Yes, it's odd, that a driver which should be small enough to fit in kernel memory comes in such a package (for Windows at least) that is a few hundred mega-bytes.
Vanced was proprietary, it's too bad for users but I won't shed a tear for its developers and would actually advise against doing anything that keeps it living. The very fact that there is a need to get apk archives before the links die is an artifact of being proprietary and would not have been an issue with Libre Software.
The only way that makes sense for all of us as a democratic society is to keep control, and this can only be achieved through Libre Software. The real move right now is not to keep existing Vanced content on life support, but to use Newpipe. If it doesn't support the right features, fork it. Enhance it. Use it as the Common it is
I don't get this argument against proprietary software. People building software should be able to expect payment for their work and effort.
Food is required for a healthy society but would anyone here advocate for farmers to give away all of their produce for free?
Text-tiles are necessary for society but would you advocate that clothing be provided by the creators free of charge?
The only thing different about software is that little to no physical resources are required as a prerequisite to its production, but an individuals time and energy is.
A world in which no one was paid to write software would be a world with much worse offerings than what we currently have and would be a net loss for humanity.
You seem to be under the impression that permissively licensed software is unable to be sold, nor developers financially compensated. This is not the case.
There are plenty of successful software companies whose offerings are not proprietary, yet manage to pay their developers well. Example products:
I agree with your point, but you picked stunningly bad examples. MongoDB and ElasticSearch are both fauxpen source, and Vagrant and Docker are both open core. The only one on your list that's really open source is Red Hat. Better examples would be Nextcloud and Grafana.
I think MongoDB and Elasticsearch should be examples of the opposite if anything. They tried to do the whole FOSS thing, but now both use "Server Side Public License", which is generally regarded as source-available, but not open source because of its restrictions.
They pay their employees well, though- the parent I replied to was implying one could not be paid well while writing software which is given away "for free". This is clearly not the case.
I don't know for MongoDB and Vagrant, but Docker and Elastic Search seem to me to be painted into a corner because of the non proprietary part of their business.
Seeing them succeed up to that point is already an incredible feat, and perhaps they will find a way to turn around with a bright future ahead, but at this point I wouldn't give them as clear examples of success of the business model.
Red Hat is IBM, so I'm not sure it fits in the list.
Just to understand where I'm coming from, I'm actually a proponent of all production being socialized so that people do not need to spend their life working just to live. Farmers would give their produce for free because all their needs would be met for free. But that's another debate.
Libre Software can totally be funded, through individual donations or through public funding; in fact, because Libre Software is a common, it is only normal that time spent improving them should be time paid by the entire society. I see no problem with the idea of taking from private property to further common property.
I've heard people who have similar beliefs to yours and IME they've never been able to rationalize what their society would actually look like and how we could maintain the same quality of life as we have today.
Given that HN is a higher quality social media platform than most, maybe today that can change. Would you mind answering a few questions:
1. Who does the hard/dirty jobs in this society? Farming being one. But also construction, sewage, trash, ad inifitum. There are a lot of undesirable jobs and while maybe some people would be willing, I doubt our needs could be met when the same individuals could just work an easier job for the same reward.
2. How are "needs" defined? Food, shelter, clothing. Then what? Electricity? Internet? Smartphones? Gaming consoles/PC's? Games to play on those? Music? Memory foam mattresses? Etc. If all of these aren't needs, then how would individuals with varying interests actually choose what they want to own?
3. What are the incentives to advance amd become highly skilled? Take doctors. Some are really passionate about what they do. Most may be a little passionate, but are mainly just intelligent people drawn by the money and prestige. Assuming medical school and university still exists, for what purpose would someone go through that pipeline when they could do something far easier?
Regarding point 1, how is "the people who we force to" an acceptable answer to this? Because that's exactly what happens now. No one wants to work hard, dirty jobs, but there is a societal pressure upon them to, and enough inertia to maintain the status quo that keeps a majority of them where they are.
Lol are you joking? I would wager my life that not a single blue collar worker in America takes or remains in a job that they hate out of societal pressure to do so. Having grown up in am environment where my social group was almost nothing but manual laborers, the only pressure they felt was financial. The difference between them and say, a SWE was often to some extent baseline intelligence coupled in with lack existing accreditation in terms of degrees or certification, and lack of motivation, interest and or ability to obtain such.
The suggestions that we as a society should basically just bully a certain number of people into undesirable positions is egregious and almost worse than blatant authoritarianism. At least today the people working those jobs are usually compensated better than they would be in another obtainable position given their skills amd ability.
