German Court Revives Axel Springer Suit Against Adblock Plus
German Court Revives Axel Springer Suit Against Adblock Plus
Germany's Federal Court of Justice revived Axel Springer's lawsuit against Adblock Plus maker Eyeo, ruling that ad-blockers may infringe copyright by altering website code. The case returns to Hamburg for reevaluation.Zane Howard (WebProNews)
MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing
MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing
There’s a stark difference in success rates between companies that purchase AI tools from vendors and those that build them internally.Sheryl Estrada (Fortune)
"Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" lamented Rob Pike in 2000
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/34919033
This talk is a polemic that distills the pessimistic side of my
feelings about systems research these days. I won’t talk much about the optimistic side, since lots of others can do that for me; everyone’s excited about the computer industry. I may therefore present a picture somewhat darker than reality. However, I think the situation is genuinely bad and requires
action.
- See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike for context
UK drops demand for backdoor into Apple encryption
UK drops demand for backdoor into Apple encryption
The United Kingdom will no longer force Apple to provide backdoor access to secure user data protected by the company’s iCloud encryption service.Jess Weatherbed (The Verge)
Taylor Swift’s new album comes in cassette. Who is buying those?
When Taylor Swift’s releases her new album, “Life of a Showgirl,” in October, it can be heard on the usual places, including streaming, vinyl and…cassette tape?The cassette tape was once one of the most common ways to listen to music, overtaking vinyl in the 1980s before being surpassed by CDs. But the physical audio format has become an artifact of a bygone era, giving way to the convenience of streaming.
Or, that’s what many thought.
In 2023, 436,400 cassettes were sold in the United States, according to the most recent data available from Luminate, an entertainment data firm. Although that’s a far cry from the 440 million cassettes sold in the 1980s, it’s a sharp increase from the 80,720 cassettes sold in 2015 and a notable revival for a format that had been all but written off.
Cassettes might not be experiencing the resurgence of vinyls or even CDs, but they are making a bit of a comeback, spurred by fans wanting an intimate experience with music and nostalgia, said Charlie Kaplan, owner of online store Tapehead City.
“People just like having something you can hold and keep, especially now when everything’s just a rented file on your phone,” Kaplan told CNN.
“Tapes provide a different type of listening experience — not perfect, but that’s part of it. Flip it over, look at the art and listen all the way through. You connect with the music with more of your senses,” he said.
Taylor Swift’s new album comes on cassette. Who is buying those?
When Taylor Swift releases her new album, “Life of a Showgirl,” in October, it could be heard on its usual places, including streaming, vinyl and … cassette tape?Jordan Valinsky (CNN)
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We’re scared of nuclear war. But it will never happen. The real danger? Hypersonic missiles — and no one’s talking about it.
For decades, we’ve lived under the shadow of nuclear war. The narrative is clear: one spark, one miscalculation, and humanity could vanish.
But here’s the truth: nuclear weapons are the most successful deterrent in history. Their very existence makes their use irrational. No leader will press the button knowing it means national — and species-level — suicide.
So why are we so obsessed with a war that will never happen?
Meanwhile, hypersonic and ballistic missiles are already being deployed and used — in Ukraine, in the Middle East, in Asia. They’re fast, precise, hard to intercept, and crucially: not seen as “existential.”
That’s the danger.
Because they don’t threaten total annihilation, they lower the threshold for war. A strike with a hypersonic missile isn’t “nuclear Armageddon” — it’s “a proportional response.”
But each use normalizes high-speed, high-precision warfare. Each escalation feels manageable — until it isn’t.
We’re not heading for a nuclear war. We’re sleepwalking into a new kind of war — fast, uncontrollable, and already here.
We explore this paradox in the latest episode of the podcast "The Italian Uncut": “Why Hypersonics are More Dangerous Than Nukes”
Behind InvestEU’s Trojan Logic: Public Guarantees, Private Gains, and the Illusion of Climate Action
EU industrial policy is being portrayed as key to achieving the net-zero targets. InvestEU, a set of financial instruments that use the EU budget and debt as a revolving guarantee fund for investors, aims to unlock billions in public and private investments for the green transition. However, InvestEU merely creates an illusion of climate action: it effectively outsources the responsibility for, and the pace of, the green transition to investors whose primary imperative remains profit maximisation, without tackling the decarbonisation of capitalism. Climate investments remain marginal and increasingly compete with defence priorities. Moreover, in its efforts to ‘crowding in’ investors, the EU is crowding out democratic oversight and control.
Behind InvestEU’s Trojan Logic - SOMO
InvestEU outsources the responsibility for, and the pace of, the green transition to investors whose primary motive is profit maximisation.madhuri (SOMO)
'Ad Blocking is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned By Top German Court
Legal action by publisher Axel Springer, which aims to outlaw ad blocking on copyright grounds, has been revived by Germany's top court.
Case file: juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi… (German)
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Chrome VPN Extension With 100k Installs Screenshots All Sites Users Visit
Most people turn to a VPN for one reason: privacy. And with its verified badge, featured placement, and 100k+ installs, FreeVPN.One looked like a safe choice. But once it’s in your browser, it’s not working to keep you safe, it’s continuously watching you.
SpyVPN: The Google-Featured VPN That Secretly Captures Your Screen | Koi Blog
FreeVPN.One, a Chrome-verified extension with over 100K installs, claimed to offer privacy but instead captured users’ screens. Our research exposes how it operated.koi-security.webflow.io
Google President Praised MAGA Speech Slamming ‘Climate Extremist Agenda’
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/35962707
Google President Praised MAGA Speech Slamming ‘Climate Extremist Agenda’
Google President Praised MAGA Speech Slamming ‘Climate Extremist Agenda’ - DeSmog
Interior Sec. Doug Burgum told an AI conference that data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear. Ruth Porat called his comments "fantastic.”Geoff Dembicki (DeSmog)
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How to obtain standards - ISO, AS
The world runs on standards that define everything. Unfortunately these standards are proprietary which is highly inconvenient.
Where would one obtain standards namely international standards (ISO) and Australian standards (AS). Some can be found on the internet archive but a majority cannot. I believe some libraries let you download some version with all sorts of drm but that's not something I want to deal with.
How hard can it be to get a pdf that defined how literally everything in the world works.
EDIT: I have checked Library Genesis it has some but not all.
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It's worth asking your local library. My library card gives me read-only access to every ISO standard I've ever needed.
There's also the Estonian standards institute which offers the same standards for much much cheaper.
EVS standard evs.ee | en
Estonian standardisation organisation – buy standards (EVS, EN, ISO, IEC), take part in trainings or participate in standardisation committees.www.evs.ee
Canada | Liberal Government Authorized New Exports For Israel’s Iron Dome
“By approving exports related to the Iron Dome, Canada is providing a shield for Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestinians.”
Archived version: archive.is/newest/readthemaple…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
'Ad Blocking is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned By Top German Court
'Ad Blocking is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned By Top German Court * TorrentFreak
Legal action by publisher Axel Springer, which aims to outlaw ad blocking on copyright grounds, has been revived by Germany's top court.Andy Maxwell (TF Publishing)
Jeremy Corbyn on Britain’s New Left-Wing Party
Keir Starmer’s Labour government has had a dismal first year in power. In an interview, socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn explains why it’s time to create a new left-wing party that empowers working-class people.
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X's declining Android app installs are hurting subscription revenue
X is struggling on Android with installs down by 49% year-over-year as of June 2025.
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How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World
How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World
A 404 Media investigation reveals how the man who started Tea, the ‘women dating safety’ app, tried to hire a female ‘face’ for the company and then hijack her grassroots community.Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)
How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World
On March 16, 2023, Paola Sanchez, the founder and administrator of Are We Dating the Same Guy?, a collection of Facebook groups where women share “red flags” about men, received a message from Christianne Burns, then fiancée of Tea CEO and founder Sean Cook.“We have an app ready to go called ‘Tea - Women’s Dating Community’, that could be a perfect transition for the ‘Are we dating the same guy’ facebook groups since it sounds like those are on their way under… Tea has all the safety measures that Facebook lacked and more to ensure that only women are in the group,” Burns said. “We are looking for a face and founder of the app and because of your experience, we think YOU will be the perfect person! This can be your thing and we are happy to take a step back and let you lead all operations of the product.”
The Tea app, much like the Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups, invites women to join and share red flags about men to help other women avoid them. In order to verify that every person who joined the Tea app was a woman, Tea asked users to upload a picture of their ID or their face. Tea was founded in 2022 but largely flew under the radar until July this year, when it reached the top of the Apple App Store chart, earned glowing coverage in the media, and claimed it had more than 1.6 million users.
Burns’ offer to make Sanchez the “face” of Tea wasn't the first time she had reached out to her, but Sanchez never replied to Burns, despite multiple attempts to recruit her. As it turned out, Tea did not have all the “safety measures” it needed to keep women safe. As 404 Media first reported, Tea users’ images, identifying information, and more than a million private conversations, including some about cheating partners and abortions, were compromised in two separate security breaches in late July. The first of these breaches was immediately abused by a community of misogynists on 4chan to humiliate women whose information was compromised.
A 404 Media investigation now reveals that after Tea failed to recruit Sanchez as the face of the app and adopt the Are We Dating the Same Guy community, Tea shifted tactics to raid those Facebook groups for users. Tea paid influencers to undermine Are We Dating the Same Guy and created competing Facebook groups with nearly identical names. 404 Media also identified a number of seemingly hijacked Facebook accounts that spammed the real Are We Dating The Same Guy groups with links to Tea app.
404 Media’s investigation also discovered a third security breach which exposed the personal data of women who were paid to promote the app.
“Since first creating these [Are We Dating The Same Guy] groups, I have avoided speaking to the media as much as possible because these groups require discretion and privacy in order to operate safely and best protect our members,” Sanchez told 404 Media. “However, recent events have led me to decide to share some concerning practices I’ve witnessed, including messages I received in the past that appear to contradict some of the information currently being presented as fact.”
Burns is no longer with Cook or involved with Tea, and she did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But messages from Burns to Sanchez show that Cook changed his story about why he created Tea after they broke up. 404 Media also talked to a former Tea employee who said she only knew Burns as “Tara,” a persona that also exists in the Tea app and on Facebook as an official representative of the Tea app. This employee said that when Burns left the company, Cook took over the persona and communicated with other Tea users as if he was Tara.
Overall, our reporting shows that while Cook said he built Tea to “protect women,” he repeatedly put them at risk and tried to replace a grassroots movement started by a woman who declined to help him. As one woman who worked for him at Tea told us: “his [Cook’s] motive is money, not actually to protect people.”
Tea did not directly answer a list of specific questions regarding 404 Media’s findings and the facts presented in this article. Instead, it sent us the following statement:
“Building and scaling an app to meet the demand we’ve seen is a complex process. Along the way, we’ve collaborated with many, learned a great deal and continue to improve Tea,” a Tea spokesperson said. “What we know, based on the fact that over 7 million women now use Tea, with over 100,000 new sign ups per day, is that a platform to help women navigate the challenges of online dating has been needed for far too long. As one of the top apps in the U.S. App Store, we are proud of what we’ve built, and know that our mission is more urgent than ever. We remain committed to evolving Tea to meet the needs of our growing community every day.”
