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NuXCOM_90Percent

@NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip

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China starts smartphone inspections to boost 'anti-espionage efforts', raising fears among expatriates and foreign business people about arbitrary enforcement (english.kyodonews.net)

- China implemented new regulations on Monday under its toughened counterespionage law, which enables authorities to inspect smartphones, personal computers and other electronic devices, raising fears among expatriates and foreign businesspeople about possible arbitrary enforcement....

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I've personally never done the trip to China for a lot of reasons (you know you are living your best life when a postdoc explains that you should never under any circumstances go to China because of what you have said) but do a lot of foreign travel for work:

No company should let any employee bring corporate electronics on international travel. Have burner phones and laptops that are set up to do incredibly minimal work locally (basically just have the slides... maybe) and to remote in. And work with your IT department to "randomly lock" them if a wrong password is detected in an airport or government facility.

It doesn't matter if it is the UK asking if we want the left or right hand this time or the CCP: It is just an unnecessary risk that is easily avoided.

And then inform the traveler of whether they want to bring their personal devices or not.

NuXCOM_90Percent , (edited )

Plenty of companies are, rightfully, adopting security models where even domestic workers never have a copy of anything sensitive on a laptop (sometimes even desktop) and rely on corporate servers to do work. Yes, it really fucking sucks during an outage but it avoids the never ending problem of people leaving their laptop at a starbucks. There is absolutely zero reason to not do that on foreign travel.

Also: The point of business travel is to have meetings or collaborations that can't be done remotely. For the former, you basically just need that set of slides and the ability to fetch a limited subset of other data. For the latter? You are by necessity taking corporate secrets and having a secure connection back home is a bare minimum.

And if your IT department have problems reprovisioning laptops to contain basically a VPN client and a web browser? Then you have even bigger problems. In a semi-competent world, you just reimage a laptop in a closet to the minimum machine that you give to a new hire and then you flag the user's account for heightened security in whatever VPN setup you have. Because it is REALLY easy to detect if something is connecting from where it shouldn't be (e.g. Fred is in Canada but suddenly is trying to connect from Australia) or is anywhere near a government facility or airport (... no comment).

As an aside, I'll point out that I have worked with various government and government adjacent orgs over my years. Their security is complete dogshit next to a decent sized company. Because they are just protecting government secrets and focused on covering their asses. A company is protecting potentially billions of dollars and everyone's livelihood. Which makes for an environment where you aren't ten years behind the state of the art because nobody wants to risk jail time (which they would not get if they are acting in good faith...) over approving something as crazy as a VPN.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Oh yeah. I DEFINITELY have some horror stories over needing to access GUI apps remotely (my favorite involved a secure tunnel to one facility to then tunnel back to a machine that was literally three doors down from my office...)

But stuff like the web interfaces to ms/google office make the vast majority of this trivial. Since SSH always worked in Windows via (god awful) putty. And increasingly other applications are understanding they need to support server/client setups so you are just connecting over a tunnel rather than using a remote desktop protocol.

NuXCOM_90Percent , (edited )

The CCP are actively engaging in genocide (remember the Uyghurs? Probably shouldn't if you don't want to piss off the CCP) and have a long history of "reeducation" camps.

While I have very serious problems with how the majority of western nations handle immigration and human rights violations, that is more along the lines of "oh, please stop isreal. By the way, here are all those bombs you asked for. Don't use them all on one mosque!" or actively turning people back to be executed in the horror they are running from (although, the US is doing a great job of having some stuff that looks a lot like concentration camps on the Southern border...).

But it is still night and day in terms of horror. The day is pretty shitty but the night... holy fuck.

But also? That doesn't change anything. It is a nation's responsibility to engage in basic espionage if only to protect its people's interests. And governments all have the power to basically shit on a visitor's human rights so long as they can keep the embassies from finding out. So why take any risks you don't need to?

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Please, do not even pretend that a human trafficking serial rapist gives a shit about "the role of fathers in a child's life"

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

He is a human trafficking serial rapist. End of story. Anything else is just spewing his own propaganda to legitimize the very real hurt he does to the world.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I mean... that is the point.

Pay for premium, watch ads, or don't watch at all. You and Google are both in agreement.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

There is nowhere else. The only other companies that can consider a YouTube scale product already noped out.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I mean, it is great that you have very specific rules in terms of what kind of ads you will tolerate. You should write a letter to John Google about that.

