Yes. Certs can expire after whatever time the issuer wants to set for them. That could be six months or 20 years. Some infrastructure has limits on max and min lengths (more max than min usually) but not all and there are best practices as well.

More importantly the certs could have been five years old by the time this person got the TV for a total age of 8 years.

People need to stop spreading this. It’s false and it’s dangerous because it presumes a basket of things that isn’t. It is incredibly easy to identify commercial VPNs meant for anonymity, skipping geo-blocks, torrenting, etc and separate them from those used for secure access to internal networks. For starters all traffic has an address. Those commercial VPN providers used easily and quickly identified servers for which off-the-shelf weekly/daily updated lists of IPs can be purchased from commercial companies. There are other things like traffic analysis but it’s frankly not necessary.

If the UK or the US wanted to block commercial VPNs entirely they could do so very easily. China and Russia have no interest in running no-logs VPNs for westerners to escape their censorship regimes and put in that kind of effort as the west has put into their own VPNs and solutions to enable “dissidents” (CIA provocateurs and liberals) to communicate. People single out China because they can’t block all VPNs, well the GFW designer said it isn’t meant to stop everyone just introduce friction so anyone who does so has to have gone against the current and hopefully knows their stuff. The technical means of doing so which the west has isn’t even getting into their control of the world financial system, they can seize bank accounts, arrest the people running these services, sanction and fine the hosting companies in the west for hosting them, deplatform them, etc. And the problem there is that the anti-west: China, Russia, etc are not interesting in hosting this stuff for westerners outside of western jurisdiction.

Did the Zionist entity tell them it would be antisemitism to interfere with their intelligence operations? Must have.

It’s actually very easy. Don’t use your TV as anything but a display. Don’t connect it to the internet ever.

If you need to watch content on it get an appropriate device. If you want to watch BluRays buy a BluRay player. If you want to do streaming buy a streaming device at a price point and privacy level to your liking. Yes the streaming devices collect some data too but they don’t have mics and cameras and they can’t tell corporations and the government the contents of the vacation photo slide show off your laptop which you plugged in. Also you can in future often neuter many of the more expensive streaming devices and if you get sick of the streaming device you have, you can just buy a different one and sell the old one.

As to librelec and “sucking”. If you’re trying to do yo-ho stuff with free streaming sites and services it isn’t going to be great. Frankly if you want some quality and good experience either pay for a commercial streaming service (or a good IPTV one*) or invest in learning how to host your own content with an Arr stack. This used to be a lot cheaper but AI has ruined everything. Nothing we can do about that.

*yeah good ones are hard to find and one should never pay ahead as many of them vanish suddenly.

Read the freaking date:

HEADLINE JUN 23, 2021

That’s because they were hacked or exploited for an uncontrolled ability to upload searchable documents that get indexed. Very common with universities and gov sites. A real plague honestly.

And there’s a non-zero chance they tried hacking you by directing you to a malware payload.

I would never follow links found in a pdf. Heck I would never open a suspicious pdf like that given it could be the payload.

Use dbzero’s piracy wiki megathread of links to find reasonably safe sources for this stuff not random links.

Assuming you mean hard drives not SSDs: almost nothing. If prices scaled perfectly linearly and all things were equal at these prices per TB it would be worth about $6.

But all things are not equal. Your drives are assuredly much older than these drives, probably more worn and the power cost of running it compared to capacity and use of limited SATA connectors would not be worth it for any kind of hot storage which lowers its value. The only way to sell them would be in a lot of at least 8, ideally more and you’d probably be lucky to get $3/drive if you can prove the SMART data on all of them is good and they work. Also if they’re not enterprise drives like these are knock that down a bit more.

Buying drives that small and old is little better than gambling and playing the odds so you have to buy an awful lot of them awfully cheap to deal with the fact you’re assuredly getting some bad eggs. You also have to figure in the hassle for the buyer of managing say backing up their 10TB data-set to 40 drives like this including plugging them in, unplugging, regular testing every year and storing them somewhere safe as well as dealing with failures and documenting what is on each drive. Most people conclude it isn’t worth the hassle though there’s enough desperate people out there now that some might bite.

250GB SSDs on the other hand assuming they’re not in a failing state are still worth some change as you can use them to install an OS on various homelab devices like a server, firewall, etc.

Please read Yogthos reply here: https://lemmy.ml/post/49690377/26558932

It basically encapsulates most of the important reasoning.