How Tea Tried to Recruit a Female “Face” for the App
Sanchez started the first Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook group in 2022 after her terrible experiences dating. The basic premise—a space for women to share information about men with other women—has existed in various forms before, but Are We Dating The Same Guy quickly became an online phenomenon. Today, Are We Dating The Same Guy is comprised of more than 200 different Facebook groups dedicated to different cities across the U.S. and Canada and has more than 7 million members. The groups have many volunteer moderators, but Sanchez is still the administrator for most of them.Women in the groups, who can also post anonymously, share a wide range of experiences, from relatively benign complaints about men they didn’t like, to serious accusations of infidelity and physical assault.
The popularity of Are We Dating The Same Guy groups is evidence that its members find them useful, but that popularity has come with a cost. Sanchez has become increasingly cautious after several attempts at retaliation from disgruntled men who are organizing on Telegram to dox women in the group and at least one lawsuit. In that case, a man accused Are We Dating The Same Guy of libel after a user in the Chicago group called him “clingy” and a “psycho.” Sanchez also said she had a rock thrown through the window of her family’s home by a man who wanted to stop Are We Dating The Same Guy, that she pays for a service to wipe her personal information from the internet, and that she generally keeps a low profile. This is the first time she has talked to the press.
By the time she was first approached by Burns in October, 2022, Sanchez was suspicious of Tea’s interest in Are We Dating The Same Guy because of some of the negative attention the groups already got.
“I’m a huge fan of all the work you're doing and I think it will have an ENORMOUS and important benefit on the lives of women,” Burns said in a Facebook message to Sanchez on October 25, 2022. At the time, Burns’ Facebook profile picture was a photo of her and Cook smiling. “My fiance and I have been working on a similar project due to my own dating woes and thought you’d be the perfect person to collaborate with on it.”
This is an entirely different origin story than the one Cook tells about Tea today. On Linkedin, Tea’s site, and interviews, Cook says that he “launched Tea after witnessing his mother’s terrifying experience with online dating—not only being catfished but unknowingly engaging with men who had criminal records.”
Before starting Tea, Cook worked at a couple of tech companies in San Francisco, including Salesforce, where he held a “director” title and rapped and made songs about Salesforce products during presentations he shared on Linkedin.
0:00
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1×A video Sean Cook uploaded to Linkedin
There is no mention of Burns on the Tea site, but in 2022 she persistently asked Sanchez to join Tea.
In addition to messaging her on Patreon and Facebook, on December 2, Burns sent Sanchez $25 on Venmo along with a message thanking Sanchez for her work. “Sent you a PM on Facebook re: Business collab when you get a chance! 😊” On December 7, 2022 Burns sent Sanchez $15 on buymeacoffee.com along with a message about a “business opportunity,” and “an app with a similar concept to the facebook groups you manage that I would love to collaborate with you on!”
In April2023, after Sanchez didn’t respond to Tea’s requests, Are We Dating The Same Guy group admins started banning a set of Facebook accounts posting links to the Tea app over and over again. For example, Are We Dating The Same Guy moderators banned one Facebook user named Crystal Lee from 25 groups across the country after the account repeatedly encouraged members to use Tea and suggested that information about the men they’re asking about was available there. Lee’s account was clearly hijacked from a woman with a different name sometime around 2016. While the account name is Crystal Lee, the name in the URL for her page is Kimberly Ritchart. I found Richart’s new Facebook account, where her first post in 2016 says she lost access to her original account. 404 Media couldn’t confirm who was in control of the account, and saw no evidence that Tea was behind it, but activity from similarly hijacked accounts indicate that there was an organized effort to stealthily promote the Tea app in the Are We Dating The Same Guy groups.
Two other Facebook accounts, Norma Warner and Morgan Ward, were banned from 23 groups and five groups respectively for spamming Tea app promotions. Warner and Ward also shared identical replies two weeks apart. “If I remember correctly, I think he’s been posted to Tea. I maybe [sic] mistaking him for someone else but looks pretty familiar,” both replies said in response to different posts in different groups.
Veronica Marz told me she was hired in April 2024 to be Tea’s partnerships manager. Her job was to manage the affiliate program that would pay people $1 per user who signed up to Tea via their unique affiliate link. She also moderated a number of groups named “Are We Dating the Same Guy | Tea App” for different cities, which were started by and owned by the Tea app and could obviously confuse Facebook users. Marz also reached out to admins of the real Are We Dating The Same Guy groups to ask if they’d be willing to join the affiliate program.While reporting this story, 404 Media discovered that Tea’s data about the affiliate program, including who signed up for it, their real name, how much they have been paid, their emails, phone numbers, Venmo accounts, and charities they wanted to donate to if they didn’t want the money, were left exposed online. All a hacker or other third party had to do to view all of this data was add “/admin” to the public Tea affiliate site’s URL. Tea turned off this site and the affiliate program entirely after 404 Media reached out for comment for this article on August 13.
On December 1, 2024, Marz noticed an account named Nicole Li who was spamming Tea app promotions in one of the Facebook groups she managed for Tea as part of her job. Li was not part of the affiliate program that Marz managed, and unbeknownst to Marz, moderators of the original Are We Dating The Same Guy groups would eventually ban the Li account later. At that point, Marz was reporting directly to Cook, and she flagged the account to him because it was suspicious and spamming several groups at the same time.
“Sean uses that account to communicate directly with users on the app, but people think they are speaking to someone actually named Tara."
“Just wanted to check and see if this person was working with the Tea app?,” Marz said in a text to Cook along with a screenshot of the account seen by 404 Media. “I’ve noticed that they’ve joined all the groups regardless of location and they’ve been promoting the app, but they aren’t a part of the affiliate program that I saw.”Cook replied: “Not sure what’s going on there but as long as they’re not bothering anyone, I guess let’s just let them do their thing!”
All of the Facebook accounts that spammed Tea promotions were either deactivated or did not respond to our request for comment. None of the accounts were officially part of Tea’s affiliate program, according to the exposed data.
404 Media has seen several messages from Are We Dating the Same Guy Facebook group members and moderators confused about whether the Tea app was the official Are We Dating The Same Guy app, and whether Sanchez was affiliated with it. Several people also wondered if the Tara persona, which reached out to them on Facebook, was associated with Tea or if Sanchez was behind it. One review of the Tea app on the Google Play Store from January, 2024 also seemed confused and disappointed by the app.
“A girl in a FB group referred me (I think she was actually advertising 🤷),” the review said. “She called it a free app. It’s not free [...] The fb groups should have raised MORE THAN ENOUGH to cover app costs that are referred to in other reviews [...] I find this gross. Maybe I’ll come around or be back, but for now I’ll stick with fb.”
Marz also told me that several users in the Tea-owned Facebook groups were confused, and thought that they were in the original Are We Dating The Same Guy groups owned by Sanchez.“Maybe five to seven people in different groups asked me about Paola Sanchez, and I had to explain to them, like, ‘Hey, this is not Paola’s group. This group is owned by the Tea app,’” she told me. “I had to explain to them the difference between the two.”
Tea’s promotion strategy clearly managed to poach and confuse some members of the Are We Dating The Same Guy community and get them to join the app. Later, its strategy was to undermine Are We Dating The Same Guy directly.
Today, Tea’s website credits an influencer named Daniella Szetela as helping to widely promote Tea: “One day while scrolling, Sean discovered a viral creator, Daniella, whose content resonated with millions of women—and saw an opportunity to bring that same energy to Tea. What began as a simple idea quickly turned into a social media movement.” The site says Cook was so impressed with her voice and following, he made her “Head of Socials.” A March, 2025 archive of the same page on Tea’s site tells the same story, but at the time Szetela’s title was “Chief Female Officer.”
“Together, Sean and Daniella have transformed Tea into more than an app—it’s a movement,” Tea’s site says.
In September 2024 Tea started posting videos to its official TikTok and Instagram accounts named @TheTeaPartyGirls. Some of the videos are of Szetela showing the app and talking about how great it is. Other videos are made to look like they’re coming from other Tea users, but in reality are produced by a company called SG Social Branding, which describes itself as a “Gen Z Creator Powerhouse Delivering Short Form Videos to be used for YOUR Brand’s Paid Social Ads.” According to its site, SG Social Branding has a team of “over 35 gen Z creators” who create videos for clients. These videos are made in the the style of common social media posts, like an influencer talking directly to the camera, doing man on the street interviews, or videos that look like they are clips from podcasts, but are from podcasts that don’t actually exist.
On a “case studies” page for Tea on the SG Social Branding website, the company says that Tea’s “ask” was to “Develop the narrative that Tea is the go to for Women who like to stay safe while dating.”
“We deployed creators for street interviews in locations such as NYC during daytime and the Nightlife scene on college campuses. Additionally, we made entertaining podcast clips of girl talk that is truly un-scrollable,” the case studies page says. Under “results” it says “The TEA app went #1 in the app store on July 23rd, 2025 and is now viral! Videos deployed from SGSB creators crossed over 3.4 million views with over 74k shares and rising.”
In these videos, the influencers don’t only promote Tea and talk about it as if they actually found information on it about men they know, they also repeatedly disparage Are We Dating The Same Guy Facebook groups.
“Instead of using that Facebook group Are We Dating the Same Guy, what girls are doing now because it’s so much easier is they’re downloading Tea,” a woman holding a microphone says as if she’s talking to someone off-camera. The text overlaid on the video says “Tea Party Pod.” The woman, Savannah Isabella, is an influencer who works for SG Social Branding. She goes on to talk about how one of her friends found a guy she was seeing there and all the red flags other women have posted about him. “Miss me with that. Boy bye. And it’s so much easier and faster than that Facebook group.”
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A post shared by Tea - Dating Safety App for Women (@theteapartygirls)
In another video, Isabella is at a bar, demoing the Tea app. “Girls, forget about Are We Dating The Same Guy,” she says.Isabella and SG Social Branding did not respond to a request for comment.
Marz told me that she was hired to Tea by a woman named Tara and that initially she only communicated with Tara. Marz did a Zoom interview with Tara before she started to work for Tea and the woman identified herself as Tara over text and email. In November 2024, Marz said that Tara left the company, at which point she started reporting directly to Cook. When I showed Marz a photograph of Christianne Burns, Cook’s then fiancée, she said that was who she knew as Tara, who first interviewed her over Zoom.
After "Tara" left, Marz said Sean took over the “Tara Tea” account which was used to communicate with Tea users in the app and on Facebook.
“Sean uses that account to communicate directly with users on the app, but people think they are speaking to someone actually named Tara,” she told me. Essentially, a man is posing as a woman to an audience of women who are trying to protect themselves from, at best, deceptive men.
How Tea Deleted Posts About Men
Tori Benitez has a private consulting business for victims of domestic violence who are in Family Court for high conflict divorces or custody battles. She told me she joined the Tea app because it promoted digital safety, talking about abusers, and protecting people by letting them share information anonymously.“I'm in the dating scene and on dating apps, and have had my own experience, so I first joined as a user, and then I saw them post that they needed help with escalation claims,” she told me. The escalation claims were complaints both from men about what women were posting about them in the app as well as complaints from other users. She thought her experience as a paralegal would be useful, and she could use more remote work, so she sent Tea her information.
