If you block ALL traffic from it? Sure. It’s possible but more involved and requires the right hardware to block their tracking domains while leaving streaming apps working.

It’s best not to use smart TVs as well smart TVs. The apps they have are almost always slower or inferior in some way to the versions you get on streaming devices, updated less often, etc. I recommend pairing a TV with a quality streaming device like an Nvidia shield (or shield pro) or an AppleTV*. Alternatively if you want something a little cheaper in Androidtv space there is the Walmart brand Onn 4k pro.

*warning with Apple is while they’re pretty good on privacy (meh, there are no excellent choices that support streaming apps in 1080p quality) and don’t have ads their app-store is a bit more locked down. They have all the major streaming services but if you do high seas type stuff it will be more involved and difficult. Though if you have a local media collection (source your own discs or high seas) and run Plex or Jellyfin they have apps for both of those that work great as well as Infuse which usually requires a subscription unless you don’t need 4k or any proprietary audio codecs like dolby for any of your media. I personally can say I enjoy my AppleTV 4K and I think it’s a great device but I run my own media-server and have some common streaming services I pay for.

Just beware last I checked they’re not very active compared to the reddit. Getting into a lot of trackers on open signups tends to rely on someone posting about it within hours of it happening. Unfortunately less people use lemmy so they’re less likely to post about it here, it’s not like they have some person in all the trackers who keeps an eye out, it’s entirely up to someone noticing and making a post. Some may open for only 24 hours (hawke tends to I think).

So regardless of where you see something open, if you have a place you want, I recommend signing up immediately within minutes rather than waiting even an hour as you never know how long it’s been open before it was posted about or how soon it will close. Just make sure you read the rules and any newsposts for new users within the first 24 hours if you can as some places may require activity in the first 24-48 hours for new accounts.

I’m pretty sure the megathread lists a website that tracks signups though in my experience it’s not as good as the subreddit. You really just have to watch that space. (Focus especially on checking daily through the winter months, in my experience lots of places open up around Christmas though around Christmas is pretty vague, some will open up around last week of or mid November, others early December, others in early January so it’s a patience game). You can create an rss feed for the sub so get just the posts fetched for you when they occur.

TL is one of the best. If you need help filling some holes I’d strongly recommend the semi-private rutracker. You can sign-up using browser translation tools and then add it your search stack (it has jacket support) and search using English titles. It’s surprising how many seeded BD remuxes you can find there, they even have stuff I haven’t found on any other PT’s below PTP level. As it’s semi-private there are no real requirements for seeding or ratio though they do track that stuff on your account and give little badges for helping seed. Rutracker also as the other commenter mentioned is pretty strong on CD-rips and music. They’re very weak on western TV though.

LST is really good. Strong requests and great bonuses system just for keeping seeds going. They have freeleech on open signup and there’s a pool people can fill up to enable it routinely as well. Points can be traded for upload credit so even if you don’t succeed in actually seeding you can maintain ratio. Be sure to check out their Christmas advent calendar (TL does this too) for free points, some people get lucky and get millions of points and you’re sure to get thousands, probably tens of thousands just for checking in daily in December and that can easily boost you to enough credits to buy enough upload to get over a TB. Once established it’s not at all a tough tracker though I’d still prefer TL over it if they have the same stuff because TL has a lower size threshold for automatic freeleech and a lower ratio req.

The AvistaZ network of sites can be pretty good for obscure content but they’re stricter than I’d like as they require login every 60 days and download of a torrent every 3 months or you get banned which seems easy but if you’re not using them for much it becomes a chore you have to maintain and if you’re on multiple of these sites it applies independently. Cinemaz in particularly is good if you have tastes for arthouse, obscure, and foreign films that you’re struggling to find elsewhere. It doesn’t have mainstream releases though. AnimeZ is pretty good for anime though generally most stuff can be found on nyaa or other open sites. PrivateHD is fine, I find myself mostly finding stuff on TL and choosing it over their listings but occasionally they have a better version of something. Their old rules were better, you could go longer with some inactivity that was more realistic.