Why do we support Iran against the US? Objectively Iran is a theocracy that is socially backwards, it oppresses women, it oppresses LGBTQ people, it has a reactionary social character. Why then do we support it? Because it is the lesser evil. And importantly we would support it if it aggressed first against the zionist entity because it’s not about aggression or simplistic victim/aggressor dynamics but about liberation for the region and the world. And because Iran exists the way it does today because of western meddling and it cannot move beyond its present character as long as the west is there serving as a foil. Take away that, take away the zionist entity and the aggression and siege situation, allow development and these things have an opportunity to change.

Anyways you use the term “totalitarian” which was itself invented by a Nazi apologist zionist to equate communism to Nazism. But why do you suppose that Russia is this but the west with its vast surveillance nets, its ICE, its camera systems, its global communications intercept network run by the eyes groups with NSA, GCHQ, and its brutal wars with atrocities against civilians across the middle east is not? I mean you can be arrested in Britain for the most trivial of things. You can be sent to prison for saying “I support Palestine Action” while peacefully protesting. How is it that these countries are not also “totalitarian” but Russia is? It cannot be and people only think that way because of propaganda. You have been blinded to the police state and brutality of the west while the brutality of Russia is hyped up, they hide the atrocities and human rights violations of the west and play down the problems while playing up, highlighting every instance and pounding the drums in your ears that scream “this is totalitarianism” to convince you of this fact.

Kleptocracy is also a meaningless term to communists. It’s almost like a slur which is selectively applied to the designated “bad guys”. All capitalist nations are run under a dictatorship of capital and capitalists to serve their interests. This is true in Russia and it is true in the US. If some places are a little more brazen with their corruption and others a little better at hiding it behind “lobbying” that doesn’t change the essential character in our opinion. People starve and sleep on the streets in every major US city while the wealthy sit atop their 12th mansion and party with models and use private jets to private islands. The wealthy do things like rape children and get a slap on the wrist because prison would be bad for them. The wealthy run pedophile networks like Jeffery Epstein and the government buries the evidence and ensures no one is held to account while fabricating lies about what really happened. They crash the economy like in 2008 and the government bails them out while shafting the average person. Does that sound like “kleptocracy”? Because that’s the US. Russian capitalist elites are no different, they steal from the people, they live lavishly while others suffer, they commit crimes and use connections to get away with it. It’s no different.

Then you’re very ignorant.

Apple’s presence is good because it’s a privacy anonymizing service that obscures your email and forwards anything to an email of your choice and logins/connections can be deleted at any time.

And it was introduced in response to the long existing proliferation of login with Google and Facebook and similar schemes. They forced it using their App Store because otherwise no company would go for the user identity obfuscation over the already existed for years privacy invasive alternatives. Apple came late and forced companies to allow their privacy obfuscation alternative. Note: though it often is more private some sites can request additional data from Apple same as from Google and Facebook such as your name. Apple is no worse and often better overall as a choice just the same though it’s best to avoid these types of login IMO.

I admit my mind went to this too. It’s a shame I just can’t view this thing with anything but anger since learning it is horrendous-tier dehumanizing zionist propaganda from a rabid zionist writer. The game and the show. Shame on the actors for continuing to participate in that zionist agit-prop in the middle of a genocide carried out by the people the writer is doing apologia for.

Unfortunately with AI induced RAM pricing prices are up across the board so cheap is out if you want extra functionality.

You can get as someone suggested the OSMC device. As well as various other third party streamer devices that support OSMC or CoreElec though the Vero does hit near the top for features for video watching as per the spreadsheet linked here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=385600

But if you want general purpose distros that allow emulation you probably want an N150 or similar mini-PC. The tricky part there is that while you can get lets of cheaper older used mini-PCs for emulation if you want to do hardware 4K HDR video content decoding then you need something more recently made for efficiency sake so you’re not pushing the processor to the max just watching videos.

If it has to be under $250 then your options are things like the Vero V or other streaming focused devices but you give up general purpose distro and emulation (I think, Kodi does technically offer a games feature but I’ve never used it and am not familiar) OR else you’re going with a used mini-PC that will okay for general purpose distro and light emulation may struggle with your 4K HDR content depending on video codec used and bitrate.

If you can afford a bit more >$250 but <$350 you can get an N150 or similar intel system that should handle all of the above.

A caveat on the N150 route though is currently there is no support for Dolby Vision, HDR+, etc. You only get plain old HDR and that’s not likely to change anytime soon as it’s a driver issue and no one makes one.

If streaming your own video content is your most important goal and you may need things like DV and other HDR+ formats then go with the Vero V or another item listed near the top of the Kodi list like the Ugoos or Homatics.

I’m guessing they don’t want to pay the costs of the fraud.

