I don’t care about Nazis switching to Linux and neither should you. Not a good look.

This is frightening.

They do not have the ability to just remove e2e back-ups in the UK alone and walk away from this, that’s not how the law is written as I understand it.

The snooper’s charter gives the UK government the RIGHT to DEMAND access to encryption keys of any user GLOBALLY. The law is that they can force the cooperation of Apple to decrypt the account of an American user, of a German user, of a Russian user, of a South African user, of a Brazilian user, of a Japanese user who have never stepped foot in the UK.

So they’re claiming that this protects their users, that they haven’t complied but the only way to avoid complying with these secret gag orders for compromising encryption GLOBALLY at the demand of the UK government is to remove themselves entirely from the jurisdiction of the UK. Is to remove all executives and technical personnel from UK soil, to not hire such people who live in or are citizens of the UK as technical personnel as they could be gag ordered and compelled to cooperate. To basically entirely pull out of any presence but maybe storefronts in the UK and take steps to prevent the arrest and pressuring of their executives and key technical people with access from being subject to UK coercion.

That they haven’t done that means all users globally are still at risk. This may be a big PR stunt to convince people they haven’t caved when in fact they have in secret and will hand over data of global users to the UK which shares it via eyes agreements with the US, with France, Australia, etc. This has the added benefit of allowing the UK to keep such access secret by acting annoyed with Apple but not actually pressing any case. If they try and actually prosecute or pressure Apple that’s a sign that they haven’t cooperated globally, if they only offer angry words to the press IMO that’s a sign that in secret they’ve given access globally and only informed UK users that their cloud data isn’t protected.

An interactive firewall.

One that blocks programs from accessing the internet and prompts the first time they try until you click a button that says allow or you choose the alternative which is deny. A program like this you’d have no reason to give it internet access, it’s something whose operations should be entirely local.

Yet another reason for people to run a default prompt (deny until prompt answer) firewall.

Voyager crashes for me on iOS too. Usually from scrolling too much in All. It’s gotten better but still happens too easily. Doesn’t happen as much in subscribed subs view or local.

i haven’t yet encountered an AP that is capable of providing all of the features that i currently use. ie ad blocking; personal vpn;

Pfsense does both of these. pfblocker NG in particular is a very powerful network adblocker with lots of lists. Pfsense can also run VPNs, it supports openvpn and wireguard in both client and server mode and you can set up multiple so one client, one server.

web hosting; and cloud-like internet accessible storage via ssh tunnel (in addition to others).

If you just need personal services it would be best to run something local, setup a wireguard tunnel on pfsense that gives access to your network and VPN in to access things remotely. If you need to share with others I suppose this can become a problem.

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The thing is. Alcohol can be used in for example cooking. Cigarettes have no good purpose, nothing you can really do with them that has utility outside of direct consumption that exposes you to the full health risks.

And at that point I fear you’re also diminishing the unique harm and danger of cigarettes which produce second hand smoke which exposes others, including kids to health dangers without their consent.

How about we slay the first demon here before starting to equate another lesser one with it? Most people do not have a risk of getting addicted to alcohol, nearly everyone has a risk with a few tries of getting addicted to nicotine and it’s spreading like a plague among children with candy and sweets flavored cartridges for the poison that is e-cigs. This undoing a generation of progress.

It really does risk making more people dismissing the unique dangers and threat of nicotine and smoke products by equating the two and risks creating a DARE moment where the whole thing is just mocked by rising anti-science, anti-expert sentiment spurred on by capitalists eager to undo regulations. I mean things like this are catnip to people like RFK who want to torpedo evidence based science in favor of vibes and snake oil because it presents an in with your average person to criticize the health establishment over at least misplaced priorities.

Drinking on its own is a danger to the drinker. Only when done to excess does it endanger others. Smoking at all produces second-hand smoke and can encourage others to join an addictive behavior that is very, very hard to quit and will be a monkey on their back for years, decades after they stop whereas MOST humans can stop drinking alcohol with less ill effects than stopping daily consumption of caffeine.

Any amount of alcohol is a carcinogen and unhealthy, but at the same time we have to ask what level of risk is okay. Any amount of charred food cooked on charcoal is also a health risk for instance and can lead to exposure to carcinogens. The unique problems of cigarettes and nicotine were always impacts to others who didn’t make that choice including children trapped with smoker parents as well as the addictive properties which left most users trapped or facing a hard fight to stop as well as bad behaviors by industry to hook people while they were young and down. Yes the alcohol industry also tries to get teens and young people to drink but nearly all of them can just stop after they leave college and go on to have a healthy life with zero or limited interactions with alcohol, you cannot say the same for someone who starts using nicotine and uses it heavily for even 6 months.

