Tankie is a sort of derogatory term for people who whitewash and cover up the horrors of communism.

There was a rebellion in the Soviet Union. The SU responded by rolling tanks into town and violently busting it. This put two sides of communism at odds; On one hand, there was the plight of the working class (the rebellion) and then on the other there were the actions of the people in control (the tanks). Tankies are the “communism has only ever helped people, you’re just listening to capitalist propaganda” folks who decided to side with the tanks, instead of siding with the working class. It’s sort of like calling someone a fake communist, [insert “No True Scotsman fallacy” argument from a tankie below], because a “real” communist would side with the working class.

You see it a lot on Lemmy because many instances have some major communist lean. After all, the “anyone can run their own instance and be in charge. No centralized instances, if you don’t like the mods you can just change instances” concept of the Fediverse jives very well with communist ideals. For instance, the “ml” in lemmy.ml is meant to stand for “Maoist/Leninist”. And that means the entire communist spectrum is on display; From both the more moderate “yeah communism has some cool parts but was also responsible for some major humanitarian crises” to the more extreme “those crises [were caused by individuals, not by the political system]/[never actually happened at all. They’re lies made up by capitalists to deter people from supporting communism!] Communism never actually hurt anyone.”

Yeah, booting from USB is something you see a lot in the data security and/or privacy-oriented circles. Because many USB boot drives are designed to be volatile, meaning nothing about the OS is actually stored on the drive. So you can nuke the whole OS just by unplugging the drive.

Basically every (smart) drug dealer who orders their supplies on Tor uses a USB drive OS, so if the cops ever bust down their door they can just yank the USB and destroy all evidence of their online orders.

But it can also be useful for test-driving a particular repo. If you ever manage to fuck things up royally, you’re just one reboot away from a fresh start.

Or a flash drive. You can just boot it from a flash drive to see if you enjoy it. Set your motherboard BIOS to boot from USB before booting from an internal drive. When the flash drive with Linux is plugged in, it’ll boot from that instead of booting Windows.

Microsoft took a big bite out of GRUB, which is the utility that your motherboard uses to dual boot OSes. A Windows update basically borked it and set Windows as the mandatory default OS. It basically makes it so your motherboard can’t properly identify your Linux install(s).

Luckily, you can fix it directly in Windows Command Prompt. But still, it’s a dirty trick that Microsoft has been using recently. Windows has historically been a bad neighbor for other OSes, (for instance, the Secure Boot Module is basically an attempt to make booting other OSes difficult,) but this was the first time in recent history that they have outright prevented another existing OS from booting.

Yup. The big downside to flatpak is that, as you said, it takes up more space.

To make a Windows comparison, imagine needing to install Java separately for every single program that needs it. Flatpaks tend to be orders of magnitude larger than technically necessary, simply because they’re sandboxed and come with everything they need to run, even if you already have it installed.

Loose lips sink ships. Don’t be that guy, y’all.

The irony is that what they’re talking about is even older than torrents. It’s just less heavily policed.

I meant specifically with the Apple TV, since that was the topic of conversation. In case you weren’t aware, the Apple TV is just a box. It’s not an actual screen. So the consoles, DVD, cable, etc are irrelevant as they would be plugged directly into the screen as well. You’d just change screen inputs to use those.

Apple TV has a fully functional Plex app. In fact, it’s pretty widely regarded as one of the most compatible Plex clients, and it’s able to DirectPlay all of the major codecs. It’s better than the apps that come built into the major smart TV brands like Roku, as many of those don’t support modern codecs like HEVC/H.265.

Pihole would happen on the DNS level. It’s not something that would require specific compatibility with the Apple TV. Unless you’re not running it on your whole network, and are manually assigning devices to it via custom DNS for each device? That would be odd, but maybe you don’t have control over your router. But even then, you can just change the network settings on your device to point its DNS at your pihole.

As far as android phones go, are you just looking for screen mirroring? Or looking to use it as a remote? Either way, you can do that; There are apps for remote control on the Google Play store.

Existing and future streaming services will likely be better supported on Apple TV than on something Iike a Samsung TV. Hell, my Samsung TV already doesn’t fully support Plex, because the app hasn’t been updated in literal years. Apple is actually pretty well known for legacy support. Hell, their fourth generation Apple TV from 2015 still has support. That’s almost a decade of support. Meanwhile, my Samsung TV is only ~5 years old, and already has apps that haven’t been updated in literal years.

Apple gets flak from the android users every time they phase out an old model of hardware, but in reality they have a better track record than most android manufacturers. It was always funny seeing the Android users memeing about Apple phasing out a 6 or 7 year old device, when their phone is half as old and is already unsupported. Google has improved with this in recent years, but only because Pixel users raised hell and started complaining to the FTC about getting dropped after only 3 years.

One is a Samsung, and the other is a Roku. The Roku is a little bit noisier, but not by much.

If you want customization and the ability to sideload apps, get an Nvidia Shield. There are custom OSes you can load which remove a lot of the spammy ad BS that the Shield’s default OS has baked in.

If you want ease of use and setup, get an Apple TV. It won’t natively run all of your pirated hentai apps, but it at least has Plex so you can stream custom content from a server if you set one up.

AdGuard as a service is alright, but it’s essentially just a pihole that you don’t have any control over. It does DNS level blocking, which means the ads get blocked before they even load on your network.