But also? We have been through all this before. Back in the day, ads on websites were incredibly unobtrusive. A small png at the top of the page that everyone skimmed past. But people still wanted to block those because only the evil sites were sellouts who needed to pay for hosting and blah blah blah. Which more or less started the ad war we have going to today. First they were simple jpegs. Then they were animated gifs. Then they were annoying animated gifs. Then they became flash ads. Then they became flash ads about how this shitty age of empires ripoff totally has boobs. And so forth.

Because if people aren't looking at ads? The people who buy ads know that. So we get ads that are harder to look away from. Until they are ads we can't look away from because they are embedded in the videos themselves.

And, until we live in a post scarcity society where energy is infinite, it is going to cost money/resources to host web content. Ads are still the closest thing to an "effective" way to pay for a lot of that. And that means a war to have ads that get past ad blockers and ensure eyes get on them.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Yeah...

How often do images "not load" when browsing lemmy? How often do sites get hugged to death even now? And that is kilobytes of data.

Video is a mother fucker. It always has been. Those of us who are old enough to remember will understand WHY youtube was such a revelation (or why so many porn sites still have a huge thumbnail archive...).

And it is why the various "youtube alternatives" like Nebula or (sex pest adjacent) floatplane don't have free video. EVERYTHING is paywalled because free video would make their hosting costs increase exponentially.

And yes, in theory, distributed hosting can lessen that burden. Anyone who has played a listen server heavy online game will already understand why that is a pipe dream.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Were the ad companies interested in increased profits? Of course they were. But they also aren't a charity. And when they are buying ad space for a web comic but having zero impressions, they are going to be pissed. They aren't running a charity (well... some actually ARE but that is a different mess).

Again, this has been going on well before subscription models were even a thing.

That said, I do agree that it is a generational "problem". Youtube has been around for almost 20 years and, arguably, in its current form for almost 10. Significant parts of the internet have no memory of anything else. Like, my niece and nephew literally throw tantrums when they see tv commercials when their father is watching a football game. Whereas my sister and I remember the fights over who got to use the downstairs bathroom during the second commercial break in The Simpsons that week.

But... I am an old. I remember heartfelt blog posts from some of my favorite webcomics and gaming news sites that were basically "Look. Hosting costs money. Especially as we are getting a lot more popular. I go out of my way to curate what ads we run on this site and have an inbox set up in case a company sneaks a bad one in. Please whitelist me in your ad blocker so I can keep doing this in the evenings".

And... I dunno. It is just REALLY frustrating to watch people pretend they care about... anything all while dicking over "the little guys". Because Google is going to get their cut. The pewdiepies of youtube will also get their cuts because they have literally been doing this for years in the form of sponsored videos. But the low/mid tier creators? They aren't getting the massive sponsor deals (unless they want to do raid shadow legends or better help) AND are going to not be getting their ad revenue or youtube premium money because no ads were run.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

A lot of smaller multiplayer games and older live games. Also a not insignificant number of fighting games.

If you ever noticed rubber banding or games straight up being broken if the wrong player is the host: That is your friendly reminder of how shitty most people's internet setup actually is. People piggy backing off the starbucks on the first floor is a meme for a reason.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Have you ever tried to torrent something less popular? One seed with shit upload getting ganged up on by ten leeches. Five of which disconnect the second they hit 100%.

Regardless, a torrent-like approach would work for large creators like Michael Reeves where thousands of people are going to be willing to act as seeds indefinitely. Someone like Matt Yuan might be lucky to have enough seeds for the latest two videos.

And it also doesn't work for anything live. And becomes a huge mess for premiers where people need to wait for the upload to propagate. MAYBE the latter could be handled with pre-seeding with an unlock coming at the release time but... it is a matter of minutes until a kick level creator nopes out by uploading CSAM "for the lolz"

NuXCOM_90Percent , (edited )

As someone who very much "grew up" on vbulletins and irc for better or for worse, I miss this.

But also... I am not sure if them going away is a bad thing. Small message boards only really worked when people, generally, did not care about moderation. Specifically moderation of hate and the like. Because when you are "a small group of friends', it is a lot easier to ignore the guy with "weird vibes". Same with the people who went out of their way to "keep women out" by insisting on making their signature images so horny that even a diehard Fairy Tail fan would blush.

