Github (Leave a star if you want)

Hosted instance

Features

  • Sponsorblock built-in.
  • Return YouTube dislikes built-in.
  • Video progress tracking & resuming.
  • No ads.
  • No tracking.
  • Light/Dark themes.
  • Custom colour themes.
  • Integrates with Invidious subscriptions, watch history & more.
  • Live stream support.
  • Dash support.
  • Chapters.
  • Audio only mode.
  • Playlists.
  • PWA support.

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I was using Spotiflyer for a while because it worked well and was available through F-Droid but it seems like the creator has moved on to an app called SoundBound that I haven't seen in the megathread or any of the other sites listed in the Other Treasures section.

I was wondering if there is a different Android app people are recommending for downloading MP3s of Spotify playlists. I am indifferent towards audio quality and don't mind missing out on a few Spotify-exclusive songs so if it is using YouTube MP3s that's fine with me.

786
 
 

Is there any pirated copy of resources for learning two Slavic languages?

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GPT-4 for free (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by aldalire@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
 
 

Hello sailors,

I have been job hunting for a while and I have felt a great disadvantage in my job search due to my lack of access to high-quality LLMs. Writing cover letters is honestly so bullshit. GPT-3 is honestly quite bad nowadays, but as a true pirate at heart I couldn't quite get myself to cough up the coin for OpenAI's GPT4 out of principle. I hate them for putting their cutting edge technology behind a paywall, making it inaccessible for their own gain. I feel like this is not what the internet was supposed to be. So today, call me the great emancipator cuz i'm teaching u how to get that shi for free baby

Requirements: Docker

It's all gonna be based off of this github repo: gpt4free

Installing through docker (there's also a way to install with Python PIP if that's more convenient for you. The docker worked for me though)

  1. docker pull hlohaus789/g4f

  2. docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 1337:1337 -p 7900:7900 --shm-size="2g" -v ${PWD}/hardir:/app/hardir hlohaus789/g4f:latest

  3. Open up the webui in your browser at localhost:8080

  4. In the "Provider" dropdown in the bottom look for "Liaobots"

  5. Choose "gpt-4-plus" under the "Models" dropdown

??? Profit

The cool thing about gpt4free is that there's a lot of providers and a lot of models to choose from! So if gpt-4-plus from Liaobot doesn't work for you you can switch to something else easily. Do note that some models require you to provide an authentication token or be logged in. Most of them work right out of the box tho.

*this post was not made with any use of an llm I promise ;)

^^list of gpt4 providers

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i installed tor to use z-lib cos the clearnet site got taken down. wondering what sites to use to find cool or interesting stuff, and which ones to avoid for the aforementioned horrid images

789
 
 

So I'm a beekeeper and we have to continuously adapt our tools to change and predators. For the fight against asian hornets, the 3D community has been really helpfull and most of the stuff can be printed at home with a small 3D printer.

However, for other stuff, such as mechanical treatments against Varroa (a nasty parasite responsible for a lot of diseases and death in bee populations), usually you can open your wallet and pay an excessive amount. Because the alternative is death and being a menace for other beekeepers and solitary bees.

There is for exemple a little cage that is usually used to rear queens. One fellow misprinted it, and has noticed that it blocks the development of the laid eggs into larvae (he left 7mm oh developpment height instead of 8mm). This doesn't harm the queen or colony, and blocks reproduction of the parasites. After 28 days, there are no more larvae in the hive, all the parasites are exposed, and we can treat once the population kill off the nasty buggers. It is also an efficient way to sample parasites for the development of varroa-resistant lineages of bees (because we need to infest those with the parasite and then check if it is resistant or not).

Of course, that little cage that was misprinted is now under a patent, and is sold way to expensively for what it is (10 bucks, it's not food-grade certified and the lock breaks way to easily). I do not mind paying for somebody's work, and fair is fair, but slapping a patent on a item that exists since decades because you slightly modified it and selling it expensively while manufacturing it on the other side of the world is a little too much for my liking. I know it's how the world works, but that doesn't mean that I have to roll over.

