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> 2. People who like to pirate content like its their job - setting up Plex and all the newsgroup/torrent apps to auto-pirate shows and movies. For a 13 year old, that can be cool. For an adult who clearly has the cash to spend on non-essential items and in a world where time is money: I do not get it.

It took me about an afternoon or two to set up, was fun to do, and now my favorite TV shows just appear in Plex for me to watch whenever I want to. Half of the time they're not available on Netflix either, so I'd have to figure out what streaming provider they're on, deal with their special websites, not get notifications when a new episode airs, etc. It's just a better experience.

Some people just need to find additional validation to prove to themselves they're doing the right thing. Don't worry about it.

I have no idea what they're talking about though. Installing qBittorrent takes about a minute, adding an RSS feed one minute more; that's it. I think I configured my setup about two years ago, the files just magically appear in whatever directory I asked them to.

How much more time does this consume compared to opening the web browser, going to <whatever streaming site>, and so on? I'd say, about 300% less.

Edit: to whoever is reading this, after pressing the downvote/flag button, please do the following: set up a VPN to any third-world country, go to your favorite streaming provider, and have a gander at the breadth and diversity of their catalog.

Or the case of discovering a great show on Netflix/HBO, binging all available seasons, only to discover that 4 more seasons have aired, and Netflix/HBO just didn’t bother enough to renew the seasons.

Or show is only available on the Nth $9.99/mo streaming platform, and I already pay for 3 others. Normally I sign up for a trial with a fake email address (getnada is great!), but some require a (valid) credit card, and I don’t have an unlimited supply of those.

Or the show simply isn’t available in your geographic region.

Revolut has "virtual cards" which are invalid after the first charge.

Only for paying customers. It used to be three free disposable cards per customer on the free tier but I woke up to find only virtual card left and no disposable ones. It's a shame these kinds of features are limited to these somewhat-sketchy online banks. None of the banks in my motherland offer digital disposable card numbers yet.

privacy.com

US only.

Yeah but isn't most of torrenting these shows illegal?

Also worth checking out is reddit.com/r/selfhosted, which tends to be much less 'masturbatory' than /r/homelab

> reddit.com/r/selfhosted

I second this, very laid back with good information.

I didn't know about that sub. Thanks.

I massively don't get /r/homelab. I can't imagine having literal work as a hobby. Low-power stuff like Synologies and NUCs are cool, but all I see on the sub is huge power-wasters, and people even brag about it!

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/bshlr9/the_real_co...

I'm on homelab. It's for fun.

It's the same reason why we have cars that have hundreds of horsepower when you can't drive above 65 mph on most highways and even accelerating fast can get you a ticket for "exhibition of speed". It's for fun, and a lot of the people on homelab use it to learn for their job.

> "I can't imagine having literal work as a hobby. "

Think of it the other way. Instead of taking work home with them to create a hobby, maybe they found some way to get paid for their hobby. Maybe this is fun for them and getting paid for it during the day is just icing on the cake.

I don't really know though. If that's true, I'm jealous of them.

When I found that sub, I had hoped it would be a bit more hacky. Like this is how I build a vSAN cluster out of a bunch of Mac Minis the office was throwing out.

Instead it is just people who buy an bunch of old enterprise gear on eBay. Though every once in a while someone posts something really cool, which is the only reason I stay subbed. Like a little while back someone figured out how to add 10Gb Ethernet to a NUC.

I have a couple of old Dell T320s that I bought for a project last year. I finished the project and powered them off because they make my office too hot. I really should think about selling them.

I am getting ready to to build a cluster out of Raspberry PI 4s as there is some cloud services that I am paying for that I want to host at home. At least those are pretty power efficient.

2. = Buys CD, gets no FLAC: choices are as follows; 1.) dl FLAC rip 2.) waste my time repeating work someone has already done

I'm always going to pick option 1; guess I'll never be an adult :|

Nah what you're doing is closer to r/datahoarder . It's legally grey, but a lot of people wouldn't really consider is real "piracy" in your case if you purchased a CD. I more consider it datahoarding in your case.

