Jul (they/she)

Cool. I activate all of the public ones. They come and go and rate limit and such. So just use them all. Unless you want to pay or try to find an invite to a free private one. That I can’t help with. But it works for me. Takes a little longer to search all of them, but it’s usually in the background so no big deal for me.

Try prowlarr.

It’s usually the opposite that’s the issue for me. If it’s not free, OK, let’s pay, but if it’s not a reasonable price for the product (including both the content, usability, and reusability, in case of media), then I’ll go out of my way to get it free or totally give up on it depending on how much I want it. That’s why I switched from piracy to Netflix for many years and now am back to piracy because I like shows in the background while working on projects, for example, or piracy, then Steam, then, fuck gaming as much because I found other hobbies.

Often the content is available without masking for a very short time so scrapers can access them or similar tricks to allow them access immediately after posting. But that requires that you hit the server immediately after the story is posted and there is no masking at all usually in those cases. That’s how things like archive.is get a copy for example. But none of that is client/browser side anymore, at least on the major sites. Otherwise it’s easy to defeat if the content is already provided to the browser and just masked with JavaScript or something that runs locally and can be blocked.

Hasn’t worked on most sites in a long time. The obscuring is now done on the server side so the text never gets to the browser. Otherwise it used to be easy to just use the developer console or uBlock to just remove the components that concealed the text or prevent the browser refreshing to prevent the concealing.

The Netflix user interface has become a mess to navigate, and mostly only ever shows me things I’ve already watched. If they’d put even a tiny bit of the effort they’re putting into driving people to watch certain content they produced or are paid to promote and their ad framework into making it possible to find new content and improving the content they do produce (damn the “AI”-based effects and skin smoothing nonsense and shitty writing in the second season of Wednesday pissed me off), I might be willing to stick around but at this point I’ve rarely been using it anymore. Sad to see the fall…

It was promising for a while, better quality streams, better payments to artists, etc. But they never ended up implementing stuff they promised like better integration with devices or improving their catalog.

It would reduce their short term revenue, but would improve their long-term revenue. Netflix used to have a great product, but they fiddled with it to make people watch only certain content that brings them more revenue. Same with Spotify. This then reduces the number of people willing to pay for the service and since there are few competitors that are better and/or have as much content they “piracy” is the only way to get the content you want for a reasonable price, with a good user experience.

So short term these things improve revenue, but not as much as the revenue lost in the long term as people start to dislike the the poor experience or are unable to afford the higher prices. And people don’t want multiple services to have to check for new content all the time all with different poor Ux.

YouTube did make some changes to their terms primarily for creators that get paid for content. They added some new LLM-based scanning of content to find stuff that is too repetitive or didn’t contain enough original content. Assuming the creators you looked at have mostly original content rather than remixing of content which may be misinterpreted by LLMs as not being “original enough”, they could be falling victim to overaggressive hits if they use a consistent format in their content since LLMs don’t really understand context, only patterns.

I’d be interested to find out if the creators got any notification from YouTube on the reason for removal of the content.

Considering the community this is posted in, I think it’s fair to mention (if maybe not directly link to) there are devices that decode DRM and other encoding and pass on a stream that can be watched without needing all of that. The ones I saw were under $100. Though it’s definitely possible that these may get cracked down on eventually either by customs or changes in the DRM that requires internet connectivity to decode which has been discussed though seems dumb to need internet to watch a broadcast signal, but greed often causes stupid things like that.

An antenna? If you don’t have a TV, you can get a tuner dongle and antenna for your PC and use VLC or other streaming video clients. Unfortunately, the services that take over-the-air signals and put them online usually get killed off by lawsuits. But tuner dongles and half decent, compact antennas are pretty cheap.

Unfortunately, the current state of the patent office is extremely understaffed and mostly nontechnical. So, there’s not enough qualified examiners to examine patents, not just in software, but medical devices, voting machines, and lots of other industries. So essentially if a patent is submitted by a major company, it just gets rubber stamped. And it’s up to the courts to sort it out. Unfortunately that sorting out is biased and understaffed, too, so usually the initial case will go to the patent holder by default and it’s not until an appeal or two on those biases and technical misinterpretations that it can be invalidated. So it’s rare for a smaller company to be able to spend that much money to invalidate an obvious idea like this. Of course this is by design to give large corporations an unfair advantage. If they want some tech, they just sue for a stupid patent, wait until the company either folds and then they can steal it legally, or goes bankrupt fighting it and they can acquire them hostilely.