“I had a Zoom call with Sean, and he wanted to know not only a little bit about my business and how I help people, but I had to tell my own personal story.” Benitez said. “I had an ex who literally threatened to kill me and told me how he was going to kill me, even after a restraining order. My story is deep and scary, and he kind of interrupted me and started crying. And I was like, ‘Oh, are you okay?’ Looking back, shouldn't I have been the one crying? It's kind of weird.”
Benitez said she took the job because she wanted to help women. During the interview and at several points while working for Tea, Benitez said that Cook wanted to make her consulting business part of Tea. Benitez said Cook floated having a tab in the Tea app that would send women to her consulting business if they needed help, or having her run workshops for users.
“I feel like his [Cook’s] motive is money, not actually to protect people, and I think that his story about his mom is a crock of shit.”
Benitez started working in April of this year but said the job wasn’t what she expected because it made no use of her experience as a paralegal. She said the work was more like customer support, and mainly had her filtering through complaints, responding to them according to a strict script she was given, and keeping a record of the responses.If a complaint contained words like “defamation” or seemed legally threatening, she would find the post in question and the user who posted it. At times she would contact the user and ask them if the post was true and if they had any evidence to prove it. Sometimes users would respond and say the accusations were true, and the post would remain. Sometimes the users also provided supporting evidence, like court documents. Sometimes the users would delete the posts themselves, or Tea would delete the posts if the users didn’t respond to Benitez’s questions after a certain amount of time.
“That's when things would get deleted and literally no longer exist on there,” she said. “Nobody could find them. They did not go into an archive. They are just poof gone.”
She would record all the complaints and responses in a spreadsheet for Tea’s internal records, but said it didn’t always make sense when Tea decided to delete a public post on the Tea app vs when it decided to leave one up. In one interview in May, 2025, Cook said the Tea app receives “three legal threats a day from men,” and that Tea has a full legal team that helps it manage those situations.
Benitez said that in one case, Cook told her he would handle a complaint from a man regarding what was said about him on the app himself because Cook knew the man personally.
“He [Cook] seemed to side with or randomly choose to delete things that just didn't make sense and felt really concerning to me,” she said. “But I felt I had no room to complain, because every time I brought up a concern his response was either ‘ignore it,’ or ‘I will handle it,’ and there's no HR, so it's not like I can go anywhere to say all this stuff's happening. I didn't have any other point of contact other than him.”
Benitez also said she raised concerns about users’ behavior on the app. She said that at some point earlier this year Tea went viral in one town in Louisiana, where Tea users started going after each other and the number of complaints exploded.
“There was a lot of fighting in the comments between users. There were a lot of threats between users. It just turned into a chat room,” she said. “They would be fighting each other. Like, ‘Where are you at? I’ll pull up on you.’ I was like, ‘holy shit.’ There would be racist posts. It just started getting bad, and I mentioned that to him [Cook] as well, and I basically got the answer of let them say whatever they want. And like this whole like, you know, ‘It's free speech.’ I thought this was about protecting people,” Benitez recalled.
In May, Benitez said Cook was late to pay her. When she asked about it, Cook said he didn’t have the money, and asked her to keep working until he did, or work for less pay. At that point, Benitez said she wouldn’t work until she got paid for the work she already did. Eventually Cook sent her the money for the hours she already worked, but Benitez never came back.
There are currently two class action lawsuits in motion against Tea accusing the company of failing to properly secure users’ private information. After these complaints were filed Tea updated its terms of service, which now require users to waive their right to participate in class actions against the company, and agree to attempt an “informal dispute resolution” before suing the company.
“I feel like his [Cook’s] motive is money, not actually to protect people,” Benitez said, “and I think that his story about his mom is a crock of shit.”
Tea’s Security Breaches Put Users at Risk
On July 25, 404 Media broke the news that Tea made an error that completely exposed a database containing at least 72,000 thousand images from its users, and that a misogynistic 4chan community downloaded them and shared them online in various forms in order to harass and humiliate women. On July 28, 404 Media revealed an even worse security breach to Tea, which exposed more than a million private messages between Tea users that included identifying information and intimate conversations about cheating partners and abortions.After the first hack, someone created a website modeled after “Facemash,” the site that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg infamously created while he was a student at Harvard to rank the attractiveness of female students at the university. This new site, based on Tea data, took the selfies women uploaded to Tea in order to verify they are women, presented them to visitors in pairs, and allowed them to choose which they believed was more attractive. The site used the votes to create a ranking and also highlighted the list of the 50 most and least attractive women according to votes.
The second breach was far more dangerous not only because the direct messages between Tea users that were exposed included conversations they thought were private about sensitive subjects that could become dangerous in the wrong hands, but also because those conversations included details that could be used to deanonymize users. Direct messages between users often included their real phone numbers, names, and social media handles.
“I posted on the app about a man who groomed and abused me as a minor,” one Tea user whose direct messages were exposed in the second security breach told 404 Media. The user asked to be anonymous because she’s heard about “incel dudes” doxing Tea users. “I joined Tea because I appreciated the premise of a ‘whisper network’ for community safety—because a huge amount of men are, in fact, unsafe individuals, and most of the time those impacted don't find out until it's too late.”
This user added that they felt safe enough to share intimate details on Tea because it was advertised as a “safe space” for women with a strong emphasis on anonymity.
“My reaction to the breach is anger, just anger, and some disgust,” the user said.
Kasra Rahjerdi, the researcher who flagged the second security breach to 404 Media, said there were signs he wasn’t the only person who may have accessed more than a million of private Tea messages. Every Tea user is assigned a unique API key which allows them to interface with the app in order to log in, read public posts, share posts, or do other actions in the app. Rahjerdi discovered that any Tea user was also able to use their own API key to access sensitive parts of the Tea app’s backend, including a database of private messages and the ability to send all Tea users a push notification.
This access also allowed users to create new databases, and Rahjerdi told 404 Media he saw someone else doing just that while he was looking at Tea’s backend. Most of these databases were empty, but one contained a link to a Discord server with a handful of users which shut down shortly after 404 Media tried to join it on July 26. This activity indicates that someone else found the same security breach as Rahjerdi and could have accessed more than a million private messages of Tea users as well.
In a podcast interview in April, 2025, Cook said he doesn’t know how to code, and that the Tea app was built by two developers in Brazil. According to Tea’s Linkedin page, both developers are contractors who are available to hire via Toptal, a platform where software developers offer their labor as remote freelancers. Those two developers did not respond to our request for comment.
Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told 404 Media that the private Tea messages could be especially dangerous to Tea users who talked about abortions or specific men.
“I would be particularly concerned about posts about abortions in say Texas, where SB 8 grants a private right of action to sue anyone who performs or facilitates an abortion that violates the law,” Galperin said. SB 8, also known as the “Texas Heartbeat Act,” bans abortion after the detection of a “fetal heartbeat,” which is usually six weeks into pregnancy. The law also allows anyone to sue anyone else who performs abortions or “aids and abets” performing or inducing an abortion in violation of the law. “I’d also be concerned about DMs containing information of sexual orientation or immigration status, or details about sexual assault that the survivor was sharing in private.”
Galperin said she would be “extremely concerned” if the messages got out, not just because of the men who are named in the messages, but because “There are people who think that anyone who has an account on this platform is fair game for harassment,” referring to some of the harassment we’ve already seen from 4chan.
Despite the risks the Tea app has already put users in, Tea has downplayed the impact of the security breaches, and has continued to grow in popularity. On July 28, Tea said in a post to Instagram that “some” direct messages were accessed as part of the initial incident, and that it had temporarily disabled the ability for users to send direct messages. The statement does not acknowledge that more than a million messages were exposed, and also misleads users that those messages were leaked as part of the initial breach. The messages were exposed in an entirely separate breach around different security issues. On July 26, after 404 Media reported about both Tea breaches, Tea said on Instagram that it received over 2.5 million requests to join the app. The replies from users on Instagram are filled with people who are on the Tea app waiting list to be approved. Again, even after it said it has hired a cybersecurity firm to address the two previously reported breaches, 404 Media found a third security issue that exposed users’ private information that Tea wasn’t aware of until we reached out for comment.
Today, Tea’s site boasts that more than 6.2 million women use the app.
Joseph Cox contributed reporting.
A Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating
The more than one million messages obtained by 404 Media are as recent as last week, discuss incredibly sensitive topics, and make it trivial to unmask some anonymous Tea users.Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)
[Video] Timelapse shows Swedish 600-tonne church begin three-mile journey to new home
A landmark church in Sweden began a two-day journey to its new home on Tuesday, 19 August, time-lapse video shows. The Kiruna Church has been relocated to save it from ground subsidence and the expansion of the world's largest underground iron ore mine. It was slowly moved down an Arctic road, part of a 30-year project to relocate thousands of people and buildings from the city in the country's far north. The 600-tonne, 113-year-old church was lifted from its foundations and onto a specially built trailer. Kiruna Church is one of Sweden's largest wooden structures, often voted its most beautiful. It will travel three miles to a brand-new Kiruna city centre at a speed of 500 metres/hour.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/sweden-church-move-timelapse-video-b2810215.html
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From Book Bans to Internet Bans: Wyoming Lets Parents Control the Whole State’s Access to The Internet
From Book Bans to Internet Bans: Wyoming Lets Parents Control the Whole State’s Access to The Internet
If you've read about the sudden appearance of age verification across the internet in the UK and thought it would never happen in the U.S., take note: many politicians want the same or even more strict laws.Electronic Frontier Foundation
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European leaders mobilize on Ukraine’s security guarantees ahead of potential Putin-Zelensky-Trump summit
European leaders mobilize on Ukraine’s security guarantees ahead of potential Putin-Zelensky-Trump summit
Editor's note: This item has been updated to reflect additional developments on security guarantees from U.S. officials.Alexandra Brzozowski (The Kyiv Independent)
Google President Praised MAGA Speech Slamming ‘Climate Extremist Agenda’
Google President Praised MAGA Speech Slamming ‘Climate Extremist Agenda’ - DeSmog
Interior Sec. Doug Burgum told an AI conference that data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear. Ruth Porat called his comments "fantastic.”Geoff Dembicki (DeSmog)
Google CIO Calls Trump Admin’s Climate Denialism “Fantastic” | Ruth Porat called for data centers to be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/26297841
I'll note that the article as originally published contains a typo; Ruth Porat is the CIO at Google, not the CEO.
Google Head Calls Trump Admin’s Climate Denialism “Fantastic”
Google CEO praised Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for slamming the “climate extremist agenda” and sayings data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear.The Lever
Google executive Ruth Porat calls Trump admin’s climate denialism “fantastic” and calls for data centers to be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/34912703
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/26297841
I'll note that the article as originally published contains a typo; Ruth Porat is the CIO at Google, not the CEO.
