This is the Author’s Guild asking for internet providers to be able to block people without a court order.

Uhm…

Authors Guild Asks Supreme Court

That’s the question at the heart of Cox Communications v. Sony, a case the Authors Guild—joined by Sisters in Crime, Romance Writers of America, the Songwriters Guild of America, Novelists Inc., the Dramatists Guild of America, and the Society of Composers and Lyricists—weighed in on by filing an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on October 22, 2025.

This is asking for the court to decide in their favor.

As for

They can already go after individual infringers and web sites that aid in piracy. Now they want to be able to order providers to cut off users without the bother of going to court over it.

ISPs have been doing that for decades. That is where data caps came from with the ISPs tending to throttle the hell out of you if you downloaded too much in a single month or they thought you were running a website without paying for business internet. Back in the day, you just had to call and ask why your internet was so slow (for the fifth time that year…) and they would un-cap, but that eventually turned into an official system where they charge an arm and a leg for going over 1 TB or whatever nonsense.

ISPs are already doing whatever they want without court orders. They just do so in a way that lets them profit off the pirates (if there isn’t enough competition to prevent them from doing so).

I’ll also just add on: We very much do not want the ruling to be that ISPs have to document everything you do and collect evidence so that the rights holders can sue you. It will end very very badly. Because that won’t be the current model where if you get caught you get a letter and stop.

The local government is not banning repeat speeders from using the roads though.

Uhm… they do. Fuck up badly enough and your license is taken away. Does that stop people from driving? Of course not. But the penalties for getting caught go up really fast (if you aren’t a cishet white “good old boy”).

And while it is more associated with NIMBYism than safety, there are a few neighborhoods around the country where “no through traffic” is enforced very heavily. Usually there is no actual fine, but you get a rentacop who will make your life hell for the 30 minutes they spend “running your plates” and so forth.

That should remain the decision of the courts.

Uhm… what do you think this is?

I mean… why do you think new speed bumps and traffic signals get added to neighborhoods? Same with adjusted speed limits.

That IS the engineers (well, the local government that employs them) being held accountable for dangerous roads.

For this? I have very serious concerns for all the obvious reasons. But ISPs 100% know what we are doing. Like… there is a reason that comcast et al basically have like a 1 gig upload on a 100 gig down connection. Same with bandwidth caps… which “worked” up until everyone was teleconferencing from home and watching 4k netflix.

And… considering comcast et al love to sell bundles for “unlimited bandwidth” or “symmetrical upload”… they are very much profiting off of piracy.

A lot of that is also a function of displays.

Everyone and their mother want ridiculously bright displays with high contrast because we are all afraid of (I will never feel comfortable typing this without an awkward preamble) crushed blacks and so forth. Most people have no fricking clue what a “nit” is but you are more likely to know how many of those a display has than the actual resolution because that is what is put in the copy sent to reviewers.

And when your display puts out brighter light than the bare light bulb in the room… suddenly a white background is REALLY brutal and everyone jokes about getting flashbanged.

The “speculative” part being massive.

Depending on what brand phone you buy, you either think apple copied the Star Trek communicator or Star Trek copied apple. But the reality is that the communicator was really just a logical extension of the telephone (also so are cell phones but…). And it played such a major role since the 60s were really when people began moving really far away from their families for work or Life and audiences could relate to relying on their phones to keep in touch. And then it is just a logical extension of what happens if you are always in touch… and then what happens when you aren’t?

In a lot of ways? It is less that the techbros see the torture nexus and want to make their own and more that the torture nexus represents a logical progression of society and technology that we will reach if ethics and “common sense” fails and… welcome to the 21st century.

To elaborate:

A TC video usually serves two purposes. The first is to provide information that is interesting and sometimes even useful.

But the other is to detail the learning process and to glance down a few rabbit holes along the way.

And the Dishwasher Saga has the bonus of being both an incredibly snarky man proving the internet wrong AND being some of his most profitable videos.

One of his best videos that more or less explains this is when he did a “live” demo of… just using google to identify and repair a radio. It is deeply fun and rapidly turns into a discussion of why it is good to curate your own entertainment rather than relying totally on algorithms.

… How did you mispell the name of the service in the thread title?

Aside from that: I think so, but you need to make that decision for yourself. There are a few demos that various influencers have made (I was sold by the one by Remap Radio… Fuck Capitalism, Go Home, and Pay For Google?) but what sold me is:

1. I do a LOT of searching in any given month. I’ll use an LLM based “engine” for quick factoids (we’ll get back to that) but I really need the ability to search from my browser’s address bar or the steam browser without having to wade through all the bullshit.
2. I REALLY like that I can prioritize, deprioritize, and outright block sites. No need for a sketchy anti-fandom extension that tracks everything I do when I can just click the dots and say to never show me warframe.fandom ever again. Also it is useful for blocking the REALLY chuddy news sites and misinformation blogs
3. Speaking of Steam. I can just grab/assemble my login-less search string and use that with Steam so that all my in-game searches use kagi with my token rather than dealing with raw dogging google.
4. And as for that LLM? While I wouldn’t pay for it on its own, I do like the kagi assistant. Mostly because it shows me what search strings it is running/emulating and gives me citations. So when it tells me that smallpox tastes savory, I can see how it came to that conclusion and even check if that is contradicted by the website it linked to

I have a lot of concerns with the techbro libertarian attitude of the company itself and am not really huge with where my money goes (in terms of API calls) but… I have a lot more concerns with google shoving and obfuscating gemini more every single day.