What he's talking about is all those people with 160TB+ servers that do nothing but seed torrents of movies and tv shows they may or may not even watch.

Format shifting is currently illegal in the UK. So even ripping a CD you own to flag is against the law.

(A civil thing, not a criminal offence).

So backups are against the law in the UK? How does that work?

Note: You can digitally "rip" an audio CD as a digital file; technically you are making a backup of the data that forms the audio on the CD. Provided you are only doing this for your personal use (not sharing), and you keep the original (that's an important part) - I can't see how such a law would even be enforceable?

Furthermore - what if you have old software from say, an IBM/370 system - that your business needs? You don't have that system any longer because the pieces all died, and they went to a museum, but you still rely on the software written in COBOL, so you run it on an emulator on a PC...

...obviously, the software is no longer running off of tapes or punchcards or whatever - ie "format shifting" - does this law cover that scenario too? "Sorry, chap, you'll just have to stuff your business because your antique computer died, but them's the breaks, mate?" - my sincere apologies... :)

Seriously, though - it just seems a trifle limiting if that's the case - ultimately preventing the use of backups and shifting of those backups onto future media (can you copy a floppy to your hard drive and run it from there?)...

Here in the United States, backups are allowed, of any media; but I do think there is a technical limitation in that you have to own the original copy, and you have to make the backup yourself. Thus, a copy of a ROM for an emulator would be a-ok, as long as you own the original cartridge, plus the original system it runs on - but you have to pull that ROM image from the cartridge (and any images needed for the emulated system from the original system) yourself - a copy from another source is not "legal".

In practice, nobody does this, though - but it probably could be checked for via serial numbers in the ROMs, if they wanted to enforce it.

IIRC/IANAL/etc, in the US backups in and of themselves are not infringement, but transferring tools that break copyright protection is illegal. So, you can back up your DVD, but you can't transfer (upload, download, etc) tools that break the encryption. So, unless you broke the encryption yourself independently, you're still not in the clear.

The IBM/370 system example seems pretty farfetched. Especially since they said format shifting was a civil thing, not criminal.

In general, there aren't a lot of clear cut laws that state "you can do X, but not Y". Mostly because that's just not how our legal system works. Most of the time, it's more about your intent rather than what you technically did.

The most clear example of this is the differences between first degree murder, second degree murder, and manslaughter. All different crimes with different punishments, but ultimately you technically killed someone.

Another more relevant example is how cybercrimes are treated. Just because a system let you have access to a file does not mean that it was legal access. Otherwise, none of them would be enforceable since it's always a machine granting you access (that you shouldn't have). It's all about your intent.

Usually, if you really are just making your own backups from your own copies, you don't have much to worry about since, at least for now, it's not really enforceable.

You can make backups. Ripping to mp3 to back something up is probably allowed. But most people ripping to mp3 are not backing up their CDs, they're format-shifting, and format-shifting is currently not allowed.

You're definitely not the kind of person I was singling out in my remarks. If you own something, it's a different story. In your case, owning a CD or ripping it is the same in my eyes.

OP is talking about torrenting someone else's rip, not ripping from the CD that they bought.

That means they downloaded torrenting software, accessed a tracker and knowingly joined a swarm of peers sharing illegally distributed content.

If your convoy "crashes the gate doin' 98," you don't get dispensation just because you happened to be driving a Chartreuse microbus[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convoy_(song)

I learned a lot of *NIX stuff just by way of introduction through setting up a fileserver to host Plex, network shares, music server, etc. Doesn't really fall into any of your categories. It's more like:

4. People who upgraded their PC and have an old PC that is currently doing nothing (but could).

Sure I could have bought a NAS, but that would have cost more money and I wouldn't have learned nearly as much. And I wouldn't have been able to transcode streams.

pbk1, your comment appears to be dead. You may have tripped some anti-spam filter because your account is relatively new and you have posted many links in your comments.