Still it’s a shame for children and the under-banked parts of the working class who are struggling. Anyone without a credit/debit card now in the US at least has to pay a 3 - 14% tax ($5-$7 per card activation fee) for a $50 to $200 gift credit/debit card to load up steam instead which is a pretty significant hit.

Bad for anonymity too. Anyone who wanted to maintain an anonymous Steam account is going to be out of luck as I suspect even those gift credit cards are likely going to require identity verification or face scans within a couple years before you can use them.

That’s Putin’s obsession not Xi’s. As a liberal who largely lives for himself and likely believes in great man theory Putin is much more interested in this idea.

That employee should be fired. Part of the responsibility of a social media/brand manager is not bringing the brand into disrepute and not making it look like it supports Nazism and as part of that they should have a passing familiarity with controversial words and symbols within their market. Fire them, announce you fired them for this egregious behavior, condemn Nazism and we’ll accept it. Anything short of that is just “sorry we got caught and a lot of people got upset about our Nazi dog whistling”.

Fact is it wasn’t sent in Germany where Nazi symbols are a criminal offense and that tells you whoever did this knew. There is no defense that they did it out of ignorance. Either one person who is not being fired but defended did this intentionally or the company is run by Nazis who did this intentionally and it’s not just one lowly email marketing person to blame.

Let me guess: in exchange for a suspended sentence he will be 4x as hawkish and make 2x as many appearances on media demanding blood for the national security state.

This seems a bit silly even if you think AI is a massive fraudulent waste of resources. People have spent decades using search engines to research and plan out murders. I get the all-encompassing surveillance state wants that and all other potential wrong-think blocked and/or reported with an eye to censoring false positives and hampering the operation of these services for consumers rather than risking even a small chance someone can write their way around these blocks with clever phrasing.

The hallucination stuff I admit is definitely something they should be held to account for but it may not be possible to stop that entirely so much as limit its frequency. The US and especially places like Florida represent a deeply broken, atomized society so the problem is deeper than chatgpt. Facebook has been harboring and spreading conspiracy theory nonsense for decades without being held to account because it buoys reactionary conservative politics.

Yeah until it starts hitting widespread hardware decode support (streaming devices and phones) it’s pretty much just a curiosity to all involved as the only things traditionally powerful enough to software decode these codecs at 4k without overheating are computers and I don’t see that changing.

If h266 gets hw decode support on a bunch of common chips first it’ll be a real blow licensing freedom or not.

Meanwhile same country: it’s the internet! It’s creating misogyny out of thin air! We have to ID check everyone for everything!

IMO it’s fair to read this as an NSA/eyes move. AMD is embedded in the western global mass surveillance architecture and by closed sourcing they can hide NSA back doors more easily.

Fact is the west is locking down all computing and doesn’t want there to be anywhere to flee for hobbyists or the Chinese. This also prevents the Chinese from benefiting from these tools if they slap sanctions on.

It’s not a fallacy when multiple countries/states have passed laws that explicitly demand some form of ID confirmation/scanning and others have stated an intent for it. It’s not a fallacy when you understand what the purpose of this push actually is.

The fact is the end result isn’t going to be compliance with the least restrictive standard but the most. That’s how regulatory compliance always works. You always comply with the most restrictive because it encompasses the least restrictive as well. Further if you stopped to think and analyzed history scientifically instead of it being a series of great man events or whatever you’d understand how capitalism in crisis reacts by crushing the working class using tools like fascism. That the 5-eyes spying abuse far from being some deviation from liberalism embody the deeper desires and wants of the modern western world to spy on and control their citizens and the world and that a free internet has been an incredible threat to state power since day one.

It’s just the first big moment where their propaganda failed, where their narrative was undermined was the Gaza genocide and they will do anything to prop up the Zio-Nazi entity occupying Palestine and prevent their other narratives from suffering the same fate in future. A man in the “free speech” loving EU was unpersoned FFS and can’t be given money, buy food, stay at hotels, use banks, anything for deviating too far from the approved EU narrative. These are the people we’re dealing with.

It’s also not a fallacy when AI has created a crisis for private/government spy fusion platforms like Meta, Google, etc in both gaining ad dollars due to AI bots being hard to discern so hard identifying humans is a must for not only spying but profits from ads.

For a long time the material interests of the massive tech companies and their financial backers and shareholders did not particularly benefit from this kind of ID law and so they pushed back and disallowed it. Now thanks to AI their interests align with those of the state, the capitalist propaganda organs, the moral crusaders. There is in other words nothing major standing in their way and tons of power centers pushing for this as a result of AI, the Gaze genocide breaking containment, etc and it has gained momentum.