I just feel like all this crying foul about authoritarianism is because people view certain roles, even the essential ones, as beneath them. If that mindset needs to be changed then I'm all for it. I don't deny that it will be hard, and I don't deny that I might be guilty of this myself.
What is the reason for the cease and desist? Code license or use of content? If it's the latter, then NewPipe won't survive either. We really need an alternative to YouTube, not another frontend to this exploitative platform.
Vanced didn't publish the letter, but I'd argue it was a code copyright issue. They applied patches to the original YouTube APK and then distributed it. If they had only distributed the patch diffs themselves and a tool to patch the user-provided YouTube app file, this wouldn't have happened.
If I sold a transparency with nothing but a twirly mustache on it, sized & positioned so that it perfectly placed the mustache on the original Mona Lisa if placed within the frame, would that be a derivative work?
(Assume for this question that the Mona Lisa was currently protected by U.S. copyright.)
> If I sold a transparency with nothing but a twirly mustache on it, sized & positioned so that it perfectly placed the mustache on the original Mona Lisa if placed within the frame, would that be a derivative work?
To the extent that it's "based on" copyrightable expression in the Mona Lisa, yes. AIUI the key question is: would a viewer recognise the Mona Lisa from your transparency? And that would be a question of fact for the jury; personally guessing I'd say probably not from just the position of a mustache in a frame, probably yes if you included e.g. an outline of the pose. (In which case it might still be protected fair use, but it would be a derivative work, and you'd have to make that positive defence).
Courts have interpreted derivative works to be so when at least some parts of it contain the original copyrighted work. If that test fails, the whole derivative work argument is null and void.
I wouldn't want to be the one with my neck on the line in court over this.
Consider that .torrent files also don't have the content, yet torrent sites which serve them and provide tracking for torrent clients are having to play cat and mouse with copyright holders.
There have been court cases on this. In Galoob v. Nintendo, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Galoob did not infringe copyright by distributing a device (the Game Genie) that allowed users to modify copyrighted video games. The case established, at the time, that modifying a computer program or other copyrighted work for personal use was fair use.
That said, so much of what we knew about copyright and software in the 90s has been overturned by subsequent rulings or even statutes (like the DMCA) that if you wish to avoid being burned by copyright suits, you must retain an attorney knowledgeable in this area of law. (Which is true in any case.) As an example, look-and-feel copyrights are back on the table thanks to The Tetris Company LLC.
I agree that a bunch of people who are all licencees of a software work should be able to exchange instructions with each other for how to modify that to work better for them; I'd like courts to see it that way.
These instructions do not increase the number of people who have copies of the work, and so no copying is taking place; copyright should not be applicable here. The licensor may argue that license clauses is being violated, but not copyright; i.e. the users are using the software in ways that they don't like (use is not copying or redistribution).
They had to keep it so, otherwise the exploits they used to modify the app would have been right in the open and countered immediately. They did keep its package manager open-source. It's the same with cracked Spotify builds, the famous xManager is open-source but the cracked builds it summons aren't.
Is there a way to transform all those split packages into a single, simple to install .apk? (with a preselected architecture, and english lang)
If Vanced will keep working as-is for maybe a year or two, that's at least nice, I just would like to keep a copy of the latest version for reinstalling when my tablet is formatted in the next days...
I always watch YT in firefox with ublock origin on, it seems to work 100%. It seems like pi-hole would work well too, but my router insists on providing a backup dns server when my pihole fails to find something... Need to go get a new one, preferably meshable.
There are a few ways to get your client devices to use the pihole:
- configure each client device accordingly (very inconvenient, but mentioning it for completeness)
- configure your router's DHCP service to tell clients that the DNS server is [IP address of pihole] instead of [IP address of router]
- configure your router's upstream DNS to be [IP address of pihole] instead of [what your modem offers] and leave the DHCP service alone (clients use the router as the DNS server)
I suspect you're using the third way, based on the issue you're having. Try the second way instead, so the router isn't even processing client lookups. (Maybe not all routers offer this. I use pfsense which does.)
Anyway, my pihole doesn't block YouTube ads... Can I remedy that?
It's not possible to block YouTube ads with pihole as they're served from the same address as the videos. Pihole does not inspect any content itself. That's why on a laptop/desktop you need ublock origin for the browser.
I've not found a solution for YouTube app on Android TV other than using Vanced! Not sure if Adguard for Android helps either.
