Hacker News: benologist

New comment by benologist in "RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Targeting 40 YouTube-Ripping Platforms and Pirate Sites"

benologist — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 14:16:24 +0000

Buying your neighbor's surrounding houses for privacy...

New comment by benologist in "RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Targeting 40 YouTube-Ripping Platforms and Pirate Sites"

benologist — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 13:38:48 +0000

For months now I have been using youtube-dl to preserve all the concerts and workout videos I like on YouTube because I don't expect this content to remain available and unencumbered. My original plan was to store just the IDs on GitHub so I could recreate the video libraries without backing up the video files, but already some of the concerts have been removed. I expect the exercise videos will be hidden behind a subscription at some point since they provide utility.

New comment by benologist in "RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO"

benologist — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 20:31:45 +0000

What if they lied about how much music was worth though? You can stream 10,000+ songs in one month for the price of one album today, in the early 2000s we were asked to believe that was $10,000+ worth of music and their suffering was relative to that...

New comment by benologist in "RIAA’s YouTube-dl takedown ticks off developers and GitHub’s CEO"

benologist — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 18:19:52 +0000

About 400 million people pay monthly for access to music instead of listening to radio, occasionally buying albums or piracy so idk if anything really backfired...

New comment by benologist in "Node.js 15.0"

benologist — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 15:05:35 +0000

This NPM cache been a huge time-saver for me, you can run it locally or across your whole network for a shared cache -

https://guides.sonatype.com/repo3/quick-start-guides/proxyin...

https://hub.docker.com/r/sonatype/nexus/

New comment by benologist in "Spotify revises TOS to allow transfers of user-created playlists"

benologist — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 14:38:54 +0000

I host mine too because I'm not interested in paying ~$100/year for the rest of my life to access music, this is like welfare for tech giants and record companies and very little even trickles down to musicians. I got a Synology NAS and these days I just run the Synology operating system in a virtual machine and it's accessible via web UI or mobile apps and backs up to the cloud, this has served me very well for years now.

New comment by benologist in "Behavioral nudges reduce failure to appear for court"

benologist — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 19:03:44 +0000

I wish the technology existed so they could just correctly bill you when you get back to your car and you drive away with a receipt instead of a fine... the idea that you have done something wrong and you deserve a financial punishment for it is ludicrous.

New comment by benologist in "Google TV"

benologist — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 19:58:11 +0000

Same. This recharger + 4 battery set has been invaluable with my remote.

https://www.amazon.com/Lithium-Battery-Charger-Rechargeable-...

New comment by benologist in "Apple Fitness+"

benologist — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 18:56:53 +0000

I have maintained my fitness and saved so much money by switching to videos on YouTube. I think this stuff should at most be a category on Netflix etc it's not worth $9.99 separately. The trainers are all good, the only thing missing is being able to superimpose your Watch metrics when you want.

New comment by benologist in "Apple Tried Charging the Price of a New MacBook Pro for a Screen Replacement"

benologist — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 14:15:12 +0000

You can block a lot of apps individually from accessing the internet with NetGuard -

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/eu.faircode.netguard/

https://github.com/M66B/NetGuard

New comment by benologist in "Your Phone Is Your Castle"

benologist — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:33:52 +0000

> hundreds of experts working to prevent it

Every major operating system has this regardless of whether they force you to download software through one marketplace. You're not less-secure if you use two marketplaces as long as both those marketplaces are kept secure. iOS is kept secure independently of the App Store as well.

New comment by benologist in "Your Phone Is Your Castle"

benologist — Sun, 13 Sep 2020 22:22:30 +0000

In real life on the iPhone we have had apps secretly uploading your address book, copying your clipboard and listening for tones embedded in television ads. And "The Fappening" where many people's private photos were leaked.

New comment by benologist in "Dickhead of the Week: Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri"

benologist — Sat, 12 Sep 2020 15:53:14 +0000

Apple and Facebook have both been sued for this. Facebook were literally calling it friendly fraud and trying not to prevent it.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2019/01/25/facebook-tu...

The FTC alleges Apple allowed the same thing on their platform for three years after they became aware.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/technology/government-and...

But what's really amazing is Google, Amazon and Microsoft have all been sued for the same thing too and it still not illegal to have games where kids can spend unlimited amounts and conduct unlimited transactions using obfuscated virtual currencies.

Australia Opens Antitrust Inquiry into Apple's App Store

benologist — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 13:28:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/09/08/australia-opens-antitrust-inquiry-into-app-store/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24408118

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by benologist in "The Right to Repair could help address a critical shortage in school computers"

benologist — Sun, 06 Sep 2020 19:02:04 +0000

Can't they control the quality of external or replaceable batteries in exactly the same way?

New comment by benologist in "AirMessage – Android app to interface with iMessage on a Mac"

benologist — Sat, 05 Sep 2020 18:43:31 +0000

It is absolutely a deliberate decision by Apple to pressure people to use iPhones and to pressure people not to convert to using Android. Hopefully this will be one of the items on Congress' agenda as they disempower 'big tech'.

> “When I asked a senior Apple executive why iMessage wasn’t being expanded to other platforms, he gave two answers,” reports Mossberg. “First, he said, Apple considers its own user base of 1 billion active devices to provide a large enough data set for any possible AI learning the company is working on. And, second, having a superior messaging platform that only worked on Apple devices would help sales of those devices — the company’s classic (and successful) rationale for years.”

https://www.cultofmac.com/433784/apple-reveals-why-imessage-...

New comment by benologist in "Justice Dept. plans to file antitrust charges against Google in coming weeks"

benologist — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 21:46:09 +0000

Nobody's saying Facebook and Amazon won't get charges too. They and Apple were all part of the same investigation. The investigators say all four companies are abusing their positions but they haven't given a lot of detail yet.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-26/house-ant...

Apple to drop AMD's lower-end GPUs, replace with own 5 nm GPUs by 2H 2021

benologist — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 14:00:03 +0000

Article URL: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-to-drop-AMD-s-lower-end-GPUs-replace-them-with-proprietary-5-nm-GPUs-by-2H-2021.490495.0.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353282

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by benologist in "App Review process updates"

benologist — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 21:43:45 +0000

They could have a Screentime-type system just for being transparent about what you or your family spent in the last week on subscriptions, apps and in-app purchases, what free trials are ending, what apps have active subscriptions but no usage etc.

They could make virtual currencies show the real price if they were bought with real money. They could require 'free' transactions with virtual currencies to go through the same payment authentication.

They could make subscription apps require an ongoing service or value being added, aside from fixing their own bugs or trying to improve their software to attract new customers.

New comment by benologist in "App Review process updates"

benologist — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 19:44:23 +0000

Apple has been sued for games defrauding children thousands of dollars, but what's really ridiculous and amazing is they are not alone. All of the tech giants have gotten in trouble for defrauding children with deceptive in-app purchases.

So far we know Facebook recognized it as fraud and referred to it as fraud internally so it's a bit hard to believe it is innocently occurring again and again wherever platforms permit games to bill unlimited amounts and players to perform unlimited transactions and developers to obfuscate transactions with layers of cash substitutes like gems and virtual currencies.

Apple: https://money.cnn.com/2014/01/15/technology/apple-ftc-settle...

Amazon: https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ftc-sues-amazon-app-pur...

Facebook: https://phys.org/news/2016-07-facebook-refunds-in-app-minors...

Google: https://lifehacker.com/get-a-refund-for-your-kids-unauthoriz...

Microsoft: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/all/child-spe...