If you like old western cartoons then something like Oldtoons would be a great idea to try and get into. That or a general old content specializing tracker though I can’t mention the one I’m familiar with by name as they prefer not to be talked about.

If you see hawke uno opening up I’d suggest joining them as well. More encode focused, heavy focus on HEVC but they have an awful lot of stuff from their internals including TAoE and HONE and lots of cross-seeding ability as most QxR stuff gets uploaded, no ratio, just points system and you get a bunch at the start, earn more by seeding, keeping a lot of stuff seeding and you’ll never want for the ability to download or worry about running out.

You can but they’ll find out. It’s reported or flagged or something, they can tell what provider holds a number and they block VOIP ones. Also if a number was ever previously a VOIP number do not try and transfer it back to proper cellular as it will still remain blocked for many but not all of these for years potentially.

Cons:

You absolutely cannot get 2FA authenticator codes from 90% of services. Many services that require a phone number even without 2FA just for “verify you’re a human” or because they want your data or to verify region use shortcode services that also will not work with ANY VOIP provider.

You will not receive their codes. These companies vary from banking institutions to gaming companies to online shopping marketplaces and stores to a Google account (used to be you could get an automated phone call to verify an account, not anymore, must be able to receive SMS from shortcodes that are disabled for VOIP numbers to register and to recover an account) just about anyone you could end up doing business with.

A shockingly large amount of companies demand phone numbers and send verification texts before allowing you to do business with them, to create an account, to recover an account, to delete an account, to place an order, etc.

They really shouldn’t, it’s a bad security practice but companies love it because with a phone number they can lower support costs by just allowing people to do a self-service where they get an automated text and can unlock their locked account. They also love harvesting that data and preventing anonymization with VOIP numbers and the reduction of fraud and increase of reliable KYC that comes with requiring them.

And they all take it as a given that EVERYONE or at least 99% have a cell plan with a non-VOIP number that works with these and the 1% who don’t they don’t care about in the developed world and are an acceptable loss.

If they have to have a lot of channels then $120 isn’t the worst price (I have relatives who pay twice as much as that a month for cable) though you could perhaps try and check into whether they could switch to a streaming linear TV service like DirecTV Stream with one of their lower tier packages to save some money while retaining a cable-like experience (there’s also Sling, Hulu+Live TV, YoutubeTV, FUBO, etc, many of which have packages with many of the top channels for $60-$80/month).

Fact is to save money you need to be willing to give things up. If you’re moving from a premium cable package with a ton of channels to a few streaming services you’re going to lose things and potentially a lot of things. You’re going to lose access to live news channels, you’re going to lose access to specific programs on some networks that don’t have streaming service equivalents (I know for one older person I knew the fact they couldn’t get and watch Lifetime and Hallmark movies within any reasonable time-frame of their premier meant they were not interested in looking into streaming any further to replace their cable).

More than that though most old people hate change, they were used to a certain way of things and they’re afraid and perhaps get confused or frustrated with this new way of doing things. It’s simply more comfortable for them to use the old satellite system they’re used to and its interface and way of changing channels than doing something new where they have to think of how to do something or get frustrated or ask for help. Which is why I do think trying a streaming cable replacement like those I mentioned might be your best bet. It would still save some money.

Nah the second movie was kind of awful in that it just threw that and other things out for no good reason. The original source book by Philip K Dick (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) is explicit that they are androids.

In my opinion it was not a sequel in the proper sense but more something cribbing a recognizable name to sell movie tickets with vaguely related ideas, themes, setting, and Harrison Ford who will do any movie for lots of money as long as he doesn’t have to put any effort in.

And they were kind of able to do this because Ridley Scott decided to not use the term android in the film adaptation because he wanted something different sounding and so chose the term replicant instead which doesn’t have the clear connotations that android does but Ridley Scott did pretty clearly intend for them to be androids whereas the sequel threw that and the entire context and larger meaning of the work out in favor of whatever it was they were doing.