But, as many of us saw, as those boards get larger? Now you need real moderators. Just having the guy who hosts it in his parents' basement delete the worst stuff no longer works and now they are asking their friends to be mods. And you basically get the same problem people still complain about on discord where you get very cliquey communities and incredibly biased moderation.

And it inevitably leads to boards either becoming a cesspool of hatred, selling the board to an internet company, or just saying "Fuck all y'all" and shutting it down overnight.

And even stuff like legacy tech support or technical knowledge? Those are already a mess of the top result being some greybeard asshole talking about how OP is a jerk and this is a common problem and they should search for it. Or we have the stack overflow problem where the accepted answer is actually wrong.

But also? For living software, bugs change over time. And plenty of times I have found exactly my symptoms/behavior and... it is for something that was fixed three years ago. So I am now looking at a different bug with the exact same symptoms and basically every search engine is worthless.

And... going back to the moderation aspect: One of the biggest Looking Glass Games or Unreal fansites in existence was still MAYBE a hundred or so people who knew it existed and a couple dozen who cared enough to hang out at the forums. Now? The fansite for a mod for the latest Microprose game is one google search away and might get name dropped by an influencer and have thousands of people swarm overnight. Let alone anyone who gets targeted by the latest hate campaign. There are no "small" communities that aren't private and spun out of larger ones.

So... I dunno. I very much miss the good old days. But I also increasingly understand those weren't all that "good". And communities are so ephemeral that they map well to a discord or even a reddit that people rage delete a few months later.

Is the Proton (Mail, VPN, Password Manager) ecosystem any good?

Due to the recent announcement of Proton moving to a non-profit structure (although not becoming fully non-profit) I've decided to take another look at them and really, Proton Unlimited is an enticing offer. However, the fact of everything from mail, to accounts, to storage being in one place is somewhat disconcerting. Also I...

NuXCOM_90Percent , (edited )

I can't speak to their Password Management as I use Bitwarden for that

But I am slowly but surely migrating myself away from gmail to (my own email at my own domain routed to) Proton. The webmail is very much comparable to gmail and, if you communicate with like minded people, it has decent support for signing and even encrypting email both to other proton mail users as well as to complete randos with just a password that you can send later. My only real complaint is that (... for some really good reasons) there is no easy to use exchange server and I need to run their mail bridge to use a desktop client like Thunderbird to send and maanage and (one day) back up emails.

VPN? I switched over to this around the same time I decided I wanted to "take control" of my email and it works pretty well. Very easy to get some openvpn credentials that I can plug into whatever setup I want. And no extra fee for port forwarding unlike SOME providers. That said, my main complaint is that the port is semi-randomized which doesn't play the nicest with my totally legit linux iso torrenting setup... But a quick docker ps and docker logs and then updating the config is pretty trivial and I only have to do it maybe once a week?

The big elephant in the room is that, as you rightfully understand, you are still putting a LOT of trust. But that is actually why I like Proton. Because other companies pretend they are going to knife fight the CIA and the US Government on your behalf all while actively not acknowledging anything until we get a post mortem. Proton are VERY open about just how far they are willing to go to protect you (not very) and what YOU can do to mean that Proton can't provide much useful information once the appropriate paperwork and legal actions have been filed.

I wouldn't trust a paid account with anything more sensitive than what really innovative stuff a friend did with a bun in the dumpster behind the Wendy's the other night. But, hypothetically, if I needed to send an anonymous email? Third party VPN/Tor, clean hardware, and a free Protonmail account works great and I do trust Proton to give the absolute bare minimum in that case.

And just for a bit of context. My "grand plan" is to migrate the vast majority of my correspondence and accounts to email addresses tied to one or more of my own domains. Currently I plan to use Protonmail for the mail server because I don't want that smoke. But the point is that I control the email address so I can get my Heat on and walk away in 30 seconds (actually more like a few hours but...).

Which is why the other aspect of that is that I want to back up the emails I actually want to save (rather than just EVERYTHING like those of us with older gmail accounts do) via a local client that I then archive to an encrypted volume on my NAS and (REDACTED) after that.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I mean, this is actually probably the "right" decision from a shareholder perspective.

