MystikIncarnate

I have two pieces of paper from my time in post-secondary education. One says information technology, the other says business. I've worked in an IT field for well over 10 years in a B2B capacity. I've had to handle cost/benefit and ROI arguments with customers, and justify having them spend incredible amounts for their own good.

Are we done dick measuring about what we think we know?

Listen, we're not going to agree on this. I couldn't give any fewer shits if you do or not. Bluntly, I'm unbothered.

Good day to you sir.

I have a very good knowledge of business operations.

They already offered Plex pass to earn their income. Plex is an extremely price elastic product, given that alternatives like jellyfin exist. They are taking features away, and charging people if they don't want to lose those features. That's a really good way to piss off your existing userbase (or customer base). Better would be to offer something new, and charge for that. Keep existing products at the same cost, but have "better" products at a premium. You won't get a huge number of people buying the extended product, but it will likely be more new paying users than how many you would get with the crap they're doing now, and they wouldn't lose any customers in the process.

When you understand the social and economic factors here, this is a super idiotic move. When you're only looking at how many dollars you can extract from the customer base, this is a golden idea.... I mean, it will fail, but it looks golden if you're only looking at the money numbers.

I would question whether you know how a business works (or whether Plex does, for that matter).

As far as I'm concerned, Plex failed to read the room. They were already walking a fine line with the people in a legal grey area, which comprised a good amount of their customer base (those that are sharing media at least). There's a nontrivial number of people who share media that are rather paranoid with reason. Nobody wants the RIAA/MPAA to have any reason to investigate what you are doing on the Internet. We all know how well that goes from the whole Napster thing. So now than a few are almost tinfoil hat level of paranoid. Many have already jumped ship to jellyfin or something similar. The rest are either unconcerned, not paying attention, or simply don't care. I would argue that the numbers of people who run servers currently that host content using Plex, that are not looking at alternatives because of this, is pretty damned low.

Plex alienated the group that brought everyone into their umbrella. When the people who host media entirely abandon their product because of this shit, their client base vaporizes.

Can't have a product or company with no clients. At least, not for long.

I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that's separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

I've been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It's "server" software, sure, but it's just a software package. What it does isn't really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I've designated as capable of doing so.

The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

You can get a free SSL certificate from let's encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS..... And honestly, brokering the connection isn't dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

They're offering shockingly little for what they're asking, and the only thing that's on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they're doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

This is not a good look at all.

I have domain names coming out of my ears. I'm tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let's encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don't want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

I just don't know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

The part I'd want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you're hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that.... Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.

You wasted a lot of words here.

You acknowledge that at the beginning of COVID, contact tracing and sterilization of contact surfaces was paramount before we knew better, going to the length of generating, or otherwise obtaining "tubs" of cleaning products for the purpose.

My entire point is that "contact tracing" is not just who you make contact with but what you make contact with. My point is not and was never that it was relevant for protection against COVID. My point was that it was a part of contact tracing. I only mention COVID at all because that is what was taught in the early days of the lockdown. A point to which you have all but plainly said, that you have also been educated on.

The miscommunication here is that you are only looking at contact tracing as person to person contact because it was relevant during the pandemic, while I'm focused on the umbrella concept of contact tracing not just for COVID specifically and that as a medical term, which it is and always has been, "contact tracing" is not just person to person contact, but also contact with surfaces. The context of the word contact, is the difference. In your view, you are seeing contact as in someone on your contact list, a person you connect with, or communicate with. In my context, contact is the act of touching or making physical contact with peoples and things, including nonphysical contact, like what happens when you share a small space with someone, you are in contact with all of the surfaces they are, inhaling the air they're exhaling.

For COVID, contact tracing and education thereof started with the full medical definition of contact tracing, including, but not limited to, physical contact to both people and objects, and sharing a space with others. Later the former part of that was dropped for COVID specifically as it was established that it did not yield any significant prevention from infection.

None of the above paragraph is in question.

