The top two are very much standard industry tools. It’s not that this company per se has a preference for using zionist products it’s that they’re really the only game in town because no competitor comes close.

It would be a lot easier if their clients were corporations and businesses and you were asked to do things like incident response to systems compromises, retrieving information improperly deleted by people acting against company orders. Other mundane things like that. Non-criminal, white collar stuff is a lot easier and less ethically fraught.

Only you can decide whether this is moral stuff. It’s not mass surveillance true but I’d have to wonder what kinds of matters you’d be dealing with. If it’s child abuse, human trafficking, narcotics, criminal networks that doesn’t seem to be a moral issue to me. On the other hand if you’re being asked to assist breaking into the phones of climate change or pro-Palestine protestors or similar that would IMO present an ethical dilemma.

If you think you’re strong enough to say no and possibly be fired for it should such a case come to you then I think taking the job is fine. If you feel you’d be coerced by the salary and the friction of finding a new job into doing things you’d hate yourself for then I’d give it a pass.

As others said someone will certainly fill this position and that person may have no moral scruples about privacy or human rights at all as you do.

I’m sure every cent will be spent on lobbying for ID checks to get online or use a computer in the name of child safety.

Doesn’t matter. They’ve been replacing the content people with repost bots and AI bots for years and most people won’t notice if half those power posters leave as a result. Many of the power posters would stay on Reddit anyways short of being charged $10/post simply for the feeling of being important which they derive from being influential.

Thats not even getting into how the US Air Force has been astroturfing Reddit for over a decade with most active city Eglin Air Force base and would therefore put paid effort in to keep it afloat and their psyops reaching minds. Heck tons of organic posters leaving gives them a chance to seize mod positions and make trustworthy names for accounts under their control.

Yes. Certs can expire after whatever time the issuer wants to set for them. That could be six months or 20 years. Some infrastructure has limits on max and min lengths (more max than min usually) but not all and there are best practices as well.

More importantly the certs could have been five years old by the time this person got the TV for a total age of 8 years.

It’s actually very easy. Don’t use your TV as anything but a display. Don’t connect it to the internet ever.

If you need to watch content on it get an appropriate device. If you want to watch BluRays buy a BluRay player. If you want to do streaming buy a streaming device at a price point and privacy level to your liking. Yes the streaming devices collect some data too but they don’t have mics and cameras and they can’t tell corporations and the government the contents of the vacation photo slide show off your laptop which you plugged in. Also you can in future often neuter many of the more expensive streaming devices and if you get sick of the streaming device you have, you can just buy a different one and sell the old one.

As to librelec and “sucking”. If you’re trying to do yo-ho stuff with free streaming sites and services it isn’t going to be great. Frankly if you want some quality and good experience either pay for a commercial streaming service (or a good IPTV one*) or invest in learning how to host your own content with an Arr stack. This used to be a lot cheaper but AI has ruined everything. Nothing we can do about that.

*yeah good ones are hard to find and one should never pay ahead as many of them vanish suddenly.

Read the freaking date:

HEADLINE JUN 23, 2021

That’s because they were hacked or exploited for an uncontrolled ability to upload searchable documents that get indexed. Very common with universities and gov sites. A real plague honestly.

And there’s a non-zero chance they tried hacking you by directing you to a malware payload.

I would never follow links found in a pdf. Heck I would never open a suspicious pdf like that given it could be the payload.

Use dbzero’s piracy wiki megathread of links to find reasonably safe sources for this stuff not random links.

Then you’re very ignorant.

Apple’s presence is good because it’s a privacy anonymizing service that obscures your email and forwards anything to an email of your choice and logins/connections can be deleted at any time.

And it was introduced in response to the long existing proliferation of login with Google and Facebook and similar schemes. They forced it using their App Store because otherwise no company would go for the user identity obfuscation over the already existed for years privacy invasive alternatives. Apple came late and forced companies to allow their privacy obfuscation alternative. Note: though it often is more private some sites can request additional data from Apple same as from Google and Facebook such as your name. Apple is no worse and often better overall as a choice just the same though it’s best to avoid these types of login IMO.

Unfortunately with AI induced RAM pricing prices are up across the board so cheap is out if you want extra functionality.

You can get as someone suggested the OSMC device. As well as various other third party streamer devices that support OSMC or CoreElec though the Vero does hit near the top for features for video watching as per the spreadsheet linked here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=385600

But if you want general purpose distros that allow emulation you probably want an N150 or similar mini-PC. The tricky part there is that while you can get lets of cheaper older used mini-PCs for emulation if you want to do hardware 4K HDR video content decoding then you need something more recently made for efficiency sake so you’re not pushing the processor to the max just watching videos.

