Spyke

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piracy

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DRM removal tool was taken down from github. If you can, please download it from gitlab before its taken down too

It seems like they made the same mistake as youtube-dl back in the day. If you develop a tool that can be used for piracy, do not straight up advertise that in your readme/documentation.

If you create a YouTube downloader, do not show it downloading music from major labels, use for a creative commons track for the demo instead.

And dont say in the short description of your repo that this tool is meant to steal books from an online lending library.

tech

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Twitter locked behind login page.

Elon posted this on Twitter (quoted from an private blog since I currently have no way to access twitter):

Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users! Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.

Lets hope that they lift this ban soon.

tech

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Twitter locked behind login page.

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If the reason for the ban is massive server load due to content scraping for AI models, that could become an issue for the fediverse as well. Our infrastructure is funded by donations and has much less performance and resiliency than big tech companies.

We might reach a point where the negative impacts on the environment caused by AI outweigh the benefits, just like it already happened with blockchains.

piracy

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VPN Recommendations?

I switched to AirVPN after finding out that Mullvad disabled port forwarding. I have heard rumors that the did that because of people hosting cheese pizza via their VPN accounts.

The performance of AirVPN does vary, I had to try a couple of countries before I found a server that didn't throttle me (and I only have a 50MBit connection).

Maybe I will try Proton in the future, but then I would have to commit to a 2year subscription or pay a lot more.

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The end of Captchas

Captcha solving bots have been around for years (e.g. CapMonster Cloud). Before AI was good enough, it was the job of actual workers (mostly from South America and Southeast Asia) to solve the captchas for a few cents each.

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Now that mullvad has ended support for port forwarding, where should one go for P2P ?

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Since my airvpn test month expired, I've just bought a Njalla subscription. Here are my experiences:

Pro:

  • Payment via PayPal or cryptocurrency
  • Same price as Mullvad (5€/month)
  • Static IPv4 and v6, allows you to forward any port
  • Torrenting just worked (including port forwarding)
  • No VPN application, just use vanilla OpenVPN or Wireguard
  • Does not throttle my internet speed (I only have 50MBit/s, so I cannot really test VPN performance. Definitely better than AirVPN though)

Contra:

  • Requires E-Mail address/XMPP to create an account
  • Only one client. If you need to access your VPN from multiple devices at the same time, you need to buy multiple subscriptions
  • Only Swedish servers

Conclusion: for my usecase (Raspberry-Pi-based torrent box) Njalla looks great. If you want to use it on multiple devices or need to circumvent geoblocks, you should look for a different service.

piracy

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Audiobook sites!

There are a lot of audiobooks available on music streaming sites like Spotify and Deezer. You can download those with Deemix. But that may be limited to certain countries. I am from Germany and here a lot of audiobooks are owned by record companies which publish them on streaming services.

Searching for second-hand CDs on ebay may be worth it, too. I've gotten some good deals there as well.