First: Asimov’s three laws

Second: Ned Beatty speech from Blade Runner

Third: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy has a reference to the Sirius cybernetics company whose marketing division has coined that phrase for their robots.

Fourth: Bender from Futurama’s catchphrase “bite my shiny metal ass”

Try toggling ErP setting or similarly named EU energy setting in your UEFI. This should resolve the lights being on.

The most elite trackers perhaps.

Trackers on /r/opensignups ? Nah they open their doors to the public every now and again.

Would not recommend it to anyone who can’t dedicate a seed box or machine uploading torrents most hours of the day every day. It’s possible to do it without those but difficult. With them it’s merely a matter of using free leech and building a buffer up as well as taking advantage of points systems to get free upload just for keeping torrents seeding even without uploading.

If you only ever grab free leech then all you have to worry about is meeting seed time and activity requirements like logging in every 90 days.

An old computer with an external drive. A raspberry pi, a nas that can run a BitTorrent client. Any would work if one doesn’t want to pay for a seed box. (Most trackers ban shared seed boxes though so you will have to get dedicated)

Take a look here for some alternatives:

https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#good-alternatives

• Matrix
• XMPP
• Briar
• SimpleX

Also just because there are no alternatives doesn’t mean your default position should be we just have to trust whatever exists now because it’s good enough. Or that we can’t criticize it ruthlessly, distrust it. Call it out and as a result of that build perhaps the desire for something better, a fix as it were.

The evidence and history clearly points towards Signal being very suspicious and likely in bed with the feds. This is not conspiracy thinking. Conspiracy thinking is thinking that the country/empire that gave away old German engima machines whose code they’d cracked to developing countries without telling them they’d cracked it in the late 40s/early 50s, that went on to establish a crypto company just to subvert its encryption. That’s done everything Snowden revealed has in fact changed suddenly for the first time in half a century for no particular reason and not to its own benefit. That’s fanciful thinking. That’s a leap of logic away from the proven trends, the pattern of behavior, and indeed the incentivizes to continue using their dominant position to maintain dominance and power. They didn’t back down on the clipper chip because they just gave up and decided to let people have privacy and rights. They gave up on it because they found better ways of achieving the same results with plausible deniability.

Also why is everything “tankies” with you people. Privacy advocates point out the obvious and suddenly it’s a communist conspiracy. LOL

No.

HDMI does have a feature called Ethernet over HDMI that in theory could allow that.

Thing is though it’s literally never been implemented in anything. It died because cheap WiFi became common.

For it to work you’d need both the TV and Chromecast and HDMI cable all to support it. It’s not uncommon on cables and a surprising amount of them include it in features list (probably to trick low info people).

But I believe that’s a hardware design thing so not something even a software update could enable. It costs extra money and they’re already paying for a WiFi chip so why bother?

Just FYI. Comments nearly exactly like yours on Reddit were used in copyright troll lawsuits against ISPs as evidence they didn’t do enough to enforce copyright and were negligent and legally liable.

Further when that didn’t work the copyright agency sued Reddit to try to unmask the identities of those people to bring legal proceedings against them to coerce them into testifying against their ISP at threat of being in trouble for their activities. Reddit was big enough to fight off the lawsuit luckily but be careful.

Yes. It’s incredibly powerful but easy to use for a basic purpose like editing a line or converting formats.

Open the web subtitles in subtitleedit. Change format to ass (advanced substation alpha). Save and re-embed using mkvtoolnix.

Positioning of multiple lines works well with ass and VLC shouldn’t have an issue reading and displaying. Not sure if YouTube includes the positioning data in their subtitles though. You could recreate that in subtitle edit (free software btw, dk web domain I believe) but it would be a bit of an annoyance.

edit: Corrected domain name. Not German, but nikse is it as OP has suggested

Remind me again how did we get those free speech rules on college campuses in the first place? What was it in response to? Oh right the inability to protest the Vietnam war and the demand from students of that era and the one that followed to be allowed to protest.