Google Head Calls Trump Admin’s Climate Denialism “Fantastic”
Google CEO praised Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for slamming the “climate extremist agenda” and sayings data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear.The Lever
How China Went From Clean Energy Copycat to Global Innovator
How China Went From Clean Energy Copycat to Global Innovator
A surge in high quality research and patent applications has cemented China’s dominance in the industry.Max Bearak (The New York Times)
German court overturns previous ruling that ad blocking isn't piracy
'Ad Blocking is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned By Top German Court * TorrentFreak
Legal action by publisher Axel Springer, which aims to outlaw ad blocking on copyright grounds, has been revived by Germany's top court.Andy Maxwell (TF Publishing)
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In other news: sunglasses are now prohibited in public transport, they were found to modify the perception of ads, modifying the intellectual property of ad maker in public places, the impact was a reduced market values of ad space in public transit which would have forced the city to increase the ticket price.
Stay tuned for news on those disgusting blinker pirate: those people blink twice more often than normal people which makes them see only half as many ads, police forces has invested millions in brand new blinking frequency detector, in order to more easily catch those dangerous criminals.
The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services
The Terminal Demise Of Consumer Electronics Through Subscription Services
Open any consumer electronics catalog from around the 1980s to the early 2000s and you are overwhelmed by a smörgåsbord of devices, covering any audio-visual and similar entertainment and hobby nee…Hackaday
The AI company Perplexity is complaining their plagiarism bot machine cannot bypass Cloudflare's firewall
Perplexity Says Cloudflare Is Blocking Legitimate AI Assistants
Perplexity defends its AI assistants against Cloudflare's claims, arguing that they are not web crawlers but user-triggered agents.Roger Montti (Search Engine Journal)
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Helge Schneider – „The Klimperclown“ (2025)
Alles richtig gemacht! Was soll ich sonst schreiben, über den Geburtstagsfilm, den der SWR dem größten Mülheimer Genie der Gegenwart im Auftrag der ARD hat widmen lassen? Angesichts der Unmöglichkeit der gestellten Aufgabe, haben sie dort glücklicherweise kollektiv entschieden, den Künstler das Werk doch lieber selbst anfertigen zu lassen, bevor die Sendeanstalt sich der Peinlichkeit einer weiteren öffentlich-rechtlichen Hagiographie die dann doch nicht mehr als ein Recycling alter Talkshows und Sketche geworden wäre. (ARD, Neu!)
Helge Schneider - "The Klimperclown" (2025)
Alles richtig gemacht! Was soll ich sonst schreiben, über den Geburtstagsfilm, den der SWR dem größten Mülheimer Genie der Gegenwart im Auftrag der ARD hat widmen lassen? Angesichts der Unmöglichkeit der gestellten Aufgabe, haben sie dort glücklicher…NexxtPress
New shiny toy
Materiali pragmatici (corsi, tutorial, etc.) per imparare a fare il reporting per il CSRD?
Provo a chiedere qui dove probabilmente molti di voi sono interessati all'argomento.
Siete a conoscenza di buone risorse, in Italiano o in Inglese, per imparare a riportare dati non finanziari secondo la direttiva UE CSRD per il reporting non-finanziario (incluso ambientale) in ambito EEA?
Sono alla ricerca di corsi, tutorial e altri materiali VERAMENTE informativi.
Cercando online ho solo trovato una pletora di articoli scritti con ChatGPT che non vanno a parare da nessuna parte.
Technos Media: Your Gateway to Innovation and Insights
Queensland premier rules out changes to coal royalty scheme despite pressure from mining industry
Queensland premier rules out changes to coal royalty scheme despite pressure from mining industry
David Crisafulli says LNP ‘not touching’ policy charging rates among world’s highest, as conservationists rubbish industry claims levy causing downturnAndrew Messenger (The Guardian)
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Nekutime internacia IJK en Indonezio
Dum la ĵusa IJK en Indonezio multaj kongresanoj manifestaciis kontraŭ ”genocido en Palestino” kaj alvokis al TEJO aliĝi al la kondamno. Oni anoncis, ke la sekva IJK okazos en Katalunio. La eksigita prezidanto sensukcese provis refoje iĝi komitatano. La komitato eĉ ne donis al li parolrajton dum la kunsido. Multaj eŭropanoj spertis stomakproblemojn kaj oni ofte aŭdis la anglan, Tyron Surmon rakontas en sia raporto.
liberafolio.org/2025/08/19/nek…
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General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability
I'm away from my desk for the next few days and so I'll likely be posting more open ended discussion questions.
Recently I've been thinking more about the decline of forums of yesteryear and how hosting a forum has always been rather niche.
That got me thinking about how one of Reddit's "killer features" was that just anybody could create a subreddit. The same could be said about Facebook groups as well.
You don't get that with forums, only the admin can create categories/forums, and by extension that usually limited the rise of general interest boards, and more towards niche topic-focused boards. It also meant that basically every board had a "general discussion" board or "random" board.
Would there be interest in NodeBB supporting something like this... Basically, the ability for anyone to set up a category and instantly moderate it, and build your own sub community inside a community? Does this ruin the magic of forums?
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Re: General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability
esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club NodeBB publishes the ActivityStreams "Article" type, which Mastodon current doesn't have good support for.
One way around it is to send summary with the full text... but then some other software thinks it's an uber long content warning. There's no winning :sweat_smile:
I think this should be reported to GoToSocial devs, because they can use name as content warning for Article objects.
Maybe there is already issue for that, but I couldn't find it
Re: General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability
silverpill@mitra.social esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club It got closed 😅
codeberg.org/superseriousbusin…
[bug] `as:summary` is used as content warning descriptor for object types other than `as:Note`
### Describe the bug with a clear and concise description of what the bug is. * Mastodon in the short-to-medium term is considering broader support for non-`Note` object types, as part of [FEP-b2b8](https://w3id.Codeberg.org
Re: General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability
esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club respectfully there is no other way to get an Article object ingested by Mastodon without being munged without shoving it all into summary.
Summary should contain a truncation probably, but other than that it's GtS that is "doing it wrong".
Btw, other threadiverse platforms, like lemmy and py-fed, don't have this issue on my end, where I could follow them because they support authorised fetch that is. I wonder how do they do it? or...hmm, maybe they don't work properly on mastodon while they do on gts?
Re: General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability
esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club I'm sorry I got a bit salty about it.
Basically if Mastodon were not in the equation we would send an Article with a name and no summary at all. Threadiverse implementations handle that perfectly already.
GtS actually did implement the Mastodon behaviour! Content warnings were their thing (afaik), done by adopting summary as the CW. GtS followed suit but applied this to all objects, not just notes. So in this case GtS went a bit further is all.
Re: General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability
esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club Mastodon would show the title and URL, and the content would be excised out.
Which I suppose is so fine insofar that sometimes long form content is best read on the originating site, but end users want their content read natively on Mastodon 🙂
Re: General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability
@julian So in other words, if an Article-type object has a summary, Mastodon discards the title, shows the summary and links to the original, and if it doesn't have a summary, Mastodon shows the title and links to the original?
Its "traditional" behaviour since ca. 2017 was that it either showed the title and the link or, in the absence of a title, only the link with zero context, and when there was a summary, it used the summary as a content warning.
I'm still not sure whether Mastodon is limited by all interfaces available for it only being geared towards old-school plain-text microblogging and incapable of handling fully formatted HTML content, or rather by the devs' stubborn unwillingness to let anything in that's too much not old-school plain-text microblogging.
Re: General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability
jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu Mastodon shows the title, summary, and adds a link.
It's as good as it'll get and quite a ways from where it used to be.
Re: General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability
This is an excellent idea, as demonstrated by the fact that many self-created communities (≈categories) on Lemmy have achieved significant global success. However, Lemmy's implementation is unsatisfactory and needs to be adjusted. I am the administrator of a Lemmy instance as well as a NodeBB instance, and I must admit that at the height of Lemmy's development, we never allowed autonomous community creation. This was due to some issues that arose with mastodon when homonymous communities and users existed. It was also because it was impossible to implement an approval process or ensure that the quality of the communities met the instance's standards. For this reason, the process for creating communities by users consisted of a request from the registered user and a creation reserved for administrators.
What I would like to see in NodeBB is the ability to create communities, but keep them in a sort of "limbo," a "section" where new communities remain until they reach acceptable quality levels for the instance's standards.
This is in addition to the entire user credit system, which I imagine could also be set up to achieve a suitable score for building a community.
Perhaps I'm asking too much, but NodeBB's development has been so impressive so far that I wouldn't be surprised if you could implement a feature like this.
L'anguilla che si annida nel dirupo e mostra i denti per assomigliare a un vecchio lupo - Il blog di Jacopo Ranieri
L'anguilla che si annida nel dirupo e mostra i denti per assomigliare a un vecchio lupo - Il blog di Jacopo Ranieri
Pareidolia è l’umana condizione psicologica, presente in ogni singolo rappresentante della specie, che induce gli osservatori di uno spazio vuoto ad individuare in esso la forma riconoscibile di un volto.Jacopo (Il blog di Jacopo Ranieri)
Swollen battery
I found an old iPhone in a drawer this morning with other old iPhones (some of which can be salvaged) and this one was so swollen that it popped the screen off. Definitely a fire hazard I hadn’t thought of as much.
Definitely recycle any lithium battery showing signs of swelling as they have a risk of exploding I think.
lithiplus.com/post/understandi…
Understanding the Dangers of Lithium Batteries: Risks, Causes, and Safe Handling
Explore the hidden dangers of lithium batteries, including thermal runaway, electrical and thermal overloads, and mechanical damage. Learn essential safety practices for storage and handling.Lithi+ (LithiPlus)
Thoughts on HOPE_16
I’m on the train back to Montreal from New York, where I attended HOPE_16 over the weekend. I wanted to capture some thoughts while they were fresh, even though they might not be fully formed.
HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) is a technology and information security conference sponsored by 2600 Magazine. The SWF had two points of presence at the event this year: I gave an hour-long talk about the Fediverse which was streamed live. We also hosted the Fediverse Village, which turned out to be mostly a booth in the non-profits area of the vendors floor.
We had people streaming by all day long Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I had thought the Village was going to be more like a hang-out room, so I was caught off guard on prep, but I put out all the ActivityPub and Social Web Foundation stickers I had, covers for the ActivityPub book, and a stack of CoSocial.ca stickers to boot. But there was a definite stone soup aspect to the village area: people brought by schwag for Fediverse software like WriteFreely, instances like GardenState.social and Masto.nyc, and projects like DWeb.
I’d hoped to have more structured discussions, including a meetup for Fediverse governance and a hackathon. But it turned out to be a lot more loosey-goosey than I expected, and most of the weekend was spent talking to other Fediverse fans, and helping people who came up to the booth to ask about the Fediverse.
I think I expected because of the level of technical expertise that was shown at the event that we’d be speaking to only true believers. But there were many people there who hadn’t heard of the Fediverse, and who were excited to try it out. One thing that struck me that was an advantage for these people over commercial social networks was the option to get out from under the “real names” policies of many platforms. It’s hard to remember that the alternative to the Fediverse that most people are familiar with are services that require a real-looking legal name to be used, and force you to send a scan of a government ID if they’re at all suspicious.
The other thing that struck me was how many people came to the booth saying that they’d registered for a Mastodon account at some point, and were really excited to get it reactivated, but forgot which server it was on and didn’t want to register for another. I think that’s a real pain point for a lot of people — and one we should do better at solving.
