You can but they’ll find out. It’s reported or flagged or something, they can tell what provider holds a number and they block VOIP ones. Also if a number was ever previously a VOIP number do not try and transfer it back to proper cellular as it will still remain blocked for many but not all of these for years potentially.

Cons:

You absolutely cannot get 2FA authenticator codes from 90% of services. Many services that require a phone number even without 2FA just for “verify you’re a human” or because they want your data or to verify region use shortcode services that also will not work with ANY VOIP provider.

You will not receive their codes. These companies vary from banking institutions to gaming companies to online shopping marketplaces and stores to a Google account (used to be you could get an automated phone call to verify an account, not anymore, must be able to receive SMS from shortcodes that are disabled for VOIP numbers to register and to recover an account) just about anyone you could end up doing business with.

A shockingly large amount of companies demand phone numbers and send verification texts before allowing you to do business with them, to create an account, to recover an account, to delete an account, to place an order, etc.

They really shouldn’t, it’s a bad security practice but companies love it because with a phone number they can lower support costs by just allowing people to do a self-service where they get an automated text and can unlock their locked account. They also love harvesting that data and preventing anonymization with VOIP numbers and the reduction of fraud and increase of reliable KYC that comes with requiring them.

And they all take it as a given that EVERYONE or at least 99% have a cell plan with a non-VOIP number that works with these and the 1% who don’t they don’t care about in the developed world and are an acceptable loss.

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If they have to have a lot of channels then $120 isn’t the worst price (I have relatives who pay twice as much as that a month for cable) though you could perhaps try and check into whether they could switch to a streaming linear TV service like DirecTV Stream with one of their lower tier packages to save some money while retaining a cable-like experience (there’s also Sling, Hulu+Live TV, YoutubeTV, FUBO, etc, many of which have packages with many of the top channels for $60-$80/month).

Fact is to save money you need to be willing to give things up. If you’re moving from a premium cable package with a ton of channels to a few streaming services you’re going to lose things and potentially a lot of things. You’re going to lose access to live news channels, you’re going to lose access to specific programs on some networks that don’t have streaming service equivalents (I know for one older person I knew the fact they couldn’t get and watch Lifetime and Hallmark movies within any reasonable time-frame of their premier meant they were not interested in looking into streaming any further to replace their cable).

More than that though most old people hate change, they were used to a certain way of things and they’re afraid and perhaps get confused or frustrated with this new way of doing things. It’s simply more comfortable for them to use the old satellite system they’re used to and its interface and way of changing channels than doing something new where they have to think of how to do something or get frustrated or ask for help. Which is why I do think trying a streaming cable replacement like those I mentioned might be your best bet. It would still save some money.

Nah the second movie was kind of awful in that it just threw that and other things out for no good reason. The original source book by Philip K Dick (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) is explicit that they are androids.

In my opinion it was not a sequel in the proper sense but more something cribbing a recognizable name to sell movie tickets with vaguely related ideas, themes, setting, and Harrison Ford who will do any movie for lots of money as long as he doesn’t have to put any effort in.

And they were kind of able to do this because Ridley Scott decided to not use the term android in the film adaptation because he wanted something different sounding and so chose the term replicant instead which doesn’t have the clear connotations that android does but Ridley Scott did pretty clearly intend for them to be androids whereas the sequel threw that and the entire context and larger meaning of the work out in favor of whatever it was they were doing.

First: Asimov’s three laws

Second: Ned Beatty speech from Blade Runner

Third: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy has a reference to the Sirius cybernetics company whose marketing division has coined that phrase for their robots.

Fourth: Bender from Futurama’s catchphrase “bite my shiny metal ass”

Try toggling ErP setting or similarly named EU energy setting in your UEFI. This should resolve the lights being on.

The most elite trackers perhaps.

Trackers on /r/opensignups ? Nah they open their doors to the public every now and again.

Would not recommend it to anyone who can’t dedicate a seed box or machine uploading torrents most hours of the day every day. It’s possible to do it without those but difficult. With them it’s merely a matter of using free leech and building a buffer up as well as taking advantage of points systems to get free upload just for keeping torrents seeding even without uploading.

If you only ever grab free leech then all you have to worry about is meeting seed time and activity requirements like logging in every 90 days.

An old computer with an external drive. A raspberry pi, a nas that can run a BitTorrent client. Any would work if one doesn’t want to pay for a seed box. (Most trackers ban shared seed boxes though so you will have to get dedicated)

Take a look here for some alternatives:

https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#good-alternatives

• Matrix
• XMPP
• Briar
• SimpleX

Also just because there are no alternatives doesn’t mean your default position should be we just have to trust whatever exists now because it’s good enough. Or that we can’t criticize it ruthlessly, distrust it. Call it out and as a result of that build perhaps the desire for something better, a fix as it were.