Only aside from Iraq which didn’t last that long to my recollection every major protest movement has been against either enemies of the US or those the US is ambivalent about like South Africa.

So this “right” has never really annoyed the powers that be until now with the pro-Palestine solidarity stuff and now they have to crush it and now all the pretensions of liberalism to caring about free speech and expression and thought are being put away and we’re assured these people represent hate and must be crushed.

Seems like we never really had that right. It was a concession given then never expected to be used again and now that it has been there’s outrage and the iron fist.

Who? When no one else learns the lesson why should Turkey be singled out for going a step further and shrugging the whole thing off? Admitting to crimes does zero good if you continue committing them and aiding others in doing so while showing no remorse for new acts.

Germany which genocided Jews now defends the rights of a subset of extremists (though they’re not a subset in the occupation zone, the majority there are unhinged racists according to opinion polls) to genocide others.

One of them is doing the right thing now about this though for transparently insincere and politically expedient domestic political reasons while the other is doubling down on criminalizing support for victims of an illegal occupation, genocide, and state.

Turkey’s denial cannot change what happened bad as it is.

And clearly Germany’s admission that they did commit genocide hasn’t made them a better country for it as they’re happy to enable it again (and still refuse to pay reparations to other non-Jewish victims).

So admitting to genocide is clearly not a given sign that a country is good or will help stop one in future or has learned any lessons at all.

In other words things are complex. This is good thing done for likely cynical reasons but it’s still good. Even if it likely won’t impact the situation on the ground immediately it could lay part of the groundwork for eventually causing “israel” to fall as apartheid South Africa did.

It’s the rubberized coating itself that came off. I had the exact same look on a remote control where its rubberized coating began to wear.

That they should abolish (or at the least push for drastic, dramatic reforms, not promises of gradual reform maybe someday during election season but a mass movement, amendments, political action, pressure groups, etc) such a system rather than participate and kick the can down along the road.

Also that their rights will be taken away regardless if they’re going to lose them.

Biden has done nothing to reverse what Trump has done, he postures, he does a few meaningless policies but at the back of it all he doesn’t value the lives of those people you claim to care about because he won’t stack the Supreme Court, because he and Kamala and the rest of the Democratic party are not interested in actually fighting the Republicans. Their theatrics that Trump is Hitler 2.0 shows them to be either people who want to enable Hitler 2.0 because they obviously aren’t fighting tooth and nail and are quick to condemn someone trying to kill him (when let’s be honest, most of us wouldn’t condemn a person who shot at Hitler) OR people who don’t truly believe that but know it’s good branding. Either way they’re not a party worth voting for, worth endorsing or worth considering as a real option to protect the vulnerable in this country or any other.

Fact is Republicans do the dirty deeds, Democrats put some peace paint and pride symbols on things but don’t undo those dirty deeds. During Trump’s term pundits and the Democratic party sobbed and wailed about “kids in cages” on the border and yet when Biden continued it? Nothing but silence. And Kamala’s campaign is ramping up and leaning into that border racism by the way.

That seems like a real problem given they are a people being actively subjected to genocide which is being censored and distorted by western media, who have their land stolen, their existence denied, and been subjected to apartheid sponsored by the most powerful nation in the world (the US no less) in flagrant violation of international law for over half a century. Abuses and genocide carried out by a regime so powerful, so important to US interests that there are multiple states in the US where you can lose your job or your business contract for simply voicing support for boycotting and divesting from the apartheid regime that is an illegal colonization and occupation of stolen land by radical far-right reactionary ethno-fascists operating under the cloak of religion. Most major western media are some degree of complicit in giving one-sided pro-apartheid state slants, omitting key details, and using dishonest framing to attempt to deceive the public and manufacture apathy and complicity.