If it has to be under $250 then your options are things like the Vero V or other streaming focused devices but you give up general purpose distro and emulation (I think, Kodi does technically offer a games feature but I’ve never used it and am not familiar) OR else you’re going with a used mini-PC that will okay for general purpose distro and light emulation may struggle with your 4K HDR content depending on video codec used and bitrate.

If you can afford a bit more >$250 but <$350 you can get an N150 or similar intel system that should handle all of the above.

A caveat on the N150 route though is currently there is no support for Dolby Vision, HDR+, etc. You only get plain old HDR and that’s not likely to change anytime soon as it’s a driver issue and no one makes one.

If streaming your own video content is your most important goal and you may need things like DV and other HDR+ formats then go with the Vero V or another item listed near the top of the Kodi list like the Ugoos or Homatics.

Yeah until it starts hitting widespread hardware decode support (streaming devices and phones) it’s pretty much just a curiosity to all involved as the only things traditionally powerful enough to software decode these codecs at 4k without overheating are computers and I don’t see that changing.

If h266 gets hw decode support on a bunch of common chips first it’ll be a real blow licensing freedom or not.

They’re sovereign.

American tech companies. American national security organs cannot touch them, cannot put the hurt on them. They are independent and there is nothing Meta, Google, Oracle, etc can do to them. Look at Europe, look at the rest of the world on Facebook and Oracle products with a big gun right at their temple held in the CIA’s hand if they do something the US doesn’t like. China doesn’t have that gun at its head and because of that China can be truly sovereign from the US.

Meanwhile same country: it’s the internet! It’s creating misogyny out of thin air! We have to ID check everyone for everything!

IMO it’s fair to read this as an NSA/eyes move. AMD is embedded in the western global mass surveillance architecture and by closed sourcing they can hide NSA back doors more easily.

Fact is the west is locking down all computing and doesn’t want there to be anywhere to flee for hobbyists or the Chinese. This also prevents the Chinese from benefiting from these tools if they slap sanctions on.

It’s not a fallacy when multiple countries/states have passed laws that explicitly demand some form of ID confirmation/scanning and others have stated an intent for it. It’s not a fallacy when you understand what the purpose of this push actually is.

The fact is the end result isn’t going to be compliance with the least restrictive standard but the most. That’s how regulatory compliance always works. You always comply with the most restrictive because it encompasses the least restrictive as well. Further if you stopped to think and analyzed history scientifically instead of it being a series of great man events or whatever you’d understand how capitalism in crisis reacts by crushing the working class using tools like fascism. That the 5-eyes spying abuse far from being some deviation from liberalism embody the deeper desires and wants of the modern western world to spy on and control their citizens and the world and that a free internet has been an incredible threat to state power since day one.

It’s just the first big moment where their propaganda failed, where their narrative was undermined was the Gaza genocide and they will do anything to prop up the Zio-Nazi entity occupying Palestine and prevent their other narratives from suffering the same fate in future. A man in the “free speech” loving EU was unpersoned FFS and can’t be given money, buy food, stay at hotels, use banks, anything for deviating too far from the approved EU narrative. These are the people we’re dealing with.

It’s also not a fallacy when AI has created a crisis for private/government spy fusion platforms like Meta, Google, etc in both gaining ad dollars due to AI bots being hard to discern so hard identifying humans is a must for not only spying but profits from ads.

For a long time the material interests of the massive tech companies and their financial backers and shareholders did not particularly benefit from this kind of ID law and so they pushed back and disallowed it. Now thanks to AI their interests align with those of the state, the capitalist propaganda organs, the moral crusaders. There is in other words nothing major standing in their way and tons of power centers pushing for this as a result of AI, the Gaze genocide breaking containment, etc and it has gained momentum.

I’m afraid this isn’t the win you think it is.

One of two things will happen in the near future:

1. Nearly everything you do online from banking to shopping to social media (including online gaming) to paying your electric or internet bill to yes porn will require OS-level attestation to access and use the site. Linux lacking this will become an incredibly private OS that is useless for anything online making this a defeat for Linux having any hopes of real desktop market share and/or forcing it to comply. Microsoft, Apple, Google would love to push Linux as an OS option off the table.

