• 2 Posts
  • 359 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • None of this is a likely threat, but is any of it completely outside the realm of feasibility?

    Yes. It’s well beyond being worth considering. You’re describing a massive conspiracy where hundreds of people from multiple countries’ governments as well as private corporations would all need to work together without any information leakage. All this to entrap some Canadian programmer who tried to torrent season 2 of a TV show aired in 1990. If any of this was worth doing, it would have been done by now, yet we hear of nothing like this ever happening.

    I’ve gone my entire adult life downloading copyrighted material without using a VPN and it’s never caused me any problem. My contract with my ISP confers me a level of trust that I’m perfectly comfortable with. I’m familiar with the Canadian law around this stuff, and how it’s been interpreted by the courts in the past. I am under no threat of financial damages being pursued against me. My ISP has no incentive to log my online activity or report it to foreign authorities. And even if they did, the Canadian courts limit the pursuable damages to four figures; barely enough to pay for the lawyer that would file the suit.


  • That level of paranoia is a waste of energy. I know that what I’m doing works just fine. Why would some Hollywood studio plant CSAM in a torrent? That would implicate them as well. It makes zero sense. They have better things to do than entrap some nobody in a country whose laws don’t favour them seeking any damages. It would cost them far more in legal fees to come after me than to just leave it alone. The notices they send out are entirely automated and exist primarily as a scare tactic.

    If you’re willing to be curious and open minded about things beyond your limited perception and experience, rather than be a know-it-all, I’d be happy to share with you an example email that I recieved recently. I think the language they use is quite interesting.




  • This reminds me of a method of trying to evaluate art in an objective way. Basically you ask yourself 3 questions:

    • What is this trying to do?
    • Does it succeed in what it’s trying to do?
    • Is what it’s trying to do worth doing?

    If the answers to 2 and 3 are “yes”, then it’s probably a good work of art. This helps remove the subjectivity of “do I enjoy it?” when evaluating a work.

    I would say the answers for Desert Bus indicate that it is indeed a good work of art. It succeeds in being a monotonous parody of a video game which makes a political statement about what games would be if they lacked any fictional elements or conflict. And I think the statement P&T were trying to make with this game was definitely worth making. Plus, we know from the amount of people who play it as a streamed challenge game that there is some desire for a game like that to exist.









  • Also check out debunking a murderer. Remember making a murderer on Netflix? Turns out that doc was bullshit, dude totally did those murders. Hear the prosecutors side and all the evidence the Netflix show left out.

    I don’t know one way or another but it was pretty clear that there was a lot of shaky evidence and a lot of coerced confession stuff which definitely doesn’t seem like justice. There was also a second season of that show where they brought in a much better lawyer (who specializes in exonerating false convictions) and showed some more significant problems with the prosecutor’s case and also that the guy’s defence lawyers were not the most competent (and IIRC also uncovered that the guy’s brother in law had a collection of r*pe porn images on his laptop)



  • Beyond the obvious answer of FOSS, there are some nonfree software out there that have powerful APIs and extremely rich third-party plugin/extension ecosystems. The two that immediately popped into my mind are Obsidian and FoundryVTT. Both are incredibly powerful tools that are only made more powerful by the huge amount of plugins available. Maybe it’s because I’ve been running D&D a lot lately that those two stick out in my mind.