Nope, I would not call 160kbps Vorbis low bitrate, it’s roughly quality of 192kbps MP3. Only the ”popularity=0” stuff (so stuff with so few listens that Spotify does not keep record of) were re-encoded to 75kbps Opus, which as a modern codec is much better than it sounds like but of course re-encode is not great for already lossy stuff.

For purists there are those Tidal downloader sites available everywhere for free lossless music, even 24-bit hires FLAC.

What is free though is LibreOffice, or some Nextcloud document addons (to a degree) if ”cloud” is the thing.

This is ALSO a guy behind many of those ”your PC is at risk” scams back in the day, selling useless optimization tools that extorted money from victims. He specifically quit Microsoft to pursue that and was even convicted later. Still chooses to downplay and try to hide what he did.

https://youtu.be/1GeF9AjlqP8

Saw the video… It mentions ”ripping” and even shows clips of some blockbuster movies. No wonder any copyright-sensitive automation gets triggered pretty fast. This will only get worse.

0-popularity, not 0-streams, which are two different metrics according to the archive blog post. But nevertheless, the re-encoded stuff is stuff pretty much no one will miss. Also Opus at 75kbps is much better than Vorbis or mp3 at that bitrate.

Don’t have any concrete reasons why I try to avoid that channel nowadays but something about his character and argumentation style they use for to the scripts just gives me a feeling of ”bullshit sensationalism”. Just a few years back I really used to like the channel.

I think you accidentially wrote Ukraine when bringing up this point about Russia?

In odd chance that you happened to forget your encryption password on old Jolla, the reset needed factory assistance, which cost some tens of dollars. So a nothingburger really, did not appear predatory, simply a bit lacking UX design.

When we talk about these browsers with ultra marginal market share, this unfortunately equals to unique. If it could spoof for example ”latest chrome on latest vanilla windows, using the most common resolution screen”, then I’d see some actual value.

UTM is the way to go on modern Macs, and even iOS/iPadOS too! Free, built on QEMU and super easy to spin up virtual machines with any architecture.

https://mac.getutm.app/

They’re prepared to do anything to get real user data for AI training. This little change gives them easily millions of files per day accidentally saved to cloud.

Well that, and the footage they got of him decades ago in Moscow when he tried to get his businesses up over there. Golden showers and whatnot they say. By now it should be obvious to everyone what his assignment is: Final blow in the divide and conquer scheme that has been running in US since the soviet days. Social media and of course China joining the cause behind the curtains really gave this campaign a big boost.