I plan to come back to HOPE next year. I’d love to have more schwag for Fediverse software, services, and platforms. I’d like to have a way to get people signed up and onboarded for the Fediverse right at the table. And I’d like to have some more formal get-together events. There are spaces to meet at HOPE if you know how to set it up — I’m going to try to use them better next time.
Thanks to everyone who came to the Fediverse Village, my talk, or just talked to me around the HOPE event. I was energised by the people and the technology that was happening, and I look forward to engaging again.
Into the Fediverse HOPE_16
One third of Americans say that social media has negatively impacted their mental health. Almost two thirds say that social media has been bad for democracy. But the majority of us still use social media on a daily basis.schedule.hope.net
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Re: Thoughts on HOPE_16
Sonolus gioconlus musicante super figo ganzo clonante tutti gli altri e afancul!!!
Stasera, per puro caso dell’espressione della consueta disperazione, il catgaming ha preso una piega inaspettata, ma graditissima. Infatti, mi era venuto un po’ a caso in mente di cercare se esistesse qualcosa tipo un server privato per VOEZ, che è quel giochino musicale che ho sul tablet per marcire con lo spirito mentre tengo tuttavia […]
octospacc.altervista.org/2025/…
Sonolus gioconlus musicante super figo ganzo clonante tutti gli altri e afancul!!!
Stasera, per puro caso dell’espressione della consueta disperazione, il catgaming ha preso una piega inaspettata, ma graditissima. Infatti, mi era venuto un po’ a caso in mente di cercare se esistesse qualcosa tipo un server privato per VOEZ, che è quel giochino musicale che ho sul tablet per marcire con lo spirito mentre tengo tuttavia la mente e le manine allenate… e ho trovato decisamente di molto meglio; classica “cercavo rame e ho trovato oro” situazione. 😳👍Per chi non lo avesse presente, non c’è molto da dire… è di circa 10 anni fa, ed è bellino: tutta l’estetica è di quel pulito-sognante stile anime, le canzoni sono varie pazzerelle (niente roba normie che va dallo zzz al bleh, insomma), ed è in generale uno dei pochi che mi piace. Ha anche una versione per Switch che, a differenza di quella mobile, costa un tot di base ma poi non ha acquisti in-app, ha tutto già sbloccato di suo, e funziona offline… ma, ovviamente, se sono a casa voglio usare il tablet da 10 pollici anziché il merdoso di Nintendo, e se sono in giro non voglio portarmi un secondo rettangolo di 6 pollici + bordi enormi oltre al telefono, per cui lasciamo stare. 🥱
Non so se ho allora trovato davvero cosa cercavo, perché dalle pareti del web mi sono spuntati diversi APK MOD, che non ho (ancora?) provato… ma ho trovato 1 cosa più pazza: un giochino di ritmo chiamato Sonolus, fatto per essere modulare, avendo un motore di base che può essere esteso con delle API per ricreare virtualmente qualunque rhythm game al di sopra di questa singola infrastruttura comune… oh, tanta roba in teoria. E nella pratica, che consiste in un APK di appena ~100 MB, il miraggio si conferma realtà: questo pezzo di pseudo-software, aggiunto l’URL del server che fornisce i dati per far comportare il gioco come un clone di VOEZ, è effettivamente tanto gustoso quanto pareva da lontano!!! 😻
La cosa bella di questo, quindi, è che non solo ho a (quasi) tutti gli effetti VOEZ ma con tutte le sue canzoni aggratis (+ custom, credo, senza necessitare di APK strani)… ma ho praticamente VOEZ che funziona senza Google Play Services, anziché freezarsi all’avvio senza spiegazioni, quindi posso tornare ad averlo pure sullo Ximifonino… e questo è davvero l’inizio della megafine, cazzo che bello. La fregatura sta nel fatto che ad ogni fine canzone esce una pubblicità, e gli acquisti in-app in realtà ci sono sotto forma di abbonamenti per togliere le pubblicità, o personalizzazioni del profilo online… roba di cui se ne fa a meno (anche perché le pubblicità
basta bloccarle a livello di OS, mafinché sono solo statiche e non video sono accettabili, non danno fastidio). 🤗Non ho ancora provato i vari motori di gioco disponibili a parte il clone di VOEZ, perché sono una marea… e quello, a dire il vero, comunque non è una ricreazione perfetta: sul look ci siamo, e anche sull’hear, ma sul feel non tanto, visto che la gestione degli input è parecchio più severa, e il margine di errore è abbastanza più basso da far si che, una canzone che sul VOEZ originale riesco tranquillamente a fare a difficoltà massima, qui mi esce un mezzo schifo persino a livello intermedio (e il video qui fa ampia mostra dei miei problemi di skill, in questo senso)… però, visti i vantaggi, dovrò abituarmici; quantomeno, se non sul tablet, per giocarci sul telefono, dove l’alternativa sarebbe il niente. 🔥
Assurdo che NON lagghi sullo Xiaomi con tanto di registrazione schermo attiva, ma, purtroppo, ha anche dei difetti… tipo che il core non è open-source — ma tutto ciò che ci gira attorno, inclusi i plugin che clonano i vari giochini, pare proprio di si — e che l’APK ha librerie solo per ARMv7 e ARMv8, niente x86+64 — ma poteva andare molto peggio: poteva essere solo ARM 64 bit; e invece, con doppie lib + supporto ad Android Nougat, si installa anche sul telefono di un pesce palla (non ironicamente). C’è anche per iOS,ma di quello non ce ne fotte; dispiace non ci sia una build Windows e/o HTML5, piuttosto, ma il gioco è appena alla v1.0.0, quindi sarà questione di tempo. Per me, già il fatto che il gioco parta senza connessione Internet e faccia tranquillamente giocare i livelli salvati, è sufficiente a godere… 👾
- Sonolus: memos.octt.eu.org/m/N6Tjx58WZN…
- Sonolus VOEZ: memos.octt.eu.org/m/ZUmx6p2trC… (devo ancora capire, per mia pace mentale, come hostare un mio clone del server con tutti i dati, che nella repo git non ci sono… però top.)
#game #gaming #mobile #music #rhythm #VOEZ
Memo by ██▓▒░⡷⠂𝚘𝚌𝚝𝚝 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚒𝚍𝚎 𝚞𝚛 𝚠𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚜⠐⢾░▒▓██
Sonolus, Next Generation Rhythm Game: + https://sonolus.com + https://wiki.sonolus.com + https://github.com/Sonolus + https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.FosFenes.Sonolus + https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sonolus/id1637055220Memos
Google is watching
Google is watching
Swinging the spotlight, for a moment, from politics to big tech. I upgraded my mother-in-law's internet service recently. As part of that upgrade, I installed a new wifi access point with better security.Mike Olson (Not a Tech Bro)
From Book Bans to Internet Bans: Wyoming Lets Parents Control the Whole State’s Access to The Internet
From Book Bans to Internet Bans: Wyoming Lets Parents Control the Whole State’s Access to The Internet
If you've read about the sudden appearance of age verification across the internet in the UK and thought it would never happen in the U.S., take note: many politicians want the same or even more strict laws.Electronic Frontier Foundation
Finale di Cincinnati shock: Sinner si ritira! Rischia il n.1 ATP?
Envision Ally lets fantasy come true
Come cambio da LMDE a Mint "vanilla"?
Scusate la domanda da newbie, spero di non evocare l'odio che hanno avuto nei miei confronti alcuni membri di lemmy.ml, ma sono molto nuovo come utente stabile su Linux.
Al mio primo approccio, a Maggio, mi è stato consigliato di installare non Linux Mint, bensì LMDE per prendere le distanze da Ubuntu etc.
Ora vedo che nel mio caso specifico ho alcune ragioni per non essere su Debian:
1) sono un utente molto nuovo e mi piacerebbe essere su una distro per la quale posso ottenere nei forum il miglior e più numeroso supporto possibile da parte della comunità
2) da quello che ho capito su LMDE lavorano molte meno persone che su Linux Mint
3) ho visto alcuni video su Debian 13 e ho capito che non fa parte della filosofia della distro inserire il supporto più recente per l'hardware, soprattutto Nvidia, e io ho un computer costruito per il gaming e con il quale mi piacerebbe continuare a giocare e a fare altre cose con la GPU etc.
Per questi motivi vorrei passare a Linux Mint, ma vorrei farlo nel modo più indolore possibile.
La mia situazione dischi è la seguente:
::: spoiler Model: ATA WDC WD10EZEX-00B (scsi) (usato solo per i dati)
Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 17,4kB 134MB 134MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres
2 135MB 1000GB 1000GB ntfs Basic data partition msftdata
:::
::: spoiler Model: ATA Samsung SSD 850 (scsi) (dove risiede quel che rimane di Windows, per ora)
Disk /dev/sdb: 512GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 106MB 105MB fat32 EFI system partition boot, esp
2 106MB 123MB 16,8MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres
3 645MB 511GB 511GB ntfs Basic data partition msftdata
4 511GB 512GB 793MB ntfs hidden, diag
:::
::: spoiler Model: ATA CT480BX200SSD1 (scsi) (disco su cui tengo i giochi, che vorrei dedicare totalmente al Linux Gaming ora)
Disk /dev/sdc: 480GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 1049kB 215GB 215GB primary ntfs
3 215GB 479GB 264GB primary ext4
2 479GB 480GB 555MB primary ntfs msftres
:::
::: spoiler Model: Samsung SSD 990 PRO with Heatsink 1TB (nvme) (il mio SSD nuovo su cui vorrei tenere Linux)
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 2097kB 302MB 300MB fat32 primary boot, esp
2 303MB 1327MB 1024MB ext4 primary
3 1328MB 1000GB 999GB primary
:::
::: spoiler altre partizioni di cui riconosco solo la prima come quella criptata che risiede sull'SSD di cui sopra
Error: /dev/mapper/lvmlmde: unrecognised disk label
Model: Linux device-mapper (crypt) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/lvmlmde: 999GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: unknown
Disk Flags:
Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/lvmlmde-root: 964GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Flags
1 0,00B 964GB 964GB ext4
Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/lvmlmde-swap: 33,5GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Flags
1 0,00B 33,5GB 33,5GB linux-swap(v1)
:::
La mia home è sulla stessa partizione del root, cosa che credo di aver capito non sia stata proprio una furbata, ma non so come mettere solo la home su un'altra partizione durante l'installazione.
Mi potete aiutare a capire il modo migliore di passare da LMDE6 a Mint "vanilla" mantenendo il più possibile?
La mia home al momento occupa meno di 40 GB, quindi potrei salvarne i contenuti sul disco per il gaming per adesso, ma non so se è una buona idea.
reshared this
Ottimo! Mi potete spiegare come si fa questa cosa della home separata?
Cioè, io potrei creare una partizione sullo stesso disco o su un altro e copiarci dentro i contenuti di home, ma come faccio a configurare il sistema per puntare lì?
reshared this
modificando il file fstab in /etc.
Qui c'è la documentazione, vale per tutte le distribuzioni non solo per arch.
wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fstab
Fai una partizione o colleghi un altro disco, e inserisci il file system in fstab.
Backup prima (su una memoria esterna)-> Ripristina dopo.