Once upon a time there was a reddit sub called chapotraphouse. It started as being centered on discussion of a leftish pro-Bernie podcast of the same name but quickly exploded in popularity and became more about general left politics discussion. Over time, especially after Bernie’s defeat in 2016 it shifted more and more left. The sub became a specter haunting reddit, having over a hundred thousand users. Eventually because they tolerated too much talk of killing slave owners (Spez famously said he thought if the world went to shit he’d probably be one of the people in charge of the slaves rather than one himself) as well as other things like being anti-cop they were banned in a both-sides-bad move along with The_Donald by reddit admins right after Trump lost re-election. This was after being quarantined some months previous. After that they built a lifeboat site for their users to gather at, that site eventually came to be a lemmy instance and eventually even later a federated instance so they were one of the first instances.

It’s a leftist lemmy instance. Nominally left-unity with rules against just launching hate tirades against anarchists or Marxists it in practice leans Marxist though has plenty of anarchists, democratic socialists, etc. It’s strongly anti-imperialist so tends to align with Marxist, Marxist-Leninists more than many (but not all) western anarchist groups on global geopolitics. It has stances that many Marxist parties would take issue with however including communities around drug use (the site is banned in China) and certain ideological beefs not really worth listing out here. It is in other words it’s own unique culture.

In addition to being a leftist instance it’s posters are aggressive. People on reddit constantly complained and worried about CTH brigading (whenever the discourse in a front-page sub shifted left people would say that chapo was doing that) and though organized brigading seemed infrequent compared to how often people suspected it*, many of its users were incredibly active posters and there were a lot of them. So it has a kind of shit-poster history. Whereas some instances would just ban someone or remove their comments, they’ll spam images of a pig pooping on its balls at people they disagree with first. Their way of interacting with those they disagree with is very strident and at times could certainly be interpreted as rude, they’re very blunt and don’t tend to do civil discourse. They can be antagonistic to an extent though it’s not like they’re a harassment site that will follow around an enemy user for days outside of their own instance.

*(it did happen in as much as they posted links to comments and posts they disagreed with until the quarantine when they stopped doing that, BUT they were accused more often than they could possibly do so as most of the sub was not about making posts like that)

And it should be mentioned they did have strong policies against bigotry which were enforced. They also had a large trans community. So they weren’t fascists. They were not reactionaries. They did not have a culture of hate for marginalized groups. I’ve certainly had unpleasant interactions with users of theirs but I’ve also had pleasant ones. Some of them come off as real assholes, many don’t.

He does have a MASSIVE constellation of satellites used for his shitty internet. What if. Just what if part of their defense shield idea is sneakily using Starlink satellites brilliant pebbles style to take down incoming missiles by just dropping them out of the sky in the path of incoming? Or putting some sort of secret payload on them that enables them to do a bit more than just drop.

As an extra step you can block DNS requests to external services from within your network to prevent devices trying to reach hardcoded for example Google DNS servers to bypass your filtering which isn’t uncommon with some IoT/streaming devices. Best to both block the known IPs as well as have DNS redirects for the urls that point back to your firewall at whatever IP it’s using to serve DNS from. There is a list called DoH servers by name or something like that which you can add to the blocklist to try and prevent usage of any DNS but your own.

at least 12GB of RAM,

Doesn’t exist and frankly not necessary. At present nothing needs this much RAM and I say this as a power user who runs a local media server and is familiar with concepts such as running Plex with remote transcoding on devices such as the Shield. The only things that come close to this much RAM might be recent generation gaming consoles like Xbox or Playstation but they don’t run Android and aren’t built for streaming, remote controls are third party accessories.

Other problems: I’m unaware of any devices even without the high RAM request that exist that fulfill all of those asks. Particularly 4k 120hz seems to be something no one has any interest in putting in a streaming box despite plenty of them having HDMI 2.1. I checked and even Apple TV 4K’s do not support 120hz despite having the right hardware for it.

Fact is commercial streaming services which these devices exist to cater to have no interest in 120fps/hz content, even 60fps with dolby vision is kind of more bandwidth than they like using and they upcharge premiums for it.