The ads are so bad and so frequent in the YouTube app that I hardly ever use it.
If they offered a light version that was JUST ad-free YT, I'd subscribe in a heartbeat.
I already pay for two other music services and have no interest another one so the $20/mo is too steep for my blood (for the family plan).
YT apparently trialed a YT Premium Lite in Europe [0], which is at a price-point I'd be willing to pay (7 EUR). That's on par with what I'd pay for other streaming services, and that's probably 50% of my streaming source, especially with the amount of learning content on there. I'd probably be willing to pay up to $10 USD/mo for just ad-free YT.
But the other ~$10USD/mo for an unwanted service doesn't appeal to me.
Honestly YouTube should have a way to disable shorts in app. They're trying to pull an Instagram and stomp on TikTok's grounds, but it doesn't feel like it's working and it feels like how Instagram went from being a simple photo sharing tool to being a bloated mess with four major interfaces in one.
You say you don't feel like it's working, but that might just be because you're no longer part of the new generation and have a different expectation of what "video content" is. Like it or not, the Tiktok format is very popular, and while a large part of it is the recommendation algo, Google isn't exactly a slouch in that area.
I have it on good authority that Shorts is both experiencing steady growth and is the fastest-growing segment within Youtube-the-company.
I feel like it's objectively not working and this is coming from someone who's spent a good amount of time on both TikTok and YouTube Shorts. TikTok has an actual community of original content creators and people trying to remix content that other's have made using sounds, duets, and stitches. YouTube is mostly reposted TikTok content (which loses context due to the lack of sounds, duets, etc.) and clip aggregators who just repost clips from popular memes/viral videos/TV shows. They aren't even in the same ballpark in terms of quality.
Ah, yes. TOTP can't be primary 2fa and isn't even a choice unless you add sms 2fa. You can remove the sms method after, but still very sketchy and unfortunate.
The difference is in the bait and switch tactic they employ. They started by offering the service for free and without ads till there were no good competitors. And then they switched to showing obscene amount of ads. Most users and a good bunch of creators are unhappy about the way they ruin the viewing experience. If YouTube declared their true intentions at the beginning, we wouldn't be yearning for competent alternatives today. Greed is definitely the word.
I dislike ads as much as anyone, and I use adblockers aggressively. If I can't use something without regularly seeing ads, I usually stop using it.
With all of that said, Youtube operated at a loss for a long time, which is impossible for anyone but a government or a charity to sustain indefinitely. According to this article, Youtube was not profitable in 2015, nine years after Google bought it: https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f...
I don't think "greed" makes sense as an insult directed at a for-profit corporation. It is by nature a machine to maximize shareholder value; it is nearly as amoral as its recommendation algorithm that tries to maximize watch time. Of course, letting machines run amok is dangerous and antitrust laws used to keep them in check, but not so much anymore.
YouTube has been running ads from the start and specifically video ads for 15 years. They've been paying creators via revenue share of those ads for 14 years. Something like 95% of the growth of that site has happened after the switch to video ads. The argument that it was a bait and switch seems pretty hard to justify.
This is a bit disingenuous because the ads from 15 years ago are very different from the ads today. Additionally, YouTube didn't even have ads (of any form) for the first few years and once they did roll them out, it was only given to specific creators who applied to be YouTube partners or people who were part of a network like Machinima or Maker Studio.
Today, there are pre-rolls, post-rolls, unskippables, multiple ads in a single ad segment, mid-rolls, etc. That's significantly more than the ads from years ago. Also, ads often supports copyright claimants instead of the actual content creators.
You just install the vanced apk like any other apk. The manager app isn't really needed and since there will be no more updates it would be kind of useless.
You can encrypt stuff to Google Drive. You can sync a Truecrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) folder or use something like Syncdocs (https://syncdocs.com) that does the encryption/decryption automatically.
Nvidia want to charge more for cards that can mine crypto currencies. Just like they want to charge more for the same product if it is used in data centers.
> That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation.
Just so long as the aforementioned monopolies don't choke out competition. Sadly, we seem to end up with a lot of pseudo-monopolies in the tech industry.
I wonder how much more competition we could have with strict monopolies regulation on acquisitions and mergers?
If you let companies acquire close to 100% market share then monopolies are guaranteed to happen because one company is always more cost efficient than two but with the obvious problem that monopolies don't act in the interest of consumers. Limits on company size can definitively prevent monopolies.
I'm on Linux with Syncdocs for syncing Google Drive so will wait and see how it handles things.