Anyway, I've got some bought cages, and the patent. How would I go to make a STL file to print it afterwards? It's made of a box with the hexagonal frames and some dead space for the queen, a lid to allow workers to move and a little lock. 3D Scanner? Drawing it from zero on FreeCAD with the patent and the cage next to me? Praying to Chtuluh to send me magically the file with a carrier pigeon? Or am I forced to go looking at an far-eastern webshop with a bad carbon footprint, where they sell it for 3 bucks a piece?

790
 
 

This year I‘ll be able to upgrade to 25/25Gbps and I‘m planning on using at least 20Gbps for seeding 24/7. Is any maintainer of private trackers interested in inviting me?

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Hello mateys,

There's a lot of discussion recently about the ethics of piracy. A lot of good points have been made out of a handful bad ones. The most compelling one is of course the data preservation one, that piracy is the only way to mass preserve digital media in a medium that is prone to error.

However, sometimes discussions about the ethical justification to privacy often lead to rationalizing. Pirating, as others have exclaimed, is at best morally grey, and there are some cases, namely pirating works of small creators, where it is actively harmful and wrong.

I would like to share my perspective on it. I studied some game theory in college and that course made me look at the world in a different way. I believe piracy is a perfect example of a game theory concept known as the prisoner's dilemma and evolutionary game theory, if you all haven't heard about it. My essay is less of a justification of piracy, but more of an explanation of why piracy happens and grounding it in theory.

As a background for this concept, here's a scenario. Let's say you're a criminal faced with two options: snitch or stay silent. There is also another criminal, your accomplice, who is also in jail and faced with the same option. Depending on your response and your accomplice's response there are different payouts:

I stay silent and accomplice stays silent: 2 years of jail for both of us

I stay silent and accomplice snitches: 5 years of jail for me, 1 year of jail for the accomplice

I snitch and accomplice stays silent: 1 year of jail for me, 5 years of jail for my accomplice

We botch snitch on each other: 3 years of jail time for both of us

Most of you probably know where this is going, but bear with me because i'm gonna go further. The quick analysis of the situation is that there is a best-case scenario, which is both of us staying silent. But this best-case scenario can only happen with the result of cooperation. This is because if one of us flips, the other will have to serves longer sentence. The best case scenario can only happen if we both agree before the game that we will stay silent so we can guarantee the outcome, or else we will serve the longer sentence if the other betrays us.

So, what if we play this game without cooperating beforehand? Well, looking at my options:

if i stay silent, i can either get 2 years or 5 years of jail time

if i snitch, i can get either 1 year or 3 years of jail time

when faced with both these options, which strategy will you choose? of course, I do not want to got to jail for 5 years. Snitching definitely looks mad appealing to me when looking at it from this perspective. That's why, in game theory, snitching is what's called a nash equilibrium. Staying silent is not a nash equilibrium, because if the other snitches then I get a resulting jailtime which is worse off than if i just stayed silent.

Note that this does not mean that everybody should snitch. It's just that, given the choices handed to us, snitching is the one that will result in the least bad jail sentences. As with life, there may be other factors at play, such as the fact that if I snitch, the gang boss might kill me when I get out, which will definitely affect my decisions whether I should snitch or stay silent.

Okay. So how does this relate to piracy? What if we now play this game at a massive scale. Each and every one of us is faced with two options: pirate or buy. Currently, the majority of people actually buy software and media!

But wait. If buying is analogous to staying silent, and pirating is analogous to snitching, why aren't we at Nash equilibrium? why isn't everyone pirating software? My sweet summer child, I present to you the concept of law. The purpose of the law is precisely to coordinate people so we don't fall into our shitty Nash equilibriums and ruin everything, and it does it precisely by attaching a more negative result to snitching (pirating). That's why we have stoplights (seriously, we talk about stoplights a lot in my game theory class) and why (mostly) everyone follows stoplight laws. (before you say tRagEdY oF tHE cOMmONs!!!! the guy Garrett Hardin who coined the term was a hardline eugenicist and his intellectual contributions is a shitstain in academia so shut the fuck up.)

