When you download a torrent, you’re downloading it from someone else’s computer. That ‘someone else’ is usually an individual, not some file sharing site with redundant servers.

When you download a torrent, someone had to send it. It’s a small cost for individual torrents, but they had to pay for energy, internet connection, hard drives etc. If more people seed the torrent, you get a small bit of it from each seed, spreading the burden.

If no-one with the torrent has their computer on and seeding it, you cannot download the file, because there is no-one to download it from. If there are several seeds with the torrent, then you can still download it even if one or more seeds turn the computer off at night, delete the file, or are overloaded.

I’ve certainly never heard of a chicken ranch, but plenty of chicken farms.

Yeah, I have no idea either, but it’s been around for more than a decade so it should be fairly easy to find a library that duplicates it.

I would be wary of AI-based solutions. There’s a risk of it picking up e.g. satirical/spoof sponsorships as actual ads, and perhaps not detecting unusual ads.

I’m slightly terrified of the day someone starts getting AI to reword and read out individual ads for each stream.

You definitely would have legal issues redistributing the ad-free version.

Sponsor block works partly because it simply automates something the user is already allowed to do - it’s legally very safe. No modification or distribution of the source file is necessary, only some metadata.

It’s an approach that works against the one-off sponsorships read by the actual performers, but isn’t effective against ads dynamically inserted by the download server.

One option could be to crowdsource a database of signatures of audio ads, Shazam style. This could then be used by software controlled by the user (c.f. SB browser extension) to detect the ads and skip them, or have the software cut the ads out of files the user had legitimately downloaded, regardless of which podcast or where the ads appear.

Sponsorships by the actual content producers could then be handled in the same way as SB: check the podcast ID and total track length is right (to ensure no ads were missed) then flag and skip certain timestamps.

I wouldn’t start worrying until 50k+ hours.

There should be a way to view SMART info and that includes an hour count.

It depends on the exact choices made by the developers, but generally the IP used by a user to make a post will always be logged - I think that’s now moving into legally required in some jurisdictions.

Mods/admins seeing that is a potentially different matter.

Seeing the IPs a user has used and what others have used them, or at least some sanitized version, can be helpful and I would argue is necessary before considering an IP ban.

• Are there 50 other accounts on the same IP, and they all always post from that one IP? Either you have a really prolific sockpuppet, or you’re about to ban a whole college dorm or big office, and maybe generate a shitload of bad publicity.

• Does the user post from a wide range of IPs already? Then there’s no point in issuing an IP ban; they probably won’t even notice.

It’s too easy to bypass an IP ban. That’s why providers have moved to tying accounts to things that should be harder and harder to replace - and more and more invasive. Email > phone > government issued ID…

Hate speech and cancel culture are usually considered somewhat opposites - cancelling is usually a ‘weapon in the toolkit’ against hate speech or whatever else you don’t like.

IP bans usually don’t work well on the modern internet. Many ISPs use CG-NAT with very rapidly changing IPs shared by many users. Places like college dorms are the worst.

Looking up which accounts stem from which IP is also a moderate invasion of privacy.

The usual issues with “banning the accounts that are constantly being used to harass people” are:

• Clearly defining harassment vs legitimate discussion

• Figuring out who’s actually being unreasonable - is one party being baited into responding, then that response is reported?

• Having enough staffing

Yes, or at least 9 when the seed numbers were last checked, which shouldn’t change too quickly.

As for why seed numbers listed on trackers are significantly larger than those found by actual clients, who knows.

Not all seeds are online 24/7. Sometimes leaving the torrent running for hours or days can allow you to download it when that PC/server gets switched on.

I’m not sure that there is any point in a fediverse platform. That implies you want interaction (e.g. comments) from other locations, and therefore need moderation etc. A local blog site with ‘share to Mastodon’ buttons (if they exist) is probably all that’s needed.

But how do you determine what’s just ‘fixing poor wording’ and what’s actively hiding major bias or retcons of history?

Radio NZ got caught a year or so ago with a staffer who was editing articles syndicated from Reuters to be more pro-Russian. Should they be able to sweep that under the rug and claim it was only ever the one article they got caught on?

Likewise, bin Laden was originally hailed as an anti-Soviet freedom fighter. The articles relating to that are part of the historical record and kinda important.

Allowing the historical record to be retconned with impunity was probably the defining trait of 1984. It’s really not a path you want to go down.

Doesn’t really affect my point.

The point of eradication is that once a disease is gone, you don’t need to vaccinate against it any more. You’ve probably never been vaccinated against smallpox, for example.

Many of these are defaults dating back to the Unix days, particularly tar (tape archive) and gzip.

Krita (KRA), GIMP (XCF), and Photoshop (PSD) save files in a lossless internal format that preserves layers etc. Every time you open and save a jpg, it gets worse, and that’s not acceptable for professional use. If all you want is to crop/draw on images, something like KolourPaint is probably a better choice.

MP4 is/was patent encumbered depending on jurisdiction.

Presumably it’s worth the same as it would be if you simply sold it.

It’s not just a FOSS issue; it’s a software patent issue.

VLC doesn’t attract a huge amount of attention because they don’t really make any money and would just get forked if someone did try to destroy them.

However, larger distros with commercial backing (OpenSUSE springs to mind) often won’t directly include potentially patent-infringing packages, so you have to get them from a quasi-third-party repo like Packman.