Do I like that I am paying for what should be a basic fundamental element of the internet? Of course not. But also… kagi’s approach kinda feels like what searching always should have been since it lets me cut through the SEO bullshit so effectively. I doubt I would be paying for this if google et al hadn’t all decided it was better to emphasize advertisements and LLMs over all else but… I also could see myself doing so with the right demo?

No.

The “only thing going for” them is the ability to sign up with zero personal information. You can encrypt your emails with ANY service because it is you exchanging keys ahead of time and doing it locally before you even look up Job on usenet.

Do not trust a third party to encrypt your sensitive communications for you. Do not trust a third party to protect you. Instead, look at what the the third party actually offers you and figure out how you can take advantage of that.

Onion TLDs are inherently not human readable for many well documented reasons of varying levels of legitimacy.

The idea is that you write it down ahead of time (bookmarks and password managers are a thing) and paste it into your TOR browser or bake it into your privacy oriented live USB.

Proton are very open about what they do and don’t provide.

They’re not going to protect you and they will turn on you the second they get a letter in the mail or a text from the cops.

But what they DO provide is the ability to register an email address (with a domain that isn’t blocked by most services) without providing any other information. And, from there, you can encrypt it yourself if it is a particularly sensitive message.

As for IP logging? if only there were tools like VPNs and Tor to negate that.

Okay, hear me out: How much of that is a function of ChatGPT and how much of that is a function of… gestures at everything else

MOSTLY joking. But had a good talk with my primary care doctor at the bar the other week (only kinda awkward) about how she and her team have had to restructure the questions they use to check for depression and the like because… fucking EVERYONE is depressed and stressed out but for reasons that we “understand”.

For a (first) NAS, I generally discourage this.

Office liquidation desktops are great for home servers (if you aren’t paying for power). But they generally are very limited on storage. Limited bays to install hard drives and limited SATA ports. So you rapidly end up with drives just sitting on the bottom of the case and real jank pcie boards to extend your storage.

Which then becomes a HUGE issue when you have a drive failure. Because now you need to actually identify which drive is the failed one which involves reading off serial numbers and, depending on the setup/OS, making sure you get the order right when you plug them back in.

Whereas a 4-bay NAS generally has dedicated hardware and hot swap bays which make this trivial. You might never actually use the hot swap capability, but it makes checking which drive is the bad drive fairly trivial.

Also, a good 4 bay NAS is REAL easy to unplug and put in the trunk of your car during a disaster. Don’t ask me how I know.

I don’t have direct experience with them, but my understanding from youtubes is that the ugreen NASes are specifically designed for you to just ignore their OS and install your own (so truenas or proxmox).

Hardware tinkering is more limited but… there is very much a question of how much of that people actually do.

Raspberry pi: No. Or, at least, not without doing something to make sure you have a real storage backend and aren’t just running it off an SD card. The wear on SD cards is exaggerated and largely minimized if you use an OS that is configured to be aware of it but you are also increasingly relying on a ticking time bomb.

Mini PC/NUC? I am a huge fan of these and think they are what most people actually need for stuff like home assistant, adguard, etc. Just understand you are going to be storage limited sooner than you expect and you can oversubscribe that CPU and memory a lot faster than you would expect.

My general suggestion? Install proxmox on the mini PC and deploy on top of that. If/when you decide you want something more, migration is usually pretty easy.

And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.

Presumably most of those services on the same physical host are running in containers? So just add tailscale as a sidecar to that. Each container will be its own host as far as your tailnet is concerned and have its own internal IP. The official tailscale youtube has tutorials on that because it maps much better to a portainer based setup and more or less requires clients to have the tailnet running constantly (which, in my opinion, defeats the purpose of selfhosting but you do you).

Or do a mess with SRV records and… good luck with that

Wait… if you JUST want your domain to point to the tailscale IP and to only work when the client is on the tailnet, this is… super duper easy?

Just install tailscale. Go to your dashboard, and get the IP. And point your domain at that. No tunnels or reverse proxies needed.

This is one of the big problems with tailscale for home users. For people who only access a system remotely (e.g. a corporate VPN) it is amazing. For people who are both on and off network… yeah.