The evidence and history clearly points towards Signal being very suspicious and likely in bed with the feds. This is not conspiracy thinking. Conspiracy thinking is thinking that the country/empire that gave away old German engima machines whose code they’d cracked to developing countries without telling them they’d cracked it in the late 40s/early 50s, that went on to establish a crypto company just to subvert its encryption. That’s done everything Snowden revealed has in fact changed suddenly for the first time in half a century for no particular reason and not to its own benefit. That’s fanciful thinking. That’s a leap of logic away from the proven trends, the pattern of behavior, and indeed the incentivizes to continue using their dominant position to maintain dominance and power. They didn’t back down on the clipper chip because they just gave up and decided to let people have privacy and rights. They gave up on it because they found better ways of achieving the same results with plausible deniability.

Also why is everything “tankies” with you people. Privacy advocates point out the obvious and suddenly it’s a communist conspiracy. LOL

No.

HDMI does have a feature called Ethernet over HDMI that in theory could allow that.

Thing is though it’s literally never been implemented in anything. It died because cheap WiFi became common.

For it to work you’d need both the TV and Chromecast and HDMI cable all to support it. It’s not uncommon on cables and a surprising amount of them include it in features list (probably to trick low info people).

But I believe that’s a hardware design thing so not something even a software update could enable. It costs extra money and they’re already paying for a WiFi chip so why bother?

Just FYI. Comments nearly exactly like yours on Reddit were used in copyright troll lawsuits against ISPs as evidence they didn’t do enough to enforce copyright and were negligent and legally liable.

Further when that didn’t work the copyright agency sued Reddit to try to unmask the identities of those people to bring legal proceedings against them to coerce them into testifying against their ISP at threat of being in trouble for their activities. Reddit was big enough to fight off the lawsuit luckily but be careful.

Yes. It’s incredibly powerful but easy to use for a basic purpose like editing a line or converting formats.

Open the web subtitles in subtitleedit. Change format to ass (advanced substation alpha). Save and re-embed using mkvtoolnix.

Positioning of multiple lines works well with ass and VLC shouldn’t have an issue reading and displaying. Not sure if YouTube includes the positioning data in their subtitles though. You could recreate that in subtitle edit (free software btw, dk web domain I believe) but it would be a bit of an annoyance.

edit: Corrected domain name. Not German, but nikse is it as OP has suggested

That seems like a real problem given they are a people being actively subjected to genocide which is being censored and distorted by western media, who have their land stolen, their existence denied, and been subjected to apartheid sponsored by the most powerful nation in the world (the US no less) in flagrant violation of international law for over half a century. Abuses and genocide carried out by a regime so powerful, so important to US interests that there are multiple states in the US where you can lose your job or your business contract for simply voicing support for boycotting and divesting from the apartheid regime that is an illegal colonization and occupation of stolen land by radical far-right reactionary ethno-fascists operating under the cloak of religion. Most major western media are some degree of complicit in giving one-sided pro-apartheid state slants, omitting key details, and using dishonest framing to attempt to deceive the public and manufacture apathy and complicity.

It doesn’t fucking censor swear words. You can say shit and ass and damn. It censors slurs and offensive terms to historically marginalized groups only. It’s just some of them are still so prevalent in our language that people take umbrage to this.

The problem with this is you just know after they pass it they’ll amend it to expand the definition from social media platforms to any platform of a certain size on the internet. Suddenly the whole internet is subject to censorship, review, lawsuits, banning encryption, age-gating and ID demands.

This is just a foot in the door move around kids to get the framework in then later change it to do all the stuff they really want to do like censor and chill speech, clamp down on encryption, mandate log-keeping for VPNs, implement age-gating that requires submitting IDs for anything even vaguely adult, etc, etc. In other words the beginning of an all-out attack on the open internet.

“Killing Hope” was written by former intelligence officer Bill Blum (think that was the name) and details such operations (though not limited to socialist countries).

I’ll try to find some links on the subject and edit my reply to include them but it may be a day or two.

All the big pirate sites use them though. Even private ones like TL. If they don’t they get DDOSed. They all turned it on over the past year or so after being badly attacked.

Lot of cope and denial in these threads. Yes the same-day is probably a rosy estimate based off people using 6 digit codes or something easy to crack, doesn’t mean it’s false or that they can’t hypothetically target longer alpha-numeric passwords. For all we know they might not even be brute-forcing and could be conducting some sort of exploit that over time reveals the encryption keys themselves in some way.

I’m still very curious about the nature of the mechanisms of action. I assume they manage to bypass the basic lock-out against entering too many passcodes too quickly somehow which is what enables this. If throttling could be properly enforced (to say nothing of something like 10 attempts and it refuses all future attempts and erases the key type of thing) this type of attack wouldn’t be practical for anyone using anything above a 6 digit numerical passcode in any reasonable timeframe. I wonder if they exploit wireless radios including cellular, wifi, bluetooth and force some code on the phones via these usually-on chips that enables this via exploiting problems in their architecture. Perhaps something that locks up, prevents functioning or resets certain checks via flooding parts of the hardware/software from these points of access. Or if it really is purely phy/log access to the lightning/usb-c port.

I mean combined with any kind of function, even a trivial kind. A salt derived from some machine state data (a random install id generated on install, a hash of computer name, etc) plus a rot13 or something would still be better than leaving it plaintext.