Search for "Apprentice Alf" for a DRM stripping plugin for Calibre. This is how I liberated my kindle library. Once you've stripped the DRM, you can freely convert them to epub.
I'd think I'll stick with the tried and true `ebook-convert` tool from Calibre, and pandoc. There's no sense uploading your documents to a third party when that's not necessary.
How many people earnestly find fancy reports fun, and how many are just smiling and playing along to avoid being a wet noodle? In the case of Netflix, it was apparently one guy's passion project. Great for him, but how many netflix workers really feel like they're having less fun now that he's not doing it?
Without power steering, holding the steering wheel at the top gives you more leverage than holding it at the bottom. When holding the wheel at the top, turning right is a matter of moving your hands to the right.
There is nothing 'vile or bigoted' about pointing out that parents frequently force religions on their children. My christian parents sure as shit did, and it was common in other families in my community too. I see no reason to think it would be any less prevalent in Muslim families than in Christian ones.
I think it should be a choice given to the convict. Imprisonment, maybe for months or years, or intense pain and life long scaring, but you get to go home at the end of the day and don't spend a significant fraction of your only life in a cell. Depending on the length of the prison sentence, I would opt for the caning.
Getting onto many private trackers is a real pain in the ass, involving lurking on some IRC channel for who knows how long, begging and sucking up to people until somebody gives you an invite (assuming the tracker is even open to new applicants at the time.) Then, even with an invite, often the admins want to interview you to see if you answer probing questions like a pirate or a lawyer. The whole thing is a pain in the ass. These days I just say YOLO and use public trackers.
Does Mullvad allow me to connect using wireguard without pasting my private key into their website? Their website says the private key never leaves my browser and is only used to generate the configuration file, but all I really want to do is give them a public key and I suppose let them know which server I'll be connecting to. I can put together the config file by hand myself, thanks, I shouldn't need to ever copy the private key into my clipboard, let alone paste it into a browser.
Their marketing is the sketchiest shit ever. Any VPN that advertises like that is dead as far as I'm concerned, particularly NordVPN. They are the worst offender; listening to a few different jackasses on youtube pitching their product and hearing each one repeat the same talking points, it's obvious the FUD comes from NordVPN themselves, telling people to say it.
Open wifi networks still exist. When last I was at my public library (a year ago... covid) they still had an open wifi network for public use. I think for them it's a matter of principle, since it means nobody has to ask permission to use it.
Apple doesn't give one without the other. I think they could though; software could be sandboxed without an American corporation exerting authoritarian control over the distribution of software. But Apple has no interest in providing something like that, they like money too much.
No matter what the PR departments of these corporations would have us believe, when push comes to shove it's always about the money. These corporations are fair-weather activists at best.
It's not selling physical hardware that binds Apple here; it's having an app store that requires the cooperation of national government to process payments. Pakistan could forbid Apple from opening Apple Stores in Pakistan, but Pakistanis would likely still be able to purchase apple products through resellers and/or black/graymarkets. And if iOS were not locked to Apple's authoritarian app store, oppressed ethnic minorities in Pakistan could distribute software through through their preexisting covert channels.
Do you think Ahmadiyya Muslims in Pakistan want Apple and the Pakistani government to forbid them from installing the software they like? Do you think they feel safe because of this? It is common for totalitarian systems to cite user/citizen safety to justify themselves. I encourage you to see past this bullshit.
> Leaving Pakistan means shutting down their Pakistani App Store, so the app still won't be available.
If Apple chose not to exercise totalitarian control over iOS users by making their App Store essential to installing software on iOS devices, then Apple would not have to collaborate with the totalitarian Pakistani government. Pakistani religious and ethnic minorities could distribute software through whatever covert channels they've already established to resist their oppressive government.
> Their situation is a bit stickier being hardware brands,
I agree with your general point but not this part. Apple products still find their way into countries with no Apple Stores. I don't think selling physical products really makes the situation much sticker. If Apple chose to be a pure hardware company and refused to do any business in Pakistan, Pakistanis could still purchase Apple devices through the usual resellers and/or [black/gray]markets. Pakistan would have no leverage over Apple, as you point out, and Apple would not be a participant in the implementation totalitarianism (as they presently are.)
> Nonetheless it is illegal for a US company to bribe people abroad
IANAL but this is only partially true from what I understand. It's legal if the bribe is "grease money". (Grease money is paying a public official to do their job properly and promptly, while regular bribery is paying a public official to do something they shouldn't. But the distinction between the two seems subjective or ambiguous in many possible scenarios.)
> But if they choose to stop doing business in Pakistan, what would become of all of their existing customers?
What happens to Pakistani users of Debian, if Debian doesn't do business in Pakistan? Nothing. Those users are fine. iOS users would be in a bind only because Apple chose to create a system where users are left high-and-dry if/when Apple decides to no longer do business in any country.
Does Pakistan force Microsoft to bar the installation of Ahmadiyya software on Windows? I expect not. Windows, closed source as it is, is open relative to iOS and consequently is less vulnerable to this sort of pressure.
I used gentoo for a few years and found it to be very pleasant, with a great wiki. The only reason I ever stopped using it is because I realized how senseless it was to build everything from source on a laptop with questionable thermal characteristics. Running laptop fans full tilt for hours on end a few times a week evidently exceeds their expected duty cycle, who'd have thunk, but I had to replace the fan in my T60p twice before I learned this lesson. Building everything with Macports would have the same problem, except worse because mac laptops were never as easy to repair as thinkpads, particularly not in recent years.
Running untrusted software on these sort of systems is fundamentally broken, no matter what the package manager chooses chown or not chown. A malicious program could edit ~/.bashrc to modify the user's PATH, or wrap sudo with a keylogger then use that password to chown anything it likes. That's not even a theoretical but unlikely sort of attack; it's quite trivial.
> alias sudo='echo not what I expected'
> sudo foo
not what I expected
I suppose their hand was probably forced by Apple in some way, but simply offering binary downloads for mpv in particular is subpar. There are a lot of unusual options for mpv that, in my experience, don't get pulled into prebuilt binaries. For instance, last I checked, the prebuilt packages for mpv from homebrew didn't have librubberband support. LibRubberband is great, but to effectively integrate it into your workflow you need some userscripts that mpv doesn't ship with, so many users (including packagers evidently) may not see the value in it. When I was still using MacOS, I had to build mpv myself to enable it. My memory is hazy, but I think libarchive support was in a similar situation. Eventually I cut homebrew out of the picture and chose to build mpv myself, since homebrew wasn't helping at all, just getting in the way.