Funziona perfettamente senza sbattimenti
FediLUG Italia - Gruppo Linux del Fediverso Italiano reshared this.
Questo significa che lo stesso si può fare con Timeshift?
Si, proprio quella, di default su Gnome. Non ho mai utilizzato Timeshift quindi non so dirti le differenze.
Un accorgimento importante, non modificare il nome utente nelle diverse istallazioni altrimenti la home ti creerà parecchi problemi. (Questo vale anche per la /home separata).
FediLUG Italia - Gruppo Linux del Fediverso Italiano reshared this.
FediLUG Italia - Gruppo Linux del Fediverso Italiano reshared this.
FediLUG Italia - Gruppo Linux del Fediverso Italiano reshared this.
Cory Doctorow at CF 25: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Iscrizione alla Blind LGBT pride international
Questo è una specie di annuncio: “PlusBrothers il mondo positivo” si è iscritto a “Blind LGBT Pride International”, @BPI un’organizzazione nata in America e presente in tutto il mondo, che si occupa di LGBT+ e disabilità visiva.
Io sono @elettrona la responsabile di burocrazia e pubbliche relazioni per il blog PlusBrothers; il polo (HIV) negativo dell’atomo.
Insieme a @gifter il polo (HIV) positivo e autore di molti racconti su questo sito, abbiamo colto l’opportunità di iscriverci a questa comunità che sembra l’unico punto di riferimento per persone LGBT+ cieche e ipovedenti, in tutto il mondo.
Io da sola, o tutti e due, faremo del nostro meglio per discutere e mettere in atto azioni concrete per contrastare lo stigma su HIV, molto più pesante se hai problemi di vista, perché intorno ci sono un sacco di ostacoli.
Li ho vissuti personalmente in passato, essendo stata partner di un uomo che vive con HIV. E una di queste barriere è il test che, se hai una disabilità visiva, non è così anonimo come lo è per gli altri. Sei, inevitabilmente, osservato.
La nostra speranza è di lavorare in sinergia con un’intera comunità, perché prendere iniziative da soli non porta da nessuna parte.
Come primo ma non unico esempio, ci sono i test HIV fai da te.
Sembrano molto difficili da fare senza aiuto di un vedente, e i risultati soprattutto, sono disponibili solo visivamente – causando un importante problema di riservatezza.
Ogni persona, indipendentemente da condizione sensoriale o identità, ha il diritto di vivere la propria salute riproduttiva e sessualità in modo sicuro e appropriato.
Andiamo avanti, e vediamo come questa realtà potrà aiutarci ma soprattutto come noi potremmo aiutare loro.
Per maggiori informazioni sull’associazione, visita Blind LGBT Pride International (pagina inglese) ed effettua l’iscrizione.
#annunci #fediblog #hiv #lgbt #stigma
Home - Blind LGBT Pride International
In 1999, a small group of individuals seeking connection and community met at the American Council of the Blind convention in Los Angeles.Blind LGBT Pride International
How AI researchers accidentally discovered that everything they thought about learning was wrong
How AI researchers accidentally discovered that everything they thought about learning was wrong
The lottery ticket hypothesis explains why massive neural networks succeed despite centuries of theory predicting they should failNearly Right
TL,DR: It wasn't learning, it was just brute-forcing the entire solution space.
When I search for “broken” I get no result.
When I search for “test” I get lots of old posts.
Seems to be.
A recent post in 'lemmyshitpost' is called 'unfair competiion', but searching for 'unfair' doesn't include it:
piefed.social/search?q=unfair&…
Search results for unfair
[Join us on chat.piefed.social!](https://piefed.social/post/970751)piefed.social
This returns some very recent posts. piefed.social/search?q=I+don%2…
It's not broken in the sense that indexing it not happening, it just sucks so bad it seems broken 😉
Search results for I don't like it
[Join us on chat.piefed.social!](https://piefed.social/post/970751)piefed.social
It will be worth doing a bit more research to check if there's something we can do to improve the results we're getting from Postgresql but I have a strong suspicion that our needs are well beyond the capabilities of Postgresql.
I'd like to explore Manticore Search as an optional extra service that we can use. It's like ElasticSearch except less RAM hungry.
codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issue…
Try Manticore Search as a replacement for Postgresql FTS
Maniticore seems to be like ElasticSearch except without the huge RAM usage. https://manticoresearch.Codeberg.org
TikTok Shop Sells Viral GPS Trackers Marketed to Stalkers
I can’t imagine how this could go poorly. /s
TikTok Shop Sells Viral GPS Trackers Marketed to Stalkers
TikTok Shop is selling GPS trackers marketed with viral videos that have voiceovers explicitly encouraging secretly tracking a romantic partner. Some of the videos have millions of views, and TikTok Shop’s own metrics show that that more than a hundred thousand of the devices have been sold.One of the accounts 404 Media found
“If your girl says she’s just out with friends every night, you’d better slap one of these on her car—no, it is not an AirTag, it’s a real GPS tracker,” one clip, which has 5 million views, begins. The video shows someone putting a tracker in various hidden locations in a car—a plastic bag in the trunk, magnetically attached underneath, or on the inside of the hood. “And, unlike AirTags, this thing doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t send alerts, she will never know it’s there. It’s tiny, black, magnetic, hide it under the seat, in the trunk, wherever. It’s got its own SIM so you can track her anywhere in the world, no wifi, no bluetooth, just raw location data whenever you want it.”
0:00
/0:40
1×The trackers are advertised as undetectable by Apple’s FindMy system. Many of the videos encourage people to secretly install the devices in their partners’ cars if they suspect them for things like being “out with friends every night.” TikTok deleted the video mentioned above after 404 Media asked the company for comment, but dozens of similar videos remain online, and the trackers are still for sale.
“This is absolutely being framed as a tool of abuse,” said Eva Galperin, co-founder of the Coalition Against Stalkerware and Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Anything where the justification is ‘catch your partner cheating’ or ‘get peace of mind about your partner’ is enabling coercive control,” she said.
404 Media’s reporters have previously written about the use of “stalkerware” that domestic abusers have used to spy on their partners, and on the use of AirTags to stalk people.
404 Media found a handful of accounts promoting these types of trackers, and there are several different versions on the TikTok Shop. Once a user clicks from the videos into TikTok Shop, the algorithm began to show us many more listings. One of the clips we saw has 86,500 likes, and links to a tracker that had 32,500 sales. Another from the same vendor currently has 97,900 sales, and there are several accounts offering the same products with similar branding and scripts. In the comments of one of the videos, a user says “I bought some and put it on cars of girls I find attractive at the gym.” The original poster responds with “Ok 😂.”
The TikTok content policy says that the platform does “not allow any violent threats, promotion of violence, incitement to violence, or promotion of criminal activities that may harm people, animals, or property.” We asked TikTok for comment about the videos that had been posted by one of the accounts we’d originally seen.
A spokesperson for TikTok said "We don't allow content encouraging people to use devices for secret surveillance and have removed this content and banned the account that posted it. We further prohibit the sale of concealed video or audio recording devices on our platform." However, 404 Media was able to find many more almost identical videos on the platform the following day, raising questions over how proactively the platform is monitoring to prevent content like this.
The videos skirt around the legality of what they are suggesting. One voiceover asks, over footage of the tracker being attached to a car, “it’s illegal to track people using this thing? I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure if you stalk someone using this GPS tracker, you’re probably gonna get in trouble.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
The majority of the videos, though, frame the trackers as a way to spy on a partner: “men with cheating wives, you might wanna get one of these,” one video in Spanish begins. “Not everyone who uses this is crazy, they just want answers.” “Guess what my girlfriend put in my car?,” another says. Other videos start with ”Don’t let what happened at the coldplay concert happen to you”, “She seriously didn’t trust me, so you know what, I put one in hers too”, or “You got a cheating girlfriend?”Eleven states explicitly prohibit digital location or GPS tracking in their stalking laws, and a further fifteen states prohibit tracking a vehicle without the consent of the owner. “Showing people how to do something that might be illegal is not necessarily illegal,” Galperin said. But TikTok is still allowing people to make money by marketing the tech specifically for the use of spying on a partner.
Alongside the trackers, the same creators are advertising secret audio-recording devices with similar abusive framing. “Your girl always stepping out to take calls? Want to know who she’s really talking to? Just place this AI recorder in her car—she’ll never notice”, says one post, tagged #husband, #wife, and #coldplay.
0:00
/0:32
1×Video advertising a voice recorder as "the legal way"
Another video for the audio devices with 136,000 views describes bugging a cheating girlfriend’s car: “I heard everything she said with that guy.” Several videos claim that secretly recording audio is legal (“Think your girlfriend’s cheating? Want to know who the guy is? Then do it the right way—legally” and “Got a feeling something’s off? Then find out the truth—the legal way” and “Why the hell did I find a used condom in my car?”) However, recording a conversation without the awareness of the people involved can often be illegal.
Galperin also said that the TikTok videos reflect an extremely common attitude. “You would be amazed how many people think stalking, or recordings, or stalkerware is perfectly justified, as long as they think their partner is up to something like cheating,” she told 404 Media.
A 2021 Kaspersky survey found that 30 percent of 21,000+ respondents found “no problem in secretly monitoring their partner” under certain circumstances. The survey report also found that 29 percent of respondents who had been digitally stalked had their location tracked.
These devices are advertised and sold as undetectable. However, all the examples I found had high numbers of one-star reviews, many of which complained that the trackers did not work as advertised, and defeated “the point” by alerting people to their presence via Apple’s FindMy system. The Apple support site for FindMy-enabled devices says that “They should not be used to track people, and should not be used to track property that does not belong to you.”
Reviews for one of the trackers on TikTok Shop
In 2021, 404 Media’s Sam Cole reported on Apple AirTags being used to stalk women; in many cases, by attaching them to or hiding them in their cars. For that story, she reviewed 150 police reports of people who had said they were being tracked by current or former partners. After that story, Apple added safety features like phone notifications when an Airtag is nearby, but an ongoing class action lawsuit argues that the devices are still insufficiently “stalker proof.”
Several of the videos were tagged #coldplay
Earlier this month, WIRED reported that TikTok shop was selling stickers that could block the recording light on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. Again, many of the reviews found that the product didn’t work as advertised, but the platform did allow the stickers to remain available for sale.Police Records Show Women Are Being Stalked With Apple AirTags Across the Country
Motherboard obtained reports of stalking, harassment, and abuse using AirTags, targeting victims of intimate partner violence.Samantha Cole (VICE)
adhocfungus likes this.
thejml
in reply to yonderbarn • • •RheumatoidArthritis
in reply to thejml • • •acosmichippo
in reply to thejml • • •kadu
in reply to acosmichippo • • •VHS isn't coming back because you simply can't buy a CRT and VCR. These are no longer being made, the existing ones are degrading and overpriced.
Otherwise they'd absolutely be back, a lot of videos on YouTube and TikTok are specifically longing for VHS.
Rai
in reply to acosmichippo • • •yonderbarn
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Gen Z is an interesting bunch. Opting for blurry photos and bringing back JNCO jeans.
The 90's are back.