Delaware is still going to stop that bribe any time soon. But this way the stock won't tank when musk guts the company out of spite and they can sell off their shares over the next few weeks/months.

Horrible for the company but... that company was already fucked.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

...

Delaware is still going to stop that bribe any time soon. But this way the stock won’t tank when musk guts the company out of spite and they can sell off their shares over the next few weeks/months.

Horrible for the company but… that company was already fucked.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Actually speculation is that twitter and general poor decision making may be overextending him.

He still has more "worth" than any of us can ever dream of. But he doesn't have the liquidity to do anything with it. And considering the strong indications that it is the Saudis and possibly the Russians who bankrolled a lot of the twitter shit...

A good way to think about it is this: Your friend from college who actually managed to buy a house a couple years back? They have more "money" than most people you know. But, unless they are willing to sell that house, they can't do anything with it. So they are still living based on their paychecks and savings in the bank.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Shhh. It is a huge "fuck you" to google to not use their bandwidth or servers for free. Not the actual goal of this.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

What law (and jurisdiction) are you thinking of?

My understanding is that this would be covered with a blanket note on the page if it detects you aren't running Premium.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

The problem is that user generated content still takes time. Which means money. Also, people don't want vlogs with a drywall background anymore and the number of creators who can get away with simple prop free skits are double digit, at best. So making the videos also cost money.

People make up this fantaasy land where art should be done with no compensation to be pure. Which ignores that the vast majority of art in human history was either made by the independently wealthy or as a "patron" system where... an independently wealthy person paid an artist to make them look good.

And that even extends to the modern day. People get angry about "nepo babies" but... it takes a lot of time and money to refine your music to a meaningful degree. The garage bands that get discovered playing at a local bar are VERY much the exception and almost everyone universally considers their best albums to be the first couple after they got signed by a label and could drill down and refine it.

Youtube and the like are basically the first time that "the everyperson" could make art for a living. Unfortunately... that means they need to get paid. Ads are of very questionable use. Youtube Premium is almost universally praised by any creator who is willing to talk about it. But we need some way of paying those mid tier creators who are popular enough to do it for a living but not popular enough to get 120 bucks a year from their fans to upload MAYBE one video (looking at you Michael Reeves).

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

So... because you had a bad they should not even attempt to pursue their dreams and make art/"art"?

Also... I really hope your job is a perfect wonderland with no ethical or moral complications. Otherwise, it is your fault for working there instead of somewhere else, obviously.

We live in a late stage capitalistic hellscape and still snipe each other constantly. Everybody would rather fuck over everyone else than show any degree of solidarity.

NuXCOM_90Percent , (edited )

The problem is that the patreon model inherently only supports the big creators. Many of whom only BECAME big because they had alternative funding sources for so long.

For example: Giant Bomb more or less imploded a few years back. Nextlander (Alex, Brad, and Vinny), Remap (Formerly Waypoint but Patrick Klepek, Rob Zachny, Cado Contreras) , and Jeff Gerstmann (hmmm? I wonder who that could be) and even Giant Bomb (Fandom) are doing great. But people like Abby Russel or Renata Price very much immediately fell into that "Well, I like her but she is one person and I am already blowing 20 or 30 bucks a month on patreons..." hole.

And we see that on youtube/twitch. Creators will mostly not care and then suddenly do a year long subathon because they understand... they are in that threshold where they make just enough off of ad and sponsor revenue that they can just keep their resume updated but are fucked if Youtube/twitch change ANYTHING. They need to get to that threshold where people will subscribe to a patreon.

And the "Well, I will just subscribe to the creators I think are worth it" inherently fucks them over.

I'll add on that, for all his many flaws, Ludwig Ahlgren (?) has done a lot of good discussion on this topic. Because as twitch and youtube stop giving streamers giant signing bonuses, it gets harder and harder for the next crop of big streamers to come into existence. Because if there isn't money to get people out of that O(100) concurrents mid-tier... yeah.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

You still aren't referencing a law. You are just saying you don't like it.

I ANAL and am not a lawyer but: There ARE laws about saying if a video contains paid advertisement. That is why basically every single video on youtube has the "contains sponsored content" tag.

