Hacker News Reader

Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

How many times does that have to happen before people realize there is no cloud, only other people's computers. The data that is stored there is no longer yours, just as thanks to Apple and Co. your hardware no longer really belongs to you, but you only enjoy a temporary right of use. It will be interesting to see when hardly anything remains of an entire generation because everything comes from the cloud: Photos, videos, games, film, music. No more treasure troves in the attic, no more of grandma's record collection or dad's DVD collection or uncle's old console games. Everything just rented and when removed from the catalog, they are gone forever. Only our plastic waste remains.

View on HN

This is why I've stopped buying books on kindle. It gives Amazon the power to censor your book library, and it would not surprise me at all if we see them exercise that power soon.

They already have, when they remotely deleted copies of 1984, IIRC whose copyright had expired in one country, but not in another.

I assume OP was implying censorship because of political views

I remember reading about that when it happened. Of all the books to do it to, it had to be that one.

They really couldn't have picked a better book to do that with.

Fahrenheit 451?

Especially given the name of the device...

Ah yes, good one. That would have been an even better choice.

They have pulled books before I believe. However there are many good drm free ebooks. I still use a Kindle because I like the device but I keep it in airplane mode nearly all the time and copies of drm free books on my pc. Edit: I manage my library with calibre and the device plugged in. You never have to take it off airplane and it gets better battery life.

Amazon banned me (for something completely unrelated to Kindle books), and I lost access to everything on Kindle as a result. It's a good thing I hadn't spent much money there, and obviously I'm not buying any ebooks going forward.

Buy ebooks from Baen directly, or from Tor on your service of choice. These publishers release books DRM free, so you actually own the file. Any other ebooks you “buy”, you’re renting.

Alternatively if it's not available DRM free I'll just buy it and support the author from wherever and then pirate a DRM free copy and archive it.

I personally find a rip of the book online to drop onto my reMarkable then purchase it through some ebook marketplace. Now I have a DRM-free copy and the author gets their cut.

That's certainly noble, but it doesn't send the message that you're unhappy with DRM. You're ultimately engaging in piracy and at the same time not voting with your wallet.

I don't see any alternative, but just wanted to make that point.

Steal the content and Venmo the creator?

The publishers won't be too happy with creators who are seen to be accepting money bypassing their cut.

But the content creator will be happy with me. And the publishers can get fuct. As nature intended.

Too many authors are exclusively on Amazon. Where am I supposed to buy their book :(

https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools works pretty well once setup. Allegedly...

The people imposing DRM don't care whether anybody is unhappy about it. To them, the only unhappy people are frustrated thieves.

Eh, not really trying to make a point personally. Just want to read books on my reMarkable or whatever I want, really.

Yeah, it wasn't a dig. Just highlighting how these companies have you over a barrel.

I actually really don’t care about kindle because it’s only useful for certain formats I tend not to keep anyway and is a lot more convenient and cheaper than hunting down physical copies of stuff.

I originally had over 200 books, all read, gathering dust so I gave them away. They took up space and attention and were a pain in the ass when I had to move house.

As for the convenience, I do a lot of hiking and it’s not much fun dragging two books from the expanse series with you versus a kindle in a ziplock bag.

I have physical copies and PDFs for technical books and reference material though. And a lot of text files.

Whenever I buy an ebook I go through the painful process of downloading it to my laptop either directly from the store (e.g. Kobo) or via Calibre [0] if I bought it from Amazon which I try to avoid, removing DRM via some tool I found somewhere and uploading it to the ebook again via Calibre. It's annoying an probably illegal but no one can take my ebooks away that way.

[0] https://calibre-ebook.com/

Me too. Just to be sure I've also put my Kindle on Airplane mode as soon as I got it. It has been working like this for years.

Wait, you can convert Amazon’s format to something DRM free?

It's text, even the best DRM would be foiled by OCR. It's definitely illegal in the US though.