The Blurry Photos Aesthetic: How to Get It
Chris Gampat (The Phoblographer)not_that_guy05
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Ulrich
in reply to not_that_guy05 • • •athairmor
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Blackmist
in reply to athairmor • • •Geometrinen_Gepardi
in reply to athairmor • • •Khrux
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Blurry photos is fine to make an stylistic choice. The 2019 movie The Lighthouse stylistically looked like a 1920s film, before modern music intentionally used bitcrushing, it used vinyl cracks, boomer shooters made in this decade intentionally look like 1990s Doom clones.
When a medium's shortcoming is patched by technology, it ultimately becomes an artifact of the era where it was accidental. Once a few years have passed, it becomes more synonymous with the era than the mistake.
It's not necessarily nostalgia, Gen Alpha and the younger half of Gen Z never grew up without smartphones, so they don't miss the era of poor film photography. Although every generation does this simulation of forgotten mistakes, it's particularly poignant now, where the high quality, perfectly lit, professional feeling photos convey something artificial, i.e. smartphone software emulating camera hardware, faces tuned with filters or outright AI generated content. Even if it's false imperfection, the alternative is false perfection.
Art using deliberate imperfections that were unavoidable in the past is romanticising something perceived as before commercialism, and that's admirable.
tourist
in reply to yonderbarn • • •I burned a few CDs and put one of them in my car's CD player
It worked but I got hit with "tray error" when I tried ejecting it.
It's been stuck in there since april
snoons
in reply to tourist • • •tourist
in reply to snoons • • •Empricorn
in reply to snoons • • •TubularTittyFrog
in reply to yonderbarn • • •elucubra
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Older dude here:
There is no advantage to listening to something on a cassette, except for the vintage brownie points.
I did the analog to digital transition, and miss nothing. There was an intermediate time, when mp3s came along, and people were lowering bitrates to absurd levels,
but digital is simply better.
All the people talking wonders about the "warmth", "tone", and other supposedly desirable qualities are very mistaken. What they are fawning over is noise, feedback, muddiness, lack of range, lack of definition, and so on.
Vinyl records are shit. They make sound by literally scratching something.
The only advantage of tape was, at the time, it's smaller size and portability, but sound was worse than records.
I still have the last deck I owned, a marvel of technology of the time, a double auto-reverse TEAC deck with Dolby and Dbx noise reduction, auto azimuth, programmable, etc, which is objectively shit compared to a decent mp3 player, provided that the music is encoded in lossless, or large enough bitrate.
CDs were a massive improvement, and the pinnacle were DDD CDs, which were Digital recording, Digital mixing, and Digital mastering, meaning very little analog garbage was introduced in the process.
The objective for audio equipment is to be transparent, to not add or detract anything from the original performance.
tankplanker
in reply to elucubra • • •With CDs they were negatively impacted by the loudness war as it became much more widespread. Having to hunt around for the right recording, often the earlier ones, can be expensive. Normalisation of the recordings by streaming companies is just an awful idea as it doesn't fix the bad parts of the mix just turns everything down.
I prefer SACDs to CDs, mostly because they tended to be mastered and mixed better than the CDs of the past two decades. The surround audio mixes are mostly just gimmicky, although they are a good fit for some records, but they almost always had a two channel mix that you could pick instead. The higher frequency range is mostly pointless.
elucubra
in reply to tankplanker • • •I agree. The loudness is not what I dislike the least. Most 1st gen CDs were the work of love of sound engineers and producers, given near miraculous equipment, to produce records with unheard of quality. I own several. Dire straits Brothers in arms is one of these, a truly brilliant recording (The album itself is brilliant) The sound quality is truly astounding.
The whole thing took a downturn when they started compressing the recordings to fit FM frequencies. Why they didn’t do the compression at the FM station, and leave the uncompressed stream for us, is always been a mystery to me.
As for the range, it is generally pointless. Most people, even when young, can’t hear above 20 Khz.
ReallyActuallyFrankenstein
in reply to elucubra • • •I moved to all-digital music-making and -listening in the 90s, and agree that a lot of the "analog" benefits are imagined or the result of misunderstandings how technology works.
But I think you're missing the point. Don't forget that noise, feedback, muddiness, lack of range, lack of definition are all legitimate effects often intentionally applied to make music sound a certain way.
A cassette is objectively lower quality by sampling rate, reproducibility, etc, but you agree that it affects the sound. At that point, I think you have to admit that a contrary personal preference for cassette or vinyl is valid. It's not objectively "worse" because many people actually and validly find those "bugs" to be "features."
It's fine to like the digital revolution, but I'm just identifying you're making a value judgement, and others can rightly value differently.
ubergeek
in reply to elucubra • • •Very little analog garbage... Except for literally every instrument tracked in, including distortion pedals. 😀
elucubra
in reply to ubergeek • • •ubergeek
in reply to elucubra • • •leftzero
in reply to elucubra • • •And not being read-only.
Also, you could spool them with a pencil.
elucubra
in reply to leftzero • • •azertyfun
in reply to elucubra • • •You've completely missed the point.
You grew up in a world where the quirks of analog formats were nothing but technical limitations to be overcome. It is true that a FLAC is literally superior in every way to a Vinyl if your value function only takes in cost, quality, and convenience.
HOWEVER Gen Z grew up in a world where music was always cheap and convenient to access. We also (mostly) grew up in a world of touchscreens and always-online gadgets and doodads. My generation's first portable music player was often the iPod touch. You know what all of that does to a person? It creates a deep craving for tactile feedback. For technology that doesn't nag with software updates, for music that can't be "unlicensed" and pulled from your library remotely, for a music player that you can touch and feel and interact with in a more meaningful way than tapping on the little square of glass that already runs our lives. For the little rituals that have been stripped away, like flipping a vinyl at the midway point or rewinding a tape.
The entire point of analog is that it's "worse". It's un-clinical, it's raw, it's tactile, it's physical. Listening to my favorite albums on vinyl is such a better experience than through the disembodied shuffle of my phone. I don't crave maximum audio fidelity or convenience because I always could have those things literally whenever I want.
TubularTittyFrog
in reply to azertyfun • • •the point is feeling like it's superior when it objective isn't as some sort of form of teenage rebellion or something.
not any different in the 90s when everything was CDs and that the few 'cool' kids were still using records as a FU to 'the man'. and wearing 70s clothing styles.
It's all about making yourself feel special.
azertyfun
in reply to TubularTittyFrog • • •Well you hardly have a leg to stand on about "feeling superior" when you're out here being smug about criticizing harmless tastes.
I don't see how listening to vinyls in the privacy of my own home is considered performative, but if that's the only reasoning you're willing to entertain... Well go right ahead, I thought I made a good case for it but I guess I was wrong and I am buying vinyls for the clout.
TubularTittyFrog
in reply to azertyfun • • •elucubra
in reply to azertyfun • • •You may agree that "cost, quality, and convenience" are pretty damn desirable.
I do agree, and kind of miss, the anticipation for a record release, the listening to the radio (in my case the quality non-commercial programs, think BBC, NPR, and their equivalents) with the finger on the record button, the wonder of buying a new LP, and poring over the jacket, and the occasional included booklet, flipping through records at the store,and many other cool aspects, but I stand by the vastly increased quality and durability.
If you want the rituals (save the fucking chore and expense of cleaning records), CDs are a pretty nice compromise. Tactile, mainly manual, choice of playing linearly, as many artists intended, possibility of programming or shuffling, high quality, and many other choices. With records and even worse, cassettes, you are stuck with the artifacts introduced by a bad medium and bad equipment. Want "warmth"? get a decent tube amp. Better yet, build from as kit. Great experience, and if you want control over sound, buy and learn to use a proper equalizer.
azertyfun
in reply to elucubra • • •I am not looking for a compromise. I listen to my high-quality digital library on shuffle most of the time, and am very well aware that my phone allows me to access orders of magnitude more music than even the most compact CD player.
When I do listen to my favorite albums as LPs, the clunkiness and the artifacts are part of an Experience. I can listen to exact copies of the digital masters of those songs any time I want to, but sometimes we do things BECAUSE they are not maximally optimal. Sometimes I want to take a walk alongside the river and get my feet a little bit wet even though I could have worn boots. Feel a little something, you know?
gerryflap
in reply to elucubra • • •Your view is totally fine, but I guess you're not understanding why people do this. I'm a millennial, around 30. Personally I buy CDs, I buy vinyl, and I even have some stuff on tape. I've also recently picked up film photography and among my friends it's common nowadays to bring some 2000-2010 digicams.
So why? flac is perfect, and streaming services stream whatever high-quality music you'd ever want to play. Film is expensive, and digicams are often way more shit than whatever a modern smartphone that's already in your pocket can do.
Personally I've become bored by perfection, overwhelmed by choice, and frustrated with the lack of owning anything. When I play a physical album I sit down for it, I am focused on the music. I cannot easily choose the music, I'll just have to accept the order of the album. There are way fewer choices to overwhelm me. Likewise, with film photography, it feels simpler in a way. You shoot a few images in a go, because film isn't cheap, and you'll only get to see them weeks later when the roll is developed. No pressure of the perfect shot, no insane resolution to show any imperfection. And mistakes just happen, because you cannot see what you're doing, so you just have to accept them. Digitally you can just take 20 pictures and take the best one.
So back to music. Why would one prefer vinyl or tape over CD? As a life-long CD collector, I wondered the same thing a few years ago. But when artists that I enjoy started skipping CD releases in favor of vinyl I hopped in, invested in a shit vinyl player, and didn't really get it. Sure it had a character, but it wasn't great in any way. After some more research I found out that it was probably just the vinyl player (please don't get some cheap shit for a 100 bucks with a red unbranded needle). I invested in an Audiotechnica LP70XBT, and oh boy did stuff improve. I finally get it. The sound is gorgeous, though not necessarily better or worse than CD imo. It's a bit warmer, with detailed bass but less clinical high end. And I love the whole tactile experience of it. Older vinyl definitely sounds worse than modern CD quality though.
I think it's the whole experience that people enjoy. Putting the vinyl or cassette in the player, having something move and, as if it were magic, suddenly there's music. With a slightly different character that differentiates it from the clean and clinical sound of high quality digital audio. Modern digital audio is great and definitely has its place, but at times it can feel sterile, too perfect. The crackles and warmth of vinyl, the grain and slightly off colours of photographic film, they feel like they have more personality. They stem from a time where the imperfections of the medium still kinda hid the imperfections of the artist.
(Okay this turned into quite a ramble but I hope there's something useful in there :3 )
elucubra
in reply to gerryflap • • •Ok, first: You do you.
Second: I'm not in possession of absolute truth.
But if I may, I'd like to share some of my experientially acquired knowledge.
On sound; I stand by my words. Why accept worse quality sound because the medium is inferior? Do whatever you want to post process, but having control. Want permanent "warmth"? Buy, or even better, build a tube amp. Pretty easy BTW. Want some sound characteristics? Get a proper equalizer and learn to use it. Want crackle? Well, really, that is something to discuss with your therapist.. BTW, what all people call warmth is just a slight bump in the 60-80 Khz range. I like many old amps, and speakers. I've actually designed and sold a few bespoke speaker systems. Some vintage Klipsch sets, with a refoaming are still astounding, but sources have gotten way better.