There is no law saying that the specific seconds of the video need to be tagged. Which makes sense. It has been a minute since I watched network TV but I don't recall giant "AD" on my screen any time Hikaru Shida wasn't.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

If google "charged for it like other companies would" then youtube would not exist. The ONLY companies that can handle that volume of data are Google, Amazon, and Microsoft: The three big cloud service providers. And Microsoft noped the fuck out and Amazon have some strong purges on most streams.

And... there were other sites that tried to compete with youtube. Those of us who are old enough will remember subscribing to Rooster Teeth or Giant Bomb but watching the videos on youtube because "the site player is shit". Let alone all the general purpose video sites that either became dirtier than a truck stop lizard who barebacks constantly or became liveleak and was all about Faces of Death and revenge porn... and then went out of business.

Videos is INCREDIBLY expensive. That is why the current rise of sites like Nebula and Gun Jesus's site and Corridor Crew's site all paywall watching anything. Because free video would cost way too much.

If this shit is so expensive, and they want money, they can gate the content like every other streaming service, and then deal with the competition that would swell up.

So... you actively dislike a model where you can choose to watch videos in exchange for watching an ad and instead insist upon paying to watch anything. AND still don't want to pay to watch anything because Youtube Premium lets you do that anyway.

Selfhosted alternatives to Goodreads?

So I finally broke down and made a very poor purchasing decision and ordered an e-ink writer to be a notepad/e-reader hybrid. Partially so that it is less of a hassle to read books I got from kickstarters and the like while still using the kindle app for the disturbing amounts of money I throw at Amazon....

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I very much think smartphones do not belong in the classroom.

That said, I also very much think that assault rifles don't belong in schools. And until we can prevent that, we can't really take away the only way for parents to figure out if their kid is dead or just traumatized.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Are increasingly unavailable on basically any real phone plan and effectively require a dedicated purchase. Rather than giving the kid yoru old motorola you kept in the drawer.

Also, as 9-11 and other "holy shit" moments taught us, having a wide range of ways to communicate with people when EVERYONE is trying to call or even text people (SMS is a best effort protocol for a reason) is important.

Again, if we actually care about the children? Stop fucking shooting them to death. Maybe then we can figure out why they don't need to be constantly connected to everyone they know.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Obviously, these shootings happen, but the solution is not to arm each student with a cell phone, just as it sure as hell isn’t to arm each teacher with a firearm.

You're right. The solution is fucking gun control. Not isolating those kids out of fear that they might give the cops misinformation and there won't e a safe space to play flappy bird while children are being executed.

So how about you shut the fuck up about how it is more important to isolate the kids than to protect them? Hmm?

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Got it. Fuck the "little derps". Their blood makes great gun lube, huh?

ANYTHING to prevent people from actually approaching the real problem of the mass availability of firearms that puts children in a situation where they need to be able to say goodbye to their parents before they are sacrificed to the altar of the AR-15.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Light phones also cost 300-800 (!?!?!) USD and aren't carried by phone providers who give people "a free upgrade" every few years.

Yes, there are the parents who buy their toddler a flagship iphone. The vast majority are just taking the phone they were totally going to recycle that has been living in the junk drawer for years and give it to their kid for emergencies and fortnite.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

The vast majority of phone providers (in the US at least, which is where this is pertinent) have heavily subsidized phones if you agree to an N-month contract. And while the price of that can come out worse, it is also a lot easier for underprivileged people to spend an extra few bucks a month for two years than to set aside that money to make the couple hundred dollar purchase (for better or for worse).

And if you are willing to actually talk to a CSR you can often get the price to pay off that phone completely negated. Which IS good if that phone plan is good for you.

To my knowledge, Light does not partner with any of the major carriers so that is not an option. So you are buying those phones, regardless.

The Internet loves to build this strawman of a first grader who has the latest top end iphone. And... some of those do exist. But mostly it is parents getting a phone either "for free" or actually for free because they agree to not leave Verizon or whatever for 2 years and giving the old one to their kid.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Proton I generally trust because they have made it abundantly clear just what they will give over to authorities in the event of a court order. I would rather it be less but I also prefer that over "We have your back and will fight the CIA if need be" nonsense.

That said: Bitwarden is still the kind of this. And the big issue with a keepass you sync (which I used to do) is that you can't really use that with yubikey style devices because it will get out of sync as far as the authentication codes go.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I mean... they ARE telling you?