The issue is that since you’re routing all of your DNS traffic through AdGuard, you’re directly telling AdGuard which sites you are using. So there are concerns that you are just shifting the data collection from the ad companies to AdGuard instead, but AdGuard has the ability to be way more invasive in how the collect data.

Just set up dual piholes (one for your primary DNS, and one for your secondary DNS) instead. You get the exact same end result, without any of the data collection worry.

For consumer grade gear, Ubiquiti is probably the best bet. Unless you want to get into the commercial side of things, but that’s prohibitively expensive for the average person.

Personally I run a GL.iNet system. I like it being completely open source, and the Flint 2 is a workhorse of a router. But as far as ease of use and config, Ubiquiti is certainly more straightforward.

That would only work until your neighbor leaves their guest WiFi open.

What other ecosystems do you need your TV to interface with? It has a remote, or you can use your phone to control it. And it has all the major streaming apps you would want in a smart TV.

I blocked my two TVs from phoning home via my pihole. They are the two noisiest devices on my network, by leaps and bounds.

On a day of heavy usage, my phone and desktop may get ~2000 blocked requests combined. That’s high, but not unheard of. It just means I did a lot of browsing, with a lot of blocked ad requests. My TVs average somewhere around 7500 blocked requests per day, on days that I haven’t even turned them on. That’s an attempt to phone home every ~12 seconds. And it is much worse on days that I actually use them.

Yup. The way I’ve always described it is this:

Http means your employer knows you watched porn on the company WiFi, and they also know which specific videos and what your username for the site is. If site security is particularly lax, they may even know your password.

Https means your employer can see you watched porn on the company WiFi, but they don’t know which video(s) specifically, and they don’t know your login info.

VPN means your employer only knows you connected to a VPN. They may be able to take educated guesses at what type of content you were viewing (streaming video, for example, has a pretty easily identifiable pattern of data transfer,) but they don’t know what video you were watching, or what site it was coming from. The VPN service knows you watched porn, but the aforementioned rules about http and https still apply; If you’re using https, they don’t know specifics.

Tor means even the VPN doesn’t know which specific video(s) you’re watching, because they just see a connection to another Tor node, which sees another tor node, which sees another tor node… Etc. In order to know what you’re watching, they would need to own every node in the chain. If they own both the entry and exit node they may be able to match it to you with a timing attack, (they see packets going into the Tor network at the same time they see packets coming out towards you). Again, they can make educated guesses based on pattern recognition, but they won’t have a clear picture without owning both your entry and exit nodes and performing a timing attack.

Now you can substitute “your employer” for anyone who is trying to get your info. Public WiFi spoofer, your ISP, etc…

Yup, browsing on lemmynsfw is interesting, because redgifs automatically blocks Texas IPs. So it’s a nice handy reminder to enable my VPN, because gifs refuse to load.

Ironically, your link is broken on Voyager because it doesn’t treat anything before the https as a link. It just leads straight to the normal pay walled site.

You need to embed the link for it to actually work. And even then, it may not work on this comment because it’ll try to route to my home instance due to having a Lemmy.world link for my image.

Yeah, N64 speedrunners even went as far as replacing their aging analog sticks with machined steel sticks. Because as the console ages, so do the controllers. And stick drift became a major problem for speed runners who used genuine consoles. There was even a case where an aging controller led to the discovery of a new glitch, when a speedrunner’s NES controller had gotten so old that it allowed him to press button combos that wouldn’t have been possible with a new controller. And that button combo allowed him to perform glitches that would have been otherwise impossible on a console.

The larger issue is accessibility. If speed running requires a genuine console, it severely limits the number of people who can afford to participate. There would be a big financial barrier just to buy the console and game(s), and since no new consoles are being made it will inevitably lead to the death of speedruns as consoles die out and nobody can continue playing.

One of the original goals of emulation was data preservation, since it quickly became evident that game companies wouldn’t bother preserving their own games. And as consoles age, that will only become more and more important. I personally have backups of all of my legitimately purchased Nintendo games. But that’s only because I enjoy data hoarding and have a NAS that can actually store all of it. Not everyone has that luxury, and it means that (again) there will be a big financial barrier to anyone wanting to be able to play the games that they legally purchased and have the right to play.

They’re probably talking about the BMG rootkit from the early 2000’s. Basically, when you inserted a Sony CD into your computer, it would automatically and silently install a rootkit on your PC, which introduced a backdoor on your PC that was being actively exploited. It was also notoriously difficult to remove, as it would reinstall itself even if you deleted every visible trace of it (and improperly installing it could disable access to your CD drive entirely.)

Then when shit hit the fan and Sony was making headlines for it, they released a “fix” for it. The fix didn’t actually remove the rootkit, and simply hid files with specific names (the rootkit files) from the users. This only introduced another vulnerability, where hackers could just name any virus the same as the rootkit, and it would automatically be hidden.

It led to several very large lawsuits and state investigations. Sony was raked over the coals by multiple state attorneys general, and the FTC even published warnings urging consumers not to buy Sony CDs.

All in the name of DRM. The rootkit was initially meant to stop you from ripping and copying the CD. Oh, and the rootkit contained sections of improperly credited open source code. So Sony stole from OSS programmers while claiming that they were trying to prevent IP theft.