Regarding photography; I bought my first SLR, a Vivitar XV1 ( A Pentax K1000 copy) in the 80's. All manual, but with a built in light meter. From there I went on to a Pentax , then another, then Pentax's first autofocus, and the worlds first SLR with a pop-up flash, often derided as a gimmick, but amazingly useful, the mighty SF1, I also had a Nikon F601 with a couple of lenses and a Old school 6x6 Bellows Zeiss. I've developed quite a bit. I kind of know my stuff.
Analog photography is not superior, but different. It's absolutely true that the limited amount of film, and the cost of developing, promotes thoughtful composition, framing, and anticipation. Selecting the right film, understanding your lenses, and, crucially, undesrtanding that the most important piece of kit is the lens, 2nd the tripod, and then the body,
helps a lot in getting superior photographs. If you know what you want, understand your film, your camera, your kit, you can get results unmatchable by digital, no matter how much post-processing. What, why, how, are necessary ingredients in film photography.
That said, I would think, compose, etc the photo in my mind, and then shoot bursts, the ask for a contact sheet, and choose what I wanted for prints. No need to gamble all on the speed of your index finger. Film was the cheapest variable in the equation, except for Kodachrome, the GOAT of films. Fuji makes some very good film, but Kodachrome was beyond anything.
Kodachrome 64, and occasionally 25, how I miss you! those films demanded discipline, but the rewards were astounding.
Yes, in some respects, film is still superior to digital, ***IF ***you understand the medium, kit, process, and thinking.
A digital compact? Fine, but get one of the later ones. Advice from someone who bought and used an Olympus 1.2 Mpx fixed lens in 1999. There is NOOOO redeeming value in an early digital, except.... Yeah, NONE.
Anecdote: I recently saw a kid, floating around his friends, taking pics with an old point-and-shoot. The cringe was strong. I was thinking, "Jeez, kid! I'm all for film, but buy an actual reflex with a proper lens, they are cheap as fuck in second hand marketplaces!!
ivanafterall ☑️
in reply to yonderbarn • • •daggermoon
in reply to yonderbarn • • •The problem is, every modern cassette deck on the market except for one by TEAC and TASCAM is fucking crap. You're pretty much stuck using vintage gear which hasn't held up too well. I had a Pioneer deck that sounded fantastic but broke. Like unfixable because they don't make the parts anymore. I have a TEAC deck from the '90s that sounds like crap now. I'm just done with it. You have plenty of good choices when buying a new turntable. Where as with cassettes you have two descent ones, and the rest are AIDS.
Edit: Also, the two descent ones are expensive.
like this
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kadu
in reply to daggermoon • • •Don't listen to "audiophiles" otherwise literally no audio equipment is ever good, and it becomes a who can spend the most money contest.
A cassette player from FiiO will sound absolutely great and work fine.
AnyOldName3
in reply to kadu • • •kadu
in reply to AnyOldName3 • • •daggermoon
in reply to kadu • • •katy ✨
in reply to yonderbarn • • •ABetterTomorrow
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Olhonestjim
in reply to yonderbarn • • •FireWire400
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Another one of those pointless articles... Cassettes have been on the rise for a couple of years now, and for the same reasons that vinyl has been making a comeback; mainly fake nostalgia and the yearning for true ownership in form of physical media.
As a vinyl snob, listening to music on that medium isn't better. The quality is at best a little worse than what you get from a CD, it's inconvenient, bloody expensive and it takes up space.
BUT you get to actually hold the music you love in your hands and listen to it more intently, because you've made the effort of putting on a record instead of just pressing play. I like that.
Edit: just realised I just made the same points the article made... oh well. I'll just continue archiving my CD collection. Not (only) for posterity, but as a big middle finger to the RIAA.
some_guy
in reply to FireWire400 • • •No. Cassettes sound like shit. They are a very lossy format. Vinyl actually sounds different in ways that people like. My vinyl collection has nothing to do with nostalgia (I grew up after CDs were on the rise). On a solid system, there's a lot more fidelity in the bass on vinyl.
FireWire400
in reply to some_guy • • •Cassettes don't sound too bad if you actually have good equipment, which most people nowadays don't (because most can't afford collector's prices for decent decks). I was born in 97, vinyl records were long dead by then. Most people who get into vinyl nowadays actually grew up with iPods (hence the term "fake nostalgia").
Eh... it's pretty much all down to mastering, but vinyl records have a limited dynamic range compared to CDs which makes the bass more pronounced maybe? Not something I've noticed but I tend to prefer clear high end and mid range anyway.
some_guy
in reply to FireWire400 • • •Digital fidelity (sample rate) grows more granular in higher frequencies because that's easier for us to distinguish. (See the Fletcher-Munson Curve from Bell Labs: on a bell curve, we hear best at the frequency of a baby crying.) Think of stair steps that get closer and more numerous over time. That's a representation of the resolution of the sound across frequencies from low to high. I may be explaining it poorly because I moved away from audio engineering toward a different career a long time ago.
Analog has all the information that's missing in between the larger, wider steps. It's not a placebo (didn't say you called it that). It's how digital audio works.
My instance isn't allowing me to upload images for some reason. It had extended downtime the other day, so maybe that's related. Anyway, here's a link to a page with a chart that illustrates what I'm attempting to describe.
What is Sample Rate in Audio? Its Types and Impact on Sound
contributor1 (Hollyland)FireWire400
in reply to some_guy • • •some_guy
in reply to FireWire400 • • •FireWire400
in reply to some_guy • • •alehel
in reply to FireWire400 • • •FireWire400
in reply to alehel • • •alehel
in reply to FireWire400 • • •Saeveo
in reply to FireWire400 • • •TubularTittyFrog
in reply to alehel • • •it makes nostalgia for something that never existed.
there is plenty of it for say medieval history. our fantasy conception of medieval times... is mostly completely false/fake.
or take the concept of the 'noble savage' as if cavemen are morally pure being or something. complete nonsense.
And yet people believe these things are legit and real.
TubularTittyFrog
in reply to FireWire400 • • •FarraigePlaisteaċ
in reply to yonderbarn • • •I don’t like touch screens, or screens in general. I miss Minidisc so much. It was and is the absolute best for me.
The iPod with the click wheel would be my next choice but they’re too expensive now. CD cases were cumbersome, and when lined up it’s hard to read the spines. They skip too when I’m walking.
I’d go back to cassettes again if they were released to the same standard as back in the day (Dolby NR, etc). I like handling the cases and they look better lined up on a shelf.
Yeather
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Darleys_Brew
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Dearth
in reply to yonderbarn • • •TubularTittyFrog
in reply to Dearth • • •she make her money from concerts and licensing fees. not music sales
most artists income these days comes from concerts. music sales aren't money makers anymore the way they used to be.
nutsack
in reply to yonderbarn • • •nek0d3r
in reply to yonderbarn • • •... if this cassette is even affordable.
Nico198X
in reply to nek0d3r • • •nek0d3r
in reply to Nico198X • • •Nico198X
in reply to nek0d3r • • •oh maybe, i'm not actually a Swift fan. i'm just here for cassette talk. XD
i tend to get my new cassettes for around €7-€12.
nek0d3r
in reply to Nico198X • • •But it would be cool to buy some in general. I can't remember how many times I listened to one Joan Jett tape as a kid
Nico198X
in reply to nek0d3r • • •word, exactly.
i tend to get them from Bandcamp on Bandcamp fridays, if you're interested.
nek0d3r
in reply to Nico198X • • •mechoman444
in reply to yonderbarn • • •You'd be surprised.
As a matter of fact, many well known and famous artists have been releasing dbrwnd new albums on old media for years and years.
For example I have a casset of 10000 days by tool.
I'm also an idiot audiophile with a stereo that's way way too expensive for my own good. (I'm not rich but I am broke.)
I swear to God I can hear a difference and theres all kinds of warm fuzzy feelings when I put a casset in.
NauticalNoodle
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Nico198X
in reply to yonderbarn • • •me. i am buying those.
fun nostalgia. it's physical, tactile, the sounds that come along with a physical cassette. and yes, the audio is imperfect, but that's part of the experience and charm.
i already have lossless digital files. this is a different experience.
Tenkard
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Rose56
in reply to yonderbarn • • •Vinyls and CDs may have done a comeback back, still are expensive.
TubularTittyFrog
in reply to yonderbarn • • •There is a large subset of hipster types who are notalgic for VHS, cassette, film and early digital cameras.
It's because of 'vibes'. It makes them feel different, special, more important than the 'normies' listening to stuff on Spotify, watching stuff on Netflix, or using iphones for photography. They think it's more 'authentic', 'analog', etc.
Yes, they are insufferable people to be around. I grew up with Cassettes and VHS. It sucked balls. I vastly prefer my 4K streaming and high bit rate audio. But I understand that for younger people or hipster types, the 'retro' aspect is super appealing and it makes them feel special. I have several friends like this over the years and they love to go on long rants about how superior they are for this stuff and how ignorant the Spotified masses are.
CyanideShotInjection
in reply to yonderbarn • • •RedEye FlightControl
in reply to yonderbarn • • •There are a number of collectors and enthusiasts who enjoy alternative types of media. It was an experience listening to music on tape and hearing the hiss of the tape. It has a different sound to it, sort of like vinyl.
If there's money to be made, they'll find ways to get it. If that means selling tapes, they'll sell tapes again. Records are still back in style and being mass produced again.
madsen
in reply to yonderbarn • • •I don't subscribe to any streaming services. I have vinyls and tapes. If I want to listen to music on the go, I use my walkman with music I've recorded from vinyl or, in very rare cases, YouTube.
My 9 year-old has a walkman too and it's the greatest thing ever. She doesn't have a smartphone, but the walkman enables her to listen to her own mixtape when we're traveling. She loves it.
Actually, I've seen quite a few people with feature phones around lately, a walkman would be perfect for them for the same reason.
Also, making mixtapes is still as great as it was back then. A playlist is not the same, not by a long shot. I made one for my little sister recently and it was all kinds of fun to make sure both sides were filled, that the mood and energy was cohesive, that it was tracks I genuinely believed she would enjoy but also tracks that I knew she wouldn't seek out on her own. (Fuck algorithms for recommending music — they won't challenge you or surprise you.)
Edit: Also, releasing on cassette isn't even that new this time around. For instance, all of Mac Miller's stuff has been available on cassette for at least a few years. Like, check out HHV's listing of cassettes: hhv.de/en/records/catalog/filt… and imusic.dk/exposure/8138/kasset… has a surprising number of metal albums on cassette.
Kassettebånd med musik - Find din yndlings genre lige her
imusic.dkNewNewAugustEast
in reply to madsen • • •How is it any different than making a playlist? You said a long shot, that's not true.
I am not talking about Spotify, I never use it, but unless you are talking about the level of effort to make the tape, then what's the difference?
Records are bulky, heavy, and horribly environmentally bad. Cassettes aren't as bad but are really inconvenient.
I got rid of all of those years ago and I am so glad I did.
I still have a music collection, I don't use streaming services though. And no no CDs either.
madsen
in reply to NewNewAugustEast • • •NewNewAugustEast
in reply to madsen • • •