Expect a LOT more companies to do stuff like this. Because "deep fake" porn is a plague and nobody (reputable) wants their software to be the go to for violating people.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Sufficiently large orgs probably will be eligible for exemptions under the theory that they are agreeing ahead of time.

But also? The Adobe suite are just leagues better than anything else in that space. Smaller companies with smaller contracts can get away with, frankly, lesser software. But at scale? You need stuff like the "Oh shit, we should stop calling it AI" plugins. And workflows matter a lot when the vast majority of your applicant pool have been using Adobe software for literally decades.

A decent number of the tech youtubers have done "We tried to not use Premier for one week" style videos. And they usually end up coming out with "I guess we could maybe make it work but it just isn't worth it"

Much like with "this is the year of gaming for linux", it is going to need massive amounts of grass roots effort to actually focus on UI/UX over "We don't need that because we are smarter" bullshit. And, eventually, it will be good enough for influencers/taste-makers to give it a chance.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Yes. Photoshop is not currently equal to deepfake porn. It is a few popular plugins away from being it though. Hence getting out ahead of things with content policies.

And... NSFW digital art is not as good money as you think it is. At least, not at the corporate/software level.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Don't pirate anything you use professionally. You are just begging for a lawsuit and to be treated as radioactive in the industry.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

If the software doesn't run?

Yeah. You do. Because unless your company sends you a written email saying to go grab this off the pirate bay, then it is your ass on the line, not theirs.

And if they DO send that email? Document everything and run away as fast as you can.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I mean, have you seen Gadget?

But also... that is kind of the point. Adobe and basically every company that isn't a porn company doesn't care about the revenue from porn. And the companies that DO care about the revenue are constantly fighting piracy.

There are some patreon-like artists who make bank for getting their Source Film Maker on. But they are a handful of licenses, at best.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

With all due respect:

You are a fucking moron if you put yourself at legal or financial risk for your employer. And that is what you are doing when you are using pirated software or other license misuse in a professional environment. Because you know what happens when Mathworks says "What the fuck? Why are we getting pings from the student version of Matlab at Innertrode?"? Your boss says "Oh shit. It must be Johnson. He went against our express instructions and this is a fireable offense"

And then you are fired and your boss doesn't give a shit. Except you are also now the talk around the water cooler because you are a thief and you risked everyone else's jobs in the process. Which tends to bode poorly when your former co-workers are on or near hiring committees at future jobs.

And if it was egregious enough that Mathworks is pissed? Guess what? Your company that you are willing to ride or die for is going to throw you to the wolves and do everything they can to get those fines on you because YOU were violating corporate policy.

If you can't do your job without putting yourself at legal or financial risk then you won't have a job for long. So rather than increase your risk until you get fired, start quiet quitting and interviewing elsewhere before the rest of the company gets sacked.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

It is once you start having to "hack" it, as that user claimed.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Okay? Just... maybe set aside a bit of money for a lawyer. No reason

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

The legality of modding, "modding", and cracking software is still very grey. Arguably intentionally so. Because no company wants to risk a negative ruling and most users aren't dumb enough to go to court with a fortune 500.

If the above user was really talking about just putting a new splash screen on Photoshop 1.5 from 10 years ago (... actually it would probably be closer to 20 or 30 at this point? Damn...)? Sure... but that is also the territory where using gimp or krita or paint.net in production is a much better idea.

But if those "hacks" are to increment versions or allow for plugins made for later versions of photoshop et al to run? That is where you are adding features you never paid for and where you start needing to be ready to cover your ass if you are profiting off of it because now you are "worth" suing.

And... good luck convincing a judge/jury when your argument is anywhere near as shakey as half the justifications for using pirated software in production in this thread are (I especially love the person who apparently feels that it is the company's responsibility to sit down with you and explain the license agreement you are... agreeing to).

Learning a skill or even software? Pirate that shit. There is a reason companies like autodesk have REALLY good "free" versions of their software.

Running a smaller patreon and doing light gig work? You are starting to get into the danger zone but can probably get away with it because "nobody will ever know" so long as you aren't dumb enough to upload the project files.