(for people that are curious, this is the realm of Evolutionary game theory. It studies the scenarios where each individual pair off in a population and play a game, and studies stable populations and stable strategies under this model. Ironically, i learned this from Game Theory, Alive by Anna R. Karlin and Yuval Peres. which i got from libgen XD)

So, as we have it, we have a majority of people buying software, with a minority of pirates who are getting that software or media for free. We aren't at nash equilibrium!! More technically, piracy is stable strategy under the parameters of the system. We pirates know that buying all the software we interact with will just make us poorer and sad in the end, and we'll be stuck with all the DRM. But on the other hand, it's untenable if everyone just pirates everything all the time! We pirates profit so long as the majority of people keep buying software. This puts us, pirates, at a very precarious position. It is dangerous when the population of pirates to increase, because this will cause things and create domino effects which will put us at nash equilibrium due to more regulation of piracy and a crackdown of piracy, leaving us worse off and needing to adapt to these changes.

My advice:the most stable strategy right now is buying software whenever you can spare the coin and if you think the value of the software to you matches its price, but pirating if it's convenient or unaffordable.

Too long, didn't read: piracy is a stable strategy under the current parameters of the system. If everybody pirates it fucks everything up. So, be as sneaky as you can. Also, read up on your evolutionary game theory you pleb

793
 
 

Hey all. Last season I used various streaming sites for baseball, but the quality was low and they obviously don't work on Apple TV. I'd love to watch games on both ATV and iOS in HD.

One option will of course be IPTV, but I only need baseball since I don't watch other sports or any other live TV.

My friend in another state lent me her unneeded MLB TV account, but it appears they don't want our money since no VPNs work. Research indicated smart DNS would work, but MLB TV doesn't carry the national games or playoffs anyway.

I don't mind paying for this, though I'd love not to! 😂

Based on the need for only baseball, where should I look and what might it cost?

Thanks!

794
 
 

I use soulseek (well nicotine+ for linux, but same network). For years know I have know that searching for certain terms will fail to give results because they are being filtered. For example "bryan" or "adams" returns no results for me. Although I can find these items in other ways- I'm curious if there have been any new finds on how to bypass this?

795
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submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
 
 

A simple tool to take the work out of uploading.

I'm just sharing. This should be used more widely

796
 
 

I'm learning to make my own clothes, but fabric is expensive and buying patterns from corporations feels like death by a thousand cuts. Anybody know of a resource for shared patterns? Megathread understandably doesn't address this particular need.

797
 
 

I apologize, I’ve been out of the loop for more than a decade with piracy, so I have a dumb question.

My friend has a cracked version of Baldur’s Gate 3 (GOG, I think) and I want to play online with him. I don’t mind actually buying the game for myself on Steam so I can install it on both my Mac and Deck, but I don’t want to spend the money if it means a legit copy that doesn’t play nice with his cracked copy.

Can cracked games play online with legit games, would I need a cracked copy as well, or is online MP simply out of the question?

Thanks to anyone willing to give a response.

798
 
 

I used to use Hamachi on Windows to play "local LAN" games with my friends, has anyone tried using Tailscale for this purpose? As far as I know it should work fine, but I'm not sure and I don't have any friends to try it out with, but it makes me curious.

799
 
 

Hello, I would like to learn German and i am seeking tools or resources to help me do it.

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It doesn't matter if it's a CD, a Film, or manual with the instructions to build a spaceship. If you copy it, the original owner doesn't lose anything. If you don't copy it, the only one missing something (the experience) is YOU.

Enjoy!

Of course, if you happen to have some extra money for donations to creators, please do so. If you don't have that, try contributing with a review somewhere or recommending the content, spread the word. Piracy was shown to drive businesses in several occasions by independent and biased corps (trying to show the opposite).

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