Moonrise2473

Same company acquired two very similar apps.

One required a $14/year subscription, the other $90/year

So they "carefully considered this decision" by delisting the cheaper one for the more expensive one. Boom, 500% cost increase

Don't want to pay? Well, your files are hostage. Stop paying and lose your data.

Ps: remember the lie "subscription for software assures constant updates"?

The announcement serves as the final nail in the coffin for one of the iPad’s oldest and most popular sculpting apps, which hasn’t received any major updates since 2023.

TrueNAS systems with Apps should be upgraded immediately to 24.10.2.2, before June 1st! [...]

After June 1st, Cobia and Dragonfish users with Kubernetes Apps will need to manually back up and restore their application data and configuration to a new Electric Eel installation. The manual update process is more complex and should be avoided.

While in the past doing a reprint of a book, movie or game was expensive and wasn't worth if something wasn't popular, now selling something on a digital store has only a small initial cost (writing descriptions and graphics) and after that there's nothing more. So why publishers are giving up on free money?

I thought to those delisting reasons:

1. Artificial scarcity. The publisher wants to artificially drive more sales by saying that's a limited time sale. For example that collection that included sm64. super Mario Galaxy and super Mario sunshine on switch. The greedy publisher essentially said "you only have 6 months to get this game, act now" and people immediately acted like "wow, better pay $60 for this collection of 3 old games, otherwise they'll be gone forever!” otherwise they would have been like "uhm, i liked super Mario sunshine but $60 for a 20 years old game? I'll think about that"

2. Rights issues. For books the translation rights are often granted for a limited time; same for music in games; or if it's using a certain third party intellectual property. Publisher might decide that the cost for renewing the license is too high compared to projected sales, while the copyright owner instead still wants an unrealistic amount of money in a lump sum instead of just royalties. Example is Capcom DuckTales remastered, delisted because Disney is Disney.

3. Not worth their time. Those sales need to be reported to governments to pay taxes and for a few sales, small publishers might prefer to close business rather to pay all the accounting overhead. Who's going to buy Microsoft Encarta 99?

4. Controversial content: there are many instances of something that was funny decades ago but now is unacceptable. Publisher doesn't want to be associated with that anymore

5. Compatibility issues. That game relied on a specific Windows XP quirk, assumed to always run as admin, writing their saves on system32, and doesn't work on anything newer. The code has been lost and they fired all the devs two weeks after the launch, so they're unable to patch it.

In all those cases (maybe except 5), the publisher and the copyright owners decided together to give up their product, so it should be legally allowed to pirate those products.

If I want to read a book that has been pulled from digital stores and is out of print, the only way to do is:

1. Piracy (publisher gets $0 from me)
2. Library (publisher gets $0 from me)
3. Buying it from an ebay scalper that has a "near mint" edition for $100 (publisher gets $0 from me)

And say that I really want to play super Mario sunshine. Now the only way is to buy it used, even if they ported it to their latest game console and it would literally cost them nothing to continue selling it. But if I buy it used, Nintendo gets the exact same amount of money that they would if I downloaded it with an "illegal" torrent.

In short: they don't want the money for their IP? Then people that want to enjoy that IP should be legally allowed to get it for free

A decade ago I used BitTorrent Sync. Then it became Resilio Sync. Then with Resilio Sync 2 they nerfed the free app to a point that I just removed that from all my computers and switched to syncthing.

Yesterday I was watching my server struggling when syncthing was doing the periodic scan of a directory with hundreds of thousands of files and then i thought, "maybe Resilio Sync uses less resources or doesn't waste time reindexing a static directory for the nth time"

I went to see their website and now with the new version 3, all the features are back. The business plan now is to sell the app to enterprises at unaffordable prices rather to persuade consumers to pay a subscription to self host their syncing server

I wanted to try it but now they say docker version is discontinued, need to install the package to bare metal. Ugh... So I desisted and decided to stay with syncthing