But once you start working for a "real" company or even reach "small business" levels of youtube? Now you need to actively hide what you are doing because that is the range where some bored person at Company X might look up in the database if you or your company have a license. And for the bigger companies? They might actively be working with Company X to iterate on features for a new release. And... That is also when you have enough money or exposure to be worth getting a C&D and told that you should settle and send them a large sack of cash.

Would you win the lawsuit? I... sincerely doubt it but we are also clearly in fantasy land in this thread and I am not going to bother to try to explain why "But I want it" won't hold up. But... yeah.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

I know AI is the big bogeyman right now (and it is especially pertinent to Adobe because the stuff that makes Photoshop and Premier and the like so good are the "AI" tools they have had... for the better part of a decade), but I think there is almost a zero chance that is a factor in this*

Because... the big companies care about that. If using Illustrator means that all of their content is being used to train models for their competitors? You can bet that MASSIVE amounts of money would be pumped into Inkscape and the like overnight. Almost as much money as they pump into the lawyers who will own Adobe by the end of the month. Same with Premier and Photoshop and all the other ones.

I DO expect Adobe to release something akin to a RAG based tool so that Company A can "save money" by feeding in all of their personal IP as training data to make a semi-personalized model. But there is zero chance that adobe is going ot risk aggregating that themselves.

*: Unless the secret is that Adobe wants to develop a service to detect the probability that art was used in the training of a model or even to implement some form of DRM to identify stolen art. Similar to what those god awful NFT models failed to do.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

That... isn't how these kinds of things work?

If there is legal precedent, it is a no brainer. That is why you don't use pirated software. https://www.technicalactiongroup.ca/these-companies-used-pirated-software-and-lost-millions-of-dollars/ is a random source i found that listed a bunch of legal cases.

But if we are in a grey area based on whatever vague "with hacks" nonsense was going on?

Company sends you a C&D because they decided what you are doing is piracy. They basically say "Give us money and we won't go to court". So you either give them money or try to go to court. At which point... setting aside a bit of money for a lawyer would have been a good idea. Wonder where that great advice came from.

The legal system in most countries (arguably all but I am sure there is a weird niche case) is inherently going to favor the large corporation with a team of lawyers on retainer. Which lets them more or less bully individuals and smaller companies to settle out of court which means that precedent is never actually established. That is where emulation generally lives, for example.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Which, for the umpteenth time, depends on what "with hacks" means. Because you can definitely do stuff that violates the terms of those licenses and, thus, invalidates the copy you are running. I can understand how you can view me continually referencing "hack it" as "deliberately ignoring it". That is on me for assuming reading comprehension.

Which, yet again, boils down to whether The Company thinks it is worth going after you and whether you can convince a lawyer that you even have a case.

Discord: Have you lost access to your email? no worries, just regain access to it! (lemmy.world)

I would have expected them to ask me to message them, in order to resolve the issue of not having access to my old email. Instead, they assume that I still have access to it, by simply contacting my email provider!...

NuXCOM_90Percent , (edited )

There is.

2FA. No, not the fucking "we'll send you an SMS" bullshit that is increasingly used to just highlight an active phone number for spam purposes. Proper TOTP with the code backed up to a proper service (bare minimum, Bitwarden)

Someone can steal your password and even your email account (unless you TOTP that too...). They still can't get into your account unless you are an idiot who gets tricked into providing the 2FA key.

In a perfect world? Have your TOTP credentials in one encrypted database/Bitwarden account and your passwords in another. In reality? Just use a trusted service. I used to be a big fan of Keepass but protecting that with a yubikey (or similar) is a huge mess.

The recent push for passkeys (?) is a nice-ish middle ground. People don't need to understand how to paste a TOTP code into Bitwarden but they still need to approve a login. That said, I hate it since so much of it is dependent on a single device that can generally be opened by just applying REDACTED to the screen and doing REDACTED to narrow down the lock code significantly.

NuXCOM_90Percent ,

Really depends on your current tool so RTFM on that.

But when you are activating it in your account? There is a QR code you are supposed to scan. And there is almost always a button like "Having trouble?" or "Show TOTP Key" or whatever. Click that and you get a long alphanumeric string instead. Paste that into the TOTP field for Bitwarden (or Keepass or whatever) and it will generate codes for you.

Once or twice I have had to actually use my phone camera to decode the QR code so that I can manually type in the TOTP code/seed, but I think the last time I did that was in like 2020?

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