Basically your choices are (all these assume giving up the RAM ask):

• Run two devices, one for local streaming of things like games and 120fps content, one for watching streaming services that’s Android TV certified and will get you 4k content from them (at only 60fps). Cost is probably going to be north of $300. You can with this option get a mini-PC and kind of hack together a game streaming solution and if you want you can put 12GB of RAM in it but you won’t need them.
• Buy something that ticks most of the boxes but either give up the ability to stream 4K content from commercial services (because no Android TV certification) OR give up the 120fps demand. If you’re willing to give up the 120hz you might look into the Dune-HD premier 4k pro which has full Android TV support and certification for 4K streaming from all the major services, does 4k 60fps, has very impressive specs for a streaming device (top of the line) and is $200 and you can add an SSD to increase the storage from acceptable 32GB to well over a TB if desired. Otherwise if you’re willing to give up 4K from commercial streaming services and get only 1080p from them they have a few 8K devices that do have support for 120fps but the price doubles and if you want 4k on the major streaming services you’ll need another device.

Other options if you’re willing to give up the 120hz demand would be the Nvidia Shield Pro. As to a remote that controls everything, I believe the Dune-HD remotes do have that capability but honestly your wants are really specific and high end. Most people would use two boxes if they HAD to have all you’ve asked for.

You might also consider waiting to see if Valve does release a streaming device like they’ve teased. If Valve does something like that it might finally be the golden one that has 120hz support though you’re still not going to get 12GB of RAM. But you’re looking at waiting a year at least I think even if that does materialize and it may not.

What they told you is misleading.

Transcoding and burning in subtitles for Plex and similar only happens in some cases if your streaming device doesn’t support image based subtitles. Plex themselves could fix this on a lot more devices but don’t.

10 years ago it was the case that there were a LOT of issues with anything but text subtitles. These days it depends. If you’re running it directly off a smart tv (bad experience anyways, not recommended) it’s likely to be an issue. If you’re using an Android streaming device or Apple TV or gaming console there’s a good chance the subs just work.

Truth is lots of things can force transcoding with Plex including using certain audio formats in certain media containers. Most of these days picture subs work. If you can get text subs it’s not a bad thing but I wouldn’t go through the hassle of doing flawed OCR unless you can confirm it’s an issue you’re experiencing with your setup.

Console batch file for mkv merge should do that as long as subs are named same as video files (or something consistent like that name +subs).

You’d want to target the sub files not idx. If that fails I’d just do an intermediate step of merging the sub and idx files into an mks file then merging that into the mkv. The gui only needs the sub files added. I’ll try and come back to this though someone else already posted a script that should be able to be adapted to do this.

People got flack for saying Proton is the CIA, Proton is NSA, Proton is a joint five-eyes country intelligence operation despite the convenient timing of their formation and lots of other things.

Maybe they’re not, maybe their CEO is just acting this way.

But consider for a moment if they were. IF they were then all of this would make more sense. The CIA/NSA/etc have a vested interest in discrediting and attacking Chinese technology they have no ability to spy or gather data through. The CIA/NSA could also for example see a point to throwing in publicly with Trump as part of a larger agreed upon push with the tech companies towards reactionary politics, towards what many call fascism or fascism-ish.

My mind is not made up. It’s kind of unknowable. I think they’re suspicious enough to be wary of trusting them but there’s no smoking gun, yet there wasn’t a smoking gun that CryptoAG was a CIA cut-out until some unauthorized leaks nearly a half century after they gained control and use of it. We know they have an interest in subverting encryption, in going fishing among “interesting” targets who might seek to use privacy-conscious services and among dissidents outside the west they may wish to vet and recruit.

True privacy advocates should not be throwing in with the agenda of any regime or bloc, especially those who so trample human and privacy rights as that of the US and co. They should be roundly suspicious of all power.

An equivalent system was set up after World War II with a peace anchored by the Allied Powers, decolonization, and the US-Soviet rivalry. That system has lasted for about 80 years and is showing significant strain.

What? No it hasn’t. The cold war ended by 1992 at the latest. At that point the US achieved total, unipolar hegemony over the world and began exercising it. Clinton’s “interventions” in Kosovo, Africa, etc. The Bush era Neo-Cons, those were all results of a new era of unchallenged American power and hegemony. That marked a new era.

Right now the world, led by China and Russia as well as other members of BRICS are trying to buck that total dominance and hegemony of the US and set up a multi-polar world but the US is not letting go, it is not ceding power, it has replaced international law as set out in agreement with the victorious powers of WW2 with “rules based order” which means its way or the high-way, the rule of their might and their wants and nothing else matters. Trump is flexing that built up power, the fact they control SWIFT, the fact the dollar is world reserve currency, their incredible ability to do sanctions to anyone anywhere and put a big hurt on them for defying US interests and wants. He’s unleashing the full might, threatening sanctions, tariffs, straight up invasion to take Greenland or the Panama Canal, etc. All to do what? To maintain US primacy, to prevent the emergence of a multi-polar world where the US doesn’t dominate everyone else and set the terms and rules for the entire world.