2. Kids will start using liveboot or installing Linux and evading these controls, Christian fascists, tech overlord capitalists, and the government will take notice and write a bill to close this “loophole” and within a few years having already established the idea in the popular conception that age verification is okay will face lesser resistance in quickly ramming it through.

For less than a million dollars they’d do it a dozen times over just to make an example of people like that.

Absolute bargain for them compared to the chilling effects and satisfaction they got out of punishing this guy for a month for his speech. It should be 5 times as big.

Quickly running out of places where VPN companies can be legally incorporated/based and where exit servers can be located that aren’t subject to advancing laws like these.

All the fools who were saying “lol they can’t ban VPNs, impossible!!!” are looking well ever more foolish and will feel very confused and shocked when the pain actually hits them and they realize it’s not so easy and they were wrong and complacent and too late now to do anything. But these are primarily westerners who’ve never had the western sanctions regime and its full power turned against anything they care about so they can be forgiven a bit for not understanding how powerful it is, its total dominance of financial exchange and how lacking a counter state interest by Russia or China in spinning up their own censorship resistant VPN for western users there isn’t really much counter to it. Russia and China are going to sit and laugh at you flailing about in the tattered remains of your liberal illusions of freedom and not lift a finger to help.

Sure you can pay for a VPS and spin up a VPN on that but that has your credit card on it with your name making it clear its you doing it and providing zero plausible deniability and as a non-residential IP you’re going to be getting increasing amounts of blocks by anti-AI-scraper methods as well as fraud alerts. Also it doesn’t hide you in the crowd so even advertisers who don’t have access to your credit card like authorities would will be able to associate all your activity back to one person and it’s just a short correlation from there via a mistake back to your real identity. Also won’t help much with torrenting copyright content as your provider will drop you at the first sign of trouble. Maybe you can find one that shrugs off DMCAs but I bet you’ll be paying through the nose. No more $5/month long term plan, get ready for $25/month and much higher than that and you still won’t necessarily be able to avoid ISP throttling of your traffic if they move to allow-listing for uncapped speeds only to known services and throttle everything else.

Very grim.

Doesn’t work. Not a Linux issue. No graphics card or motherboard maker connects the hardware correctly to support CEC on PCs. It’s an industry-wide practice.

There is the pulse eight injector which together with software can inject CEC with a USB connection with the caveat it can’t turn your computer on and it’s a hacky and imperfect solution for tinkerers rather than production ready equipment. Also it’s only HDMI 2.0 not 2.1.

Except it notes that the wireguard dev definitely complied with that so while Microslop might be hiding behind that fiction it is just a fiction and not the real cause.

I’m suspicious if it isn’t because the US has discovered something exploitable in both wireguard and veracrypt and want to prevent it being patched while they (the US) unleash it against their enemies over a prolonged period. That or just crushing privacy.

Linux stay winning I guess as this would be the first case in history where Microsoft has used its position as gatekeeper to prevent Windows users from running software they want to run in this manner. Even worse you have to disable driver signature enforcement system-wide to bypass it, it’s more locked down than Apple which can grant per application gate-keeper exemptions. It’s just up until now Microsoft handed out driver signing like candy.

It’s interesting both of these are also tools likely be targeted by the “child safety” panic being shopped around to enact ID laws. Encryption without a backdoor is something they really hate whether it’s for data in transit or at rest.

One last thought is that Microsoft mentioned kicking third parties out of the kernel after the Crowdstrike fiasco where they borked a ton of airline computers due to awful practices. Many hoped it would mean kicking anti-cheat out of the kernel but it would be very Microsoft to start with kicking privacy tools out instead and simply insist that using Windows bitlocker is enough and Windows VPN settings are adequate and therefore these software needn’t be in the kernel.

For proprietary streaming apps where I want to be able to see what’s going on because I’m allowed a higher resolution than a 720p blurry mess? Apple’s TVos seems pretty great. Zero ads, smooth, devices are overpowered for watching just TV. It does have apps for Jellyfin and Plex though I’d have to suggest infuse instead which is a $12 annual subscription for 4k or any proprietary audio codecs but it does work pretty well.

For everything else some version of libelec or corelec depending on the device in question it’s being installed on. There are also external launchers that keep Android but remove most of the problems.

If you want plug and it works then AppleTV. If you’re interested in putting in some work maybe a custom launcher on an android install. Beyond that libelec, coreleck, and Kodi.

Kodi maintains a big csv list of hardware (and software) with capabilities and suggestions here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=376035