My friend who sanitized their groceries on the advice of medical professionals during the early days of the pandemic did, indeed, as you say, waste cleaning products with no real gain to show for it. In their defense, at the time nobody knew that.

My point is. Contact tracing is more than who you make contact with. That was it. You're arguing something totally off topic about COVID that doesn't refute anything I'm trying to prove.

In the context of COVID, again, no it does not prevent the spread in any meaningful way, as medical science has since proven. You were, like everyone else, taught the full meaning of contact tracing during the early days of the pandemic, yet here we are. You're up on a soap box, shouting from the rooftops that it doesn't prevent the spread of COVID. A point that was never in contention. Good job. You played yourself.

That seems like the same thing as soda stream, which is far more popular where I am.

I don't want soda stream, I also don't want this drink mate thing. Far too manual to make soda when I want it.

With an actual soda fountain: I set it up, and beyond refilling the supplies every few months or so, I wouldn't need to think about it or do anything... Just fill up my cup and go.

I disagree. I specifically cited in the context of the apps made. The contact tracing that was in effect for COVID was far more comprehensive.

If you didn't get that message, you likely were not paying attention. I knew people that were using disinfecting wipes on their groceries because of contact tracing. Eg, they couldn't know what or who made contact with their products prior to having them, so they did the right thing in the context of contact tracing and sanitized the items to the best of their ability.

This wasn't uncommon among those that actually wanted to avoid the virus.

If you're only referring to contact tracing in the context of the apps that were made, sure. Then it's about who you were in contact with.

Contact tracing in medical contexts is entirely not that (or at least, not just that).

I'm in a riding that is consistently held by the conservatives, and not by a small amount. There are something like 40-50k votes cast in my riding and the difference between lib and conservative was about 6k.

I still go out and vote, because some day the 6k difference might be 12 individual votes....

If the conservatives win by a handful of votes, and I didn't vote, I don't think I could forgive myself.

Therein lies the issue I have with modern streaming. When Netflix was the only game in town, things were mostly fine. Then I saw content I was actively watching disappear from the service, and research showed that this was due to licensing issues.

I saw the writing on the wall. Copyright holders were gearing up to make their own Netflix competitor streaming service. Which is exactly what they did.

When it all started, I dusted off my tri-point hat and got to work building "my own Netflix" and honestly, it's been amazing. A royal pain in my arse sometimes, but mostly amazing.

I have had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with some of the more recent streaming services, shortly before everyone started cracking down on "asking sharing" bullshit. I live in the same house as one subscriber, but I run my own network, and have my own Internet IP address, so I'm not in their "home" and can no longer use the service because of account sharing restrictions and related bullshit. Anyways.....

One thing that always grabbed me is that my own service puts all my recently watched shows that have new episodes front and center as soon as I open it up.... New streaming services either have that info halfway down the page, with the top of the page dominated by ads for new shows to watch, or whatever popular.... Meanwhile, I mainly just care about the show I've been watching and I want to watch what's new.... What a pain in the ass.

On top of that, I would have to memorize what service has what shows/movies, and if it's anything pre-streaming that's not part of a large franchise, like Star wars or Star Trek, or whatever, I usually have to look it up, or bounce between different services frantically searching for what I want.

No thanks.

The MPAA needs to take notes from the RIAA.... I subscribe to one music service and I never have any trouble finding what I want to listen to. ... Key takeaway: I subscribe to a music service.

I do not subscribe to any video streaming services.

In medical environments being aware of what you make contact with, aka, contact tracing, is absolutely about tracking what the hell you touched.

You leaned on that wall over there for 2.6 seconds after touching this thing contaminated with x, y, and z? Great, now we have to sanitize that, and everything that made contact with it.

Sit down.

We wanted to do it this year on our anniversary, which was about a month ago now, but there was too much going on financially that even throwing a modest party with the budget constraints was going to create problems. We both had job disruptions in the last months of 2024, and things have just been a bit to hard financially to really bother.

We're starting to save for next year already. Planning shall begin soon.

I love it. I think it would be pretty awesome to have a drink fountain for home.

Not sure I could get the wife approval on that....