So there are movements to try and strive towards a Westphalian (multi-polar) order led by China, Russia, and followed in those steps by other BRICS nations but they are cautious, they don’t want to anger the US and even China still backs down if the threats of sanctions gets too big. So right now we’re in a struggle to determine what kind of world we have either a continuation, a hardening of US empire and unipolar hegemony, unchallenged dominance of the world and its peoples to their dictates and benefits or else a multi-polar world structured around Westphalian principles of sovereignty of individual nations and cooperation and peace born out of multiple strong powers checking each other’s ambitions against other weaker nations.

The US ended an era of struggle and some independence for nations on its own after it won the cold war, it chose to build up its power, to break international law (Yugoslavia, Iraq, war on terror, sanctions regimes galore, etc), to replace it with “rules based order” which no one can solidly define the rules of because they’re ever shifted based on the wants and needs of the US.

Yeah they include a gigabit ethernet port which is really useful for full quality 4k, amazing how many cheaper streaming devices only have 10/100 ports which I suppose is adequate if all you do is stream Netflix.

But to me it’s just cheaping out to save a dollar or two on the manufacturer’s part that with ethernet & protocol overhead could result in problems potentially even for 1080p streams. Whereas gigabit even with overhead and lackluster conditions you’re going to get 700-800mbps sustained. People think for 1080p bluray dumps for instance that oh bitrates are only around 40-50mbps average but if you fast forward, if you’re seeking around the actual bitrate being consumed jumps to double or more at times and that 100mbps port will choke on that and buffer whereas the gigabit will not flinch. And though I don’t use the playback speed option myself much Infuse does allow playing back at 1.5 and 2x speeds which consume around 1.5x and 2x the bitrate respectively.

But it’s just nice to not have to deal with wireless hiccups too.

I’m assuming you mean the first generation of the Apple TV 4k or the Apple TV HD, that is that your box is black in color? (reference: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101605)

The actual first generation Apple TV is white, originally debuted in 2007, has a hard drive as opposed to flash memory and runs a modified version of MacOS rather than modern tvOS. If you were indeed using the very first generation I’d be impressed you can do anything streaming related with it.

All generations after that have HDMI CEC support and IR remotes. How the volume is controlled can be changed via a setting in the settings app on the Apple TV but as mentioned you should make sure your TV has that setting on.

Additionally iPhones have a built in remote app and you should be able to change the volume using the buttons on the side of your phone while you have the app open and connected to your Apple TV (connection to the same WiFi network is necessary). You can access this remote by adding it to the control center from settings, typing remote in search or pulling down the control center from the top right, in the top right the music/now playing tile when clicked on has a button at the bottom that says “control other speakers and TVs” and when clicked will show a list, once one is selected there’s a button you can press to open the remote.

Here’s an Apple support page on volume control: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108789

Putting this here as another comment so as to not get too lengthy in my original reply:

The only other things I can recommend in the streaming space would be Dune-HD’s products which are more expensive than Apple TV (though not more than Nvidia shield pro) and are not quite as simple and easy to use but do offer customization and a nice virtualized linux+androidtv system on some of their models AND maybe the Nvidia Shield Pro with caveats. But I have a bit of a bone to pick with the Shield for a number of reasons:

1. Price. They haven’t updated the hardware in 5 years and have changed it from a premium product without ads to standard AndroidTV with ads on the homescreen yet charge the same $200 price, meanwhile Apple dropped the price on their AppleTV and is eating their lunch with annual hardware updates and regular software updates that bring new functionality
2. Features. The shield still has bugs around things like framerate switching while AppleTV does not nor does Dune-HD’s products
3. The lack of updates, the move from a premium android experience without homescreen ads to one with ads. I feel it could be killed off any moment, they’re just lazily milking the product which is probably the only reason they haven’t. You /can/ with some effort alter the launcher to a 3rd party launcher to lose the ads but it’s not easy, it usually requires revisiting and you can do the same thing with the Dune-HD products and they care a lot more and offer a lot more IMO.

The only reason you might really prefer Dune-HD over an Apple TV is the ability to side-load a modded youtube app if you use that a ton but even that feels up in the air with how hard Google is going in their war on anyone using things like that and how successful they’ve been against it. You can’t block ads in ad-supported major streaming services (Netflix, Max, Hulu, Disney+, etc), neither with pihole nor any other way I’m aware of.

Beware I have heard that the latest revision of the Onn 4k box locks down the bootloader and prevents people from doing this as they found out and obviously wanted that data. Specifically I believe only models from before 2024 (should be model number that indicates this) still work with this.