CoyoteFacts

It could be both, but often I see downvotes used strongly when information is actually incorrect or misleading, regardless of whether the person is trying to be pleasant or not. I guess that upvotes on a post like this could be mistaken for agreement. If the OP was instead phrased as a question it probably wouldn’t be downvoted.

I think it’s more of a result of OP conflating this with an “average” Debian experience. Who knows if Kali (downstream) or the user made a frankendebian, and who knows what they’ve done to their install before this log. Using Kali for an improper reason doesn’t give a lot of bonus points in our trust that this is not user-induced.

Yeah that sounds about right. It also depends on which indexers you’re using, as I imagine the more public indexers will have a higher chance of getting takedowns from trolls. It’s worth noting that I believe the running theory is that a lot of 2021-2023 articles were voluntarily deleted to save space, resulting in issues even for .nzbs that weren’t takedown’d. It’s also theorized (and outright stated sometimes) that providers do silently delete data that is rarely or never accessed as well to save space, so that can be a random issue too.

Personally, I lean more into torrent technology because usenet can be fickle for these reasons even if you’re in the secret indexers, whereas if you’re in at least some semi-good private torrent trackers you’ll never have completion issues (just potentially slower downloads). I also feel like usenet’s scalability, future, and pricing is sort of uncertain.

It’s generally better to instead have more indexers, or indexers that repost stuff. Articles on the various providers often get taken down at the same time, so while it’s not a bad idea to get a lot of blocks just in case, you’ll get a better chance of completion by just trying a different .nzb

As far as I’m aware this is true (same with a lot of desktop linux distros), but I’m more interested in freeing myself from Android at the moment. I’m sure we can get there eventually w/r/t security, but it takes time, and we’ll never get there if we don’t start moving.

To me it reads like Graphene is saying /e/ is “actively attacking” them as a puppet of the government of France. How do you reconcile them both being perfectly good when either one is engaging in this behavior, or one is lying about it? It’s okay to support both projects overall and not agree with every action they take, but that doesn’t mean you have to turn a blind eye to accountability when they are making bad choices (to put it lightly). In any other project, criticism would lead to positive changes and correction of bad behavior. Because Graphene doesn’t work like that, I think it’s important to understand their history so that everyone is more informed when they make serious accusations about other innocent projects like this.

It mainly makes me pine for linux phones. I think Graphene is the best we have at the moment in the mobile space, but that’s far more of a testament to our lack of options than how valuable Graphene is. I have no doubts that we’ll eventually kick Graphene to the curb when it stops being useful, so I’m not overly concerned with its future. Worst-case, I think many of us would be just fine on any other AOSP rom for a few extra years until linux phones can come save us all.

This is actually a really relevant note, because all of us are the “wolf-watchers” in that sense. We’re all trying to keep track of accountability on stuff like this and use what little power we have to protest and counteract government overreach and abuse. When hyperbole and gaslighting are used by those “crying wolf” it makes our jobs that much more difficult. Even after reading through the HN thread I still am not sure if the threat is real or imagined. There are a couple paranoid leaps in logic asserted as fact, and that makes it impossible to know which other “facts” are actually just opinions. By all means, they should GTFO of France if they feel they might be threatened, but turning around and saying they’re being imminently attacked by France makes it so much harder to understand what’s actually happening.

I did skim through some similar discussion on the HN link, which you can read here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999024

I honestly don’t know or care enough to figure out how much exaggeration is taking place, but it seems like there’s at least a possibility that this is a nothingburger from a powerless journalist that’s being extrapolated like crazy. There might be a definite answer in that thread but I don’t have the time to evaluate all angles of this incident right now.

Graphene (more specifically its founder) is always in a vicious cycle of claiming that everyone asking for proof of Graphene being “under attack” is in itself making an “attack”. You can consider yourself Graphene’s enemy for life for your transgression.

Watching these youtube links makes you an attacker also, so be careful: https://youtu.be/Dx7CZ-2Bajg https://youtu.be/4To-F6W1NT0

I don’t want to write up a whole paper at the moment but I’ll note that you really shouldn’t be trusting any cloud providers with your data, because you should always be fully encrypting your data before they get their hands on it. Plasma Vaults (if you use KDE) are one way to do this, or you can use something like Cryptomator, gocryptfs, etc. Basically how it works is that you store files encrypted in one directory (/home/me/Encrypted), then transparently unencrypt that data to another mountpoint for your regular usage (/home/me/Unencrypted). Modifications in the Unencrypted directory will automatically affect the Encrypted directory through the use of magic. The cloud provider will only sync the Encrypted directory, and without the key they know nearly nothing about what your data is.

Given this sort of workflow, you can store your data anywhere, as long as you have a nice (open-source) way of syncing to that provider that can’t introduce any further vulnerability.

I don’t entirely mean to throw rocks, but there’s something funny about them dragging their feet so long on supporting a linux version (8+ years) that by the time their personal breaking point with windows came, they discovered themselves on the other side of the issue with no one to blame but themselves. Maybe a parable.

