Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/6528233

I'm working on building a personal alternative to Spotify and YouTube Music and I've hit two roadblocks.

1. Genre labeling in my library is inconsistent and manually updating 2500+ MP3s isn't feasible. I've tried using beets with the LastFM plugin in quiet mode but no luck. Any ideas?

2. Where can I bulk download diverse music catalogs? I've snagged some 'top 90s/80s/hiphop/etc' collections, but 2500 songs don't go far.

What I miss about Spotify and YouTube Music is their ability to auto-play similar tunes based on my current selection. Any advice would be appreciated.

Is there a way to bypass mega's transfer quota with paying for a vpn or anything?

All the normal websites have subscriptions and make it a nightmare to print off. I tried looking elsewhere but no where seams to do tabs. Am I missing something obvious?

I always have a hell of a time, is it just me?

My mom bought a used laptop absolutely riddled with spyware, linux isn't an option

It seems like there's been a lot more websites that have been deploying anti-adware blocker software in the past few weeks. One that stands out in particular is called Admiral (see websites like GameRant for an example).

I have tried Adguard Plus and Rethink DNS (using the instructions from FMHY), and neither can prevent the popup that stops you from reading the site. I assume there's user scripts out there, but at this point, I don't even know what to search for on Greasyfork.

Have any of you figured out a workaround?

This post will guide you on how to install and run pirate releases of games on Linux. Basic knowledge (how to install stuff, get around files, opening the terminal) is assumed.

Step 0

Ensure the game you intend to pirate actually stands a chance in running on Linux. Check the game's ProtonDB rank, if it's Silver or below chances are it won't work even with additional effort. If it has a good rank (Gold and above), get the cracked release from wherever you get those. If multiple options are available, the general order of preference should be: Steam/DVD Rip > GOG release > Repack

Step 1

Install Wine and Steam, then enable Steam Play for all titles (Steam → Settings → Compatibility).

Step 2

Make one central folder for all game files. Copy the game files to each game's subfolder (e.g. ~/games/). If it's an ISO file, extract its contents like an archive. If it is a repack/setup (e.g. GOG, FitGirl, Dodi, etc) run the setup by opening a terminal in the repack folder and entering: wine ./theGameSetupFile.exe

! Make sure in the setup you set the destination folder to the main games folder you've made. In Wine, access to the Linux file system is through the Z: virtual drive. e.g. in FitGirl's setups, just change the installation folder to Z:\home\yourUsername\games\gameSubfolder if the directory you made was ~/games/

! Make sure the installer is installing only the game, not anything else. Uncheck the option of installing Visual C++ runtimes, for example.

Step 3

Open Steam, in the menu bar go to Games → Add a non-Steam Game to My Library.., click on Browse and select the game executable (.exe) from the game's folder. Then in your Steam Library click on the new game and go to its settings (right click → Properties or open game page → Settings icon → Properties), go to the compatibility option and check the "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool" option. In the dropdown, select Proton Experimental.

Run the game from Steam. If it works, great!

If it didn't work, you might be missing some software requirements (vcredist, etc). To add them, you'll need an additional step:

Step 4 (optional)

Install winetricks and protontricks. Open a terminal and run protontricks --gui Select the game in the list, click on OK, select Install an application, click on OK, click on Cancel and now you'll see a slightly different options window. Select Install a Windows DLL or Component option and click on OK. The new window will list all possible requirements/dependencies, install whatever the game needs. You can get to know the game's software requirements from its PCGamingWiki page (or just google it). Repeat for each requirement.

That's it, with this you can run any game directly through Steam's Proton layer. No Lutris, no juggling multiple wineprefixes, no racking your brains around multiple Wine runners. Proton Experimental gets regularly updated, so you'll always be running your game with the best and latest compatibility option there is.

I've been using forum.rojadirecta.es for my non-streaming sports piracy for years, but I wonder if there is any other/better options

To get rid of the annoying YouTube message (ad blocker are not allowed on Youtube) use this custom filter in uBlock extension

1. Open uBlock extension dashboard
2. Open my filters tab
3. Copy & Paste this code into my filter
4. Apply changes and close all tabs

via: enderman

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/181356

In a precedent-setting verdict, a programmer identified by his surname, Ma, from northern China has been slapped with a fine exceeding 1m yuan by the authorities for using a Virtual Private Network (VPN), marking a stark example of the stern measures taken to uphold China’s great firewall. This sets a new record for the harshest financial penalty ever imposed on an individual for bypassing the nation’s stringent internet censorship regime.

Chengde’s Public Security Bureau in Hebei province held Ma accountable on 18th August for using “unauthorized channels” to connect to worldwide networks while being employed by a Turkish firm.

The authorities confiscated Ma’s earnings of 1.058m yuan ($144,871.96), which he’d accrued from September 2019 to November 2022, labeling it as “illegal income.” Along with this, he was fined an additional 200 yuan ($30).

