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I'm disappointed in how many pro-piracy comments are in this thread. Free speech does not mean you have the right to steal someone else's labor unencumbered. When actual free speech is blocked, then I'll be among the people rallying -- but blocking a piracy site is blocking cybercrime not legal free speech.

Keep in mind that some of the organizations are presumably patching ancient versions of PHP like 5.6. I am sure this is a process which takes considerable time, especially as upstream PHP has washed their hands of such old versions and the downstreams are effectively on their own.

(It is often much cheaper for an enterprise to just get a long term support contract than to properly upgrade to a modern PHP stack.)

Worth pointing out this is not open source, if that is an important consideration when you're comparing the two (it is to me).

Both these shows have a first couple of seasons of slog. Mr Robot gets a bit better, but it's not worth it. The Office (US) was worth it for me -- eventually they settle into a groove of silly hijinks punctuated by occasional emotional connection and it just works. Mr Robot though suffers from a writers room that think telling a story in an over-engineered way makes it more engaging, and it just mires in that conceit for far too long. It's a movie, maybe a miniseries worth of content they tried to stretch out to four seasons. It has its moments, but they are not worth the trip IMO.

Thanks for the info, it encourages me to give it a try myself!

Privacy departments definitely, but a lot of state AGs have been lobbying for anti-privacy legislation lately. They are the same ones asking app stores to collect PII for ASAA/KOSA/SCREEN and its ilk. They'd probably applaud this invasion of privacy, unfortunately.

Binaries are slightly less contentious, but still problematic for MMOs and other titles where they're just not designed to run on consumer gear, might have credentials baked in or might reveal trade secrets to competitors.

Fundamentally, entertainment and technology both are time limited experiences and can't reasonably be expected to last forever. Usually games get shut off when the playerbase has already moved on -- even if the binaries are available, you'd likely be playing in a ghost town.

This is a fair observation, but storefronts are subject to similar long-term concerns. I have lost plenty of Wii games when that store shut down.

Basically by eliminating IP rights, what you're suggesting is to make games not commercially viable. Do you expect content creators to work for free?

What will happen is the money is invested into other industries and we'll see another video game crash like in the 80's.

Yeah, the idea of game companies (especially MMO or live service ones) being mandated to release server binaries or code is completely unworkable. Companies are not going to want to give away their main proprietary advantage that they've invested into. Games are already a high-risk investment and this would make it even higher risk because the little competitive moat between studios would be eliminated. The industry has been hit hard by layoffs and making gaming even less desirable for investment will further accelerate that. Any failed game (which is most games, because gaming is a hits driven industry) would be saddled with even more liability. Not to mention most commercial middleware is under NDA, so having their source become public would likely destroy those companies, too.

I am not opposed to some mandatory disclosures at the time of sale - like "this multiplayer game requires centralized servers", etc. But straight up requiring server binaries is not going to be viable for a whole swath of online-only game studios like MMO/live service/subscription games etc.

How do you feel it compares to DeepSeek 0731 if you have tried that? (Also runs well on 2x spark)

This is an outrageous privacy invasion and if it's not illegal already, it should be.

Some of the regulation they have previously supported may impact open weight models. Example: are Chinese companies likely to comply with the testing and reporting requirements? And even if they are, the hundreds of remixers are almost certainly not.

Caveat being such regulation may not apply depending on... size of model? Income of originating company? Income of remix creator? It's in flux, but they have an incentive to deter potential future competitors.

IP lawyers tend to be at the more expensive end, typical billing rate in US of $500/hr last I looked. But yes, being able to do a letter quickly is probable.

I just tell them they can look at it but not copy it and that's satisfied them, for now. Sometimes had to get a manager in, but never had them deny me fully. I'm sure sooner or later I'll run into a stubborn one and have to scramble for a day-of replacement hotel, and that just adds to my list of reasons to avoid travel.

There is also the difficult reality that the government doesn't need to block vpn entirely, but just make it a credible risk of being detected. If you have to worry about the state police barging into your home, you are likely to decide it isn't worth the risk and self-regulate.

I still remember 'priscilla' all these years later -- though I had to look it up to remember what it does (debug menu, apparently).

When they inevitably do this to me, I will tell them to delete my account instead.

Well, that assumes Discord doesn't ban you for something like posting a picture of a grid by then... ;)

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/discord-dev-responds-a...

(Not everyone got unbanned for grid posting yet)

It took down Teamspeak and several other alternatives last time discord tried this: https://www.techdigest.tv/2026/02/discord-discord-triggers-s...

Anecdotally, I suddenly had almost my entire friend group on matrix after that as well. I had campaigned for months but AV was the thing that got them to finally sign up.

A child mode flag is fine. But a birthdate is a recipe for data collection and fingerprinting. And with Google, we're seeing a full verification requirement flag that means people have to scan identity documents or face pictures. It's a slippery slope.

They will also likely dial up the sensitivity of the system over time. Maybe initially 90% of users are let through without doxxing themselves, like Discord claims. But over time, they have the knob to turn up the sensitivity to get more verifications so eventually everyone is verified. They love to exploit the network effect of making people think they're missing out while all their friends are in, exact same strategy they've used for years with the sudden demand for phone numbers on good standing accounts.

THIS. Nearly lost several large owned 'servers' on the account, too, due to the phone number demands! Support was awful, making needless month long hoops and ultimately not helping me at all.

Meanwhile Discourse (the open source forum software) has recently added voice and video calling. Matrix is a good option, also.

Open source SyncThing

This site could be useful also since there's been a recent trend of abliterated model providers demanding a hugging face account and email collection. I assume this is so the providers can spam people since there's not much other benefit. Hugging face had also been making it harder to sign up with disposable email addresses since they throw a weird error during sign up if they detect it. Anyway, I see a site like this being useful to sidestep all that data collection.

Open code is great and I use it, however, they were caught uploading prompts to their summarization AI instead of using the configured AI model endpoint. This has since been fixed.

That said, running in a completely offline mode remains unnecessary difficult to configure. In particular, toggling off Zen seems to require a community plugin.

Also you must factor in what's behind the board!

Likewise, opened a couple in the past few years and never saw this. That said, bank lobbies have tons of ambient cameras anyway, so they don't really need a selfie.

Seems kind of outrageous you had to agree to any terms, even minimal ones. TVs existed for many decades without needing terms.