What I actually settled on was NOT using one of my domains and to instead just use the tailscale FQDNS in all situations. Mostly because I saw they added more human readable names so it is now like foo.happy-panda.ts.net instead of foo.tb12415161613616161616.ts.net

• Externally? I just activate the tailscale app and I can see foo.sad-hamster.ts.net with zero additional config. Which is good if I am using an app on my phone or helping someone I trust set up their own machine without needing to drive/fly out there with a laptop.
• Internally? I actually just added a simple DNS override locally (I use unbound via opnsense for this but you can also do it with a pihole if you really want to). So foo.sad-hamster.ts.net goes to foo.localdomain which goes to a 192.x IP seamlessly

End result is that I don’t need any special config in any devices or apps and everything just uses the tailscale FQDN regardless of whether it is a “client” connected to the tailscale itself. Which ALSO avoids issues where things stop working during an internet outage.

I’ve seen alternative setups that specify their own DNS server in their tailnet and… that is a lot of effort if you ask me. Also it seems to be the leading cause of “When I connect to my tailnet I can’t see the outside internet anymore”.

The big drawbacks to this are that it makes assigning actual certs rather messy since the same FQDN goes to multiple very different IPs… at least one of which being a potential security vulnerability since it is assigned by whoever controls the LAN you are on at any given moment. Not the end of the world and, truth be told, I am less likely to bother with proper certs for fully internal resources (unless I am getting paid to do it). So no NEW risk vectors.

The other is that you are kind of at the mercy of tailscale corp changing their business model entirely and suddenly having to deal with the fqdn that points to your plex server now actually being used for the latest dating app and everything catching on fire until you remember you did this. But that is a problem that is multiple years down the road…

Also, depending on what DNS/network shenanigans you do, this could cause other issues. But that is why you always test things yourself.

I get that Mozilla needs to keep the lights on but… yeah.

I’ve increasingly been meaning to switch to a fork. Anyone aware of a good way to self host a bookmark (and preferably tab) sync?

Is it just me, or are the bubbles coming closer together these days?

Yes and no.

Yes in the sense that we have a lot more “fad” economies. There is something new so that needs to be EVERYTHING and the market course corrects, often at the cost of hardship for many.

But “no” in the sense of what “bubbles” tend to refer to. Things like the Japanese Bubble Economy where it causes (I forget if it is officially one but) recessions and even depressions.

The AI Bubble is not going to do that (on its own…). Yeah, a LOT of companies are going to be left holding the bag when they realize LLMs can’t solve all problems for them AND manifest a Cyber Stana Katic to give them a blowie while it does that. But what will they be left with?

1. A LOT of “prompt engineers”: This is bad because that is going to be a LOT of people who, increasingly, went to school to get a degree in something with very little utility. That said… Art History majors have been showing us how to do that for decades and at least they did something they loved on their way to service industry jobs.
2. For the companies that gutted their workforce over the past few years: A need to rapidly hire talented workers who don’t require ChatGPT to do their job: This is REALLY good for the people who have been hurting and should actually lead to a lot of job mobility… for the old hats who predated this fad
3. For the companies that purchased hardware: A lot of edge computing devices are going to be of questionable value. But for the folk who “just” bought a shit ton of GPUs from Daddy Jensen? They have a shit ton of GPUs they can either sell for cheap (not horrible) or repurpose (good)

Don’t get me wrong. There is going to be upheaval and it is going to be bad. But it is also important to remember that drawings like the above are actively misleading and bordering on manipulative. Because basically all the biggies, except OpenAI, have non-AI uses. Oracle ballooned massively because of the OpenAI injection but… they are still god damned Oracle. Same with nVidia who, when they aren’t powering every LLM on the planet, are also one of the companies that makes all the cards that power stuff like computer vision and the like in cars and what not.

Because… remember the dot com bubble? Remember how basically the entire world still runs on The Internet? It was just a case of rebalancing and pivoting for the most part.

All that said… the US is in a really bad way because the fascists have been increasingly gutting the economy and stopping basically any industry that involves manufacturing or communicating with external countries. We are gonna have a massive stock market crash when OpenAI et al pops…

In the case of Windows, it is because MS has spent the past… 20 or so years slowly phasing out old functionality while not actually adding in new ones. So you get the mess of two (three?) different control panels which each one having capabilities the other doesn’t and so forth.

I also personally hated when they got rid of the start menu but also acknowledge that for the past almost 15 years my workflow has been “winkey and then type what I want”.

But mostly it is the MS mindset of completely changing the UX sometimes mid-generation and expecting people to figure it out. Which… I am not going to pretend that neurodivergence doesn’t play a factor but I kind of fucking hate my machine rebooting and suddenly I have to figure out a new interface.

Also there is MS increasingly activating more and more monitoring and spyware (sometimes re-enabling silently) with every single update. Same with increasingly locking people into MS accounts and cloud shit.

And while I do think many of the Lemmy Linux Users are more obnoxious than Vegans What Do Crossfit… contrast that with Linux where you find a desktop environment you like and you are basically good for a decade… and then another eight years after that when everyone is “slowly migrating”. And as long as you stay the fuck away from Gentoo and Arch, you have a pretty idiot proof setup for the vast majority of people.