Shining a spotlight on the erosion of free speech and blatant censorship in China, Ma’s case exemplifies the lengths to which the state will go to muzzle the open exchange of ideas and information. Ma expressed on Weibo that he was initially approached by the police approximately a year ago, under the belief that he was responsible for a Twitter account under investigation. The account, according to Ma, was not his.

VPNs, a lifeline for ordinary citizens striving for information access in the face of the great firewall, are existing in a legal soup. Officially, the government has green-lighted VPN usage for commercial purposes. However, the narrowing leeway for VPN usage signals a sinister trend, as in recent times, firm steps have been taken to restrict access, and even penalize its usage in specific instances.

The other day someone was complaining about the new ad blocker-blocker on YouTube and I mentioned that it might be fun to write a Firefox extension that would just load up yt-dlp and play the video through mpv.

It turns out, writing a Firefox extension is easy and tricking Firefox into launching yt-dlp isn't much harder (though it does require some annoying configuration on the user's end).

Anyway, if you're a Linux user, feel free to try it out. I don't know how much I'm going to pour into this, but as an exercise of "can this be done", it was pretty good for a few hours on a Friday night.

I downloaded the game from soft32 (this file used to work on the old days). I installed both WINE and Lutris, but the game runs like sh**t. I get .NET and Vulkan errors from Lutris&WINE. Can you give me a newbie friendly guide for the right way? I'm tired of scrapping the web and it doesn't help that I have limited data.
My system:
Device: HP 15 Notebook PC i5-4210U
OS: Ubuntu MATE (basically ubuntu 22.04)
GPU: Intel® HD Graphics 4400 (integrated) & Nvidia GeForce 820M (I'm not even sure which of them I'm using).

Does Spotify have a way to see if your computer is recording with your DAC's stereo mix? And if so, is there a way around it?

1337xx.to, not the real site. I only downloaded .flacs

Today, for the first time, I couldn't use iplayer. As usual, I switched country to UK, cleared browsing data, deleted everything from temp app data file before going there. Was using Firefox. Tried same procedure with Epic browser. Same result. Chatted with Nord support. They wanted screenshots of results from dnsleaktest dot com. Tech said wait while they checked it out. After a little while, chat terminated. Created a ticket via email.

Have BBC finally made themselves bullet-proof?

You might have noticed that even on Firefox (depending on your lists) YouTube may detect uBlock Origin on Firefox now

There's already a workaround (found, again, here), but I figured I would use this opportunity to tell people that projects like Piped and Invidious exist, which both allow you to watch YouTube without loading their ads, with improved Privacy and (in the case of Piped) even Geoblocking-Circumvention and SponsorBlock out of the box.

They're both great tools, and using something like LibRedirect you can even automatically go to Piped or Invidious when clicking/opening a YouTube link (and more).

Both don't load ads, but unless changed in the settings Individous may still make connections to Google/YouTube to load the video(s) themselves.

Bit of a shameless plug for these projects, but I figured this is a really good time to show these projects as I often see people asking what they are in threads on here

Will or can the HEVC_AMF encoder support Profile 10 or 10-Bit HEVC? I've installed the full version of ffmpeg into the ffmpeg Batch converter I use but can't seem to get the two things together. I'm a little vauge on terminology but I think I'm asking the correct question. Thanks!

I realize this isn’t exactly piracy per-se, but does subscribing through a VPN to Turkey work? Has anyone had their accounts terminated for this?

There’s something to be said about paying something and not having to worry about updating and keeping the patches up to date.

It’s like $83 USD annually for all apps if it does work, and I’d be good with it for that price.

I found them on torrentlite and haxNode.net, does anyone have any experience with them?

I'm looking for a clean version of Ableton Live (ideally 11, but anything older is fine too) for weeks now. But everything I download and send to VirusTotal.com is infected with all kinds of nasty malware.

Am I doing something wrong? Where does one get cracked audio software (for Windows) without malware?

Hi, I'm trying to find the subtitles for Harmy's "Despecialized" Star Wars remakes and I was wondering if anybody has any ideas. The original website for Project Threepio points at a blog that seems abandoned and an old private tracker (MySpleen) that never opens to public anymore. Even just the English subs would be great (the original pack contained extensive language coverage in DVD format so I was given to understand it was quite large). TIA for any hints.

While many popular English language TV shows seem to be dubbed into other widely-spoken languages (looking for French, personally), the releases that include those audio tracks unfortunately often either have lower bitrates than their English-only counterparts (which only include subtitles for other languages) or only have one of several seasons that made its way from the scene to usenet or a torrent tracker. Therefore, to avoid needing to download two variants of the same content and merge the sought combination of their video/audio tracks, is there a simpler means of acquiring dubbed audio of movies and TV shows?

Language-specific public trackers (Torrent911 and YGGTorrent for French) seem to be a reliable means of acquiring alternate releases of movies containing dubbed audio that otherwise are identical in length to the original English releases, making them mergeable, but they seem to be lacking in terms of dubbed releases for anything but the most popular movies and TV shows. Usenet fills the gaps somewhat, but as language-specific private torrent trackers seem hard to gain access to, I haven't found a reliable source for most dubbed releases and dubbed audio tracks.