Semi-related for people whose distros don’t package deno, I installed deno in a distrobox and exported it with distrobox-export and yt-dlp picked it up just fine from my $PATH. Before I did so, running yt-dlp gave the following error:

WARNING: [youtube] No supported JavaScript runtime could be found. YouTube extraction without a JS runtime has been deprecated, and some formats may be missing. See  https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS  for details on installing one. To silence this warning, you can use  --extractor-args "youtube:player_client=default"  

I can launch it fine:
GE-Proton10-21
WINEDLLOVERRIDES="wsock32=n,b" %command% -skip_intro -steamMM -NewCPU

Yep, I forgot it’s not a company. The point stands though; someone has to pay for the servers and administration, and if they run out of money or the foundation falls apart, then the problem happens in the same way. I don’t know much about Wikipedia’s structure, but I would guess it’s a similar situation in terms of needing money to stay running and also being able to be salvaged by the community if it does go down.

Worth noting that when What died, ~4 new sites popped up immediately and invited all the old members, and everyone raced to re-upload everything from What onto them, which was actually pretty effective. At this point, RED and OPS have greatly surpassed What in many ways, aside from some releases that never made it back (you can actually find out which releases used to exist because What’s database was made available after its death). Users and staff are a lot more prepared if it happens again, e.g. keeping track of all metadata via “gazelle-origin”.

If by “in” you mean how to get into them, generally you’re supposed to have a friend invite you. If you don’t have anyone you know on private trackers, you’ve gotta get in from scratch. Luckily, RED and OPS both do interviews to test your knowledge on the technicals of music formats, though I’ve heard RED’s interview queues are long and OPS’s interviews are often just not happening: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html https://interview.orpheus.network/

Alternatively, you can interview for MAM, which is IMO the best ebook/audiobook tracker. They’re super chill and have a very simple interview e.g. “what is a tracker”: https://www.myanonamouse.net/inviteapp.php. After that, you can just hang around there for a while until you can get into their recruitment forums to get invites to other entry-level trackers, and then on those entry-level trackers you can get recruited into slightly higher-level trackers, and so on, and eventually RED/OPS should be recruiting from somewhere.

This can feel a little silly and convoluted, but I guess I’d just appreciate that these sites put the effort into conducting interviews for new people at all, since the alternative is that you will just never get into anything without a friend. Reddit’s /r/trackers wiki is unfortunately one of the better places for information about private trackers if you want to do further reading.

If you have any drive to get back into it, TMK the interview for RED is roughly the same as the interview for WCD, and although OPS isn’t interviewing right now it’s fairly easy to get to power user on RED and get an invite to OPS that way. I think RED is a little bit more hard-ratio than WCD was because RED doesn’t do freeleech staff picks or site-wides, but they do give out handfuls of freeleech tokens from time to time, so even if you can’t keep up with ratio requirements you can still nab free stuff with those just by having an account. As before, having an OPS account will help tremendously for keeping up with RED ratio, and eventually it’ll become a non-issue.

Yes, it’s allowed and encouraged between RED<->OPS. There are a few tools on the RED and OPS forums to automate most of the process (e.g. Transplant, REDCurry, Takeout, Orpheus-Populator, etc.). Cross-posting torrents on many sites is allowed and fine, you just have to be aware of the rules of the source site, e.g. some places don’t want their internals to be shared, or some have a literal timer countdown before cross-posting is allowed. On the other hand, most sites are not going to enforce other sites’ exclusivity demands (PTP explicitly has a note about this). If an exclusive file is cross-posted onto PTP, PTP isn’t going to take it down on anyone’s behalf.

I’ll note that private tracker culture has warmed up quite a bit in the past decade and a half that I’ve been on them. Trackers (and their users) don’t usually see other trackers as rivals/competitors anymore, release groups are respectful of each other, there are a ton of tutorials and help forums around to help low-skill members learn how to do the advanced stuff, and so on. There are recognizable usernames everywhere, and the general vibe is to cross-upload as much as possible and help build everyone’s trackers together. Cross-seed (the program) has helped a lot with this, and seedbases have become very strong even on smaller trackers as a result.

Mainly, HDDs are bigger and FLAC is future-proof for future audio formats, as well I think the death of What.CD has really impressed upon the next generation that preservation is of utmost importance. A lot of albums were fully lost during the transition to RED/OPS, and a good chunk of albums that used to have a lossless copy now only have lossy versions from those who kept MP3 libraries. IMO, piracy is ownership, and owning the master lossless copy so you can generate any other formats is that concept taken to its logical conclusion.

Seconding the notion to get into OPS somehow if at all possible. RED’s economy is one of the few economies that is actually non-trivial, whereas OPS’s economy is totally trivial. A large amount of RED stuff is automatically mirrored to OPS, so you can just grab it at OPS and cross-seed back to RED (there are a few tools to do this automatically, e.g. nemorosa). RED is still definitely the more active and qualitative place to be, but cross-seeding shenanigans with OPS will keep RED’s economy in-check.