True, but flipping through the book to copy all pages is too much effort to copy the file to my remarkable instead.

I'm pretty sure the kindle DRM is broken easier than that, DeDRM came up on my quick search, but flipping through the book to copy all the pages is an easily scriptable task.

You can remove the DRM, no need to do any OCR shenanigans. But yes, it's of course illegal but I've paid for the book so I don't really care.

I discovered the other day that 80% of the music I've ever bought from them is just gone now

you will own nothing and be happy

tell yourselves a decade ago: everything is streamed, if something doesn't meet the most up-to-date social guidelines created by a mob of microbloggers it's removed from a storefront or completely kicked off most of the internet, oh and privacy? too radical!

clown world

We have to be able to rely on some cloud services, though, if we want georedundant backup of local files. I agree that relying on Google drive without additional backups is a bad idea, and it's generally a bad idea to store unencrypted files on cloud servers (or rely on their encryption), but the problem is more general.

It should be prohibited by law for cloud service providers to snoop around in other people's data without a warrant, no matter whether that snooping is automated or done by humans.

This is what baffles me in the cloud story: you think you get a servant, but you get a master.

I told someone I had catalogued over 20k songs and they thought that was insane. When I explain them my backup system they think I spend a fortune on it. I don't even have an NAS. Just a simple mirroring system with like 6 separate hard drives.

That's honestly really scary and I never thought of that.

There is a counter movement, for example, these guys place a significant role (and as far as I know primarily with a practical focus): https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/

They are the worst pirates I've ever heard of.

If everything I've paid for and supposedly own some right to access can be taken away from me by a wayward algorithm at a moment's notice with zero recourse, you bet your ass I'm going to "pirate" content, even if I still buy it first!

What a terribly inaccurate, sweeping generalization.

(Pretty sure it was just a joke reference to 'Pirates of the Caribbean'.)

This isn't going to be the best response of mine by HN standards, but:

Well, fuck me.

Ah, but you have heard of them!

(gotta do everything myself, but I can go to sleep now :D)

If it makes you feel better, I immediately spoke this line in my head after reading your post :-)

This is HN; best jokes are like apples - hard, but not too hard, and in moderation.

Well, shit, I apologize for calling your comment a "terribly inaccurate, sweeping generalization" (I can't edit my response, the option isn't there).

Well done here, I'm the asshole. :)

Post in the top 5 of the subreddit currently: "Is there a good self hosted, cross platform OneNote / SimpleNote like app out there ?"

Yep, scum of the earth. /s

>They are the worst pirates I've ever heard of.

They are. They don't even know how to pirate.

The best pirates would never use free open source solutions. They'd just take whatever corporate solution that's the flavor of the day and then use that with anxiety inducing cracks that will give your antivirus a heart attack.

Never heard of Amazon and Apple removing files from users' accounts? It was kinda big news. For a day.

It's not that, it's the risk of permanently losing culturally significant media because of it.

Not everyone is a techie that can switch from google's friendly UI, and transfer everything to another safer service that operates differently.

I worked as an intern for an archive digitizing old letters among other things. Many aspects of key historical figures are available — letters, etc. You know what they were thinking because you can read some of their personal thoughts.

In this day and age, if you’re lucky emails exist, but due to discovery, etc many entities just purge everything. Bad news, this era will be a black hole for future generations to understand. Good news is that the idiocy of this era will be toned down.

Maybe Google's history department will make some money from their monopoly on the primary sources.

OTOH, if that sort of data is not purged, it could be far richer than any letter. Many people pretty much use their phones/devices as extensions of their minds, and phones are a very personal, private place.

Apple is still ok, just don't use iCloud.

They still have censorship power over the App Store. You can't even have reader apps that show titties, as Tumblr learned, or show UGC expressing wrongthink, as Gab and Parler learned, or offer VPNs in China, or protest apps in Hong Kong.

The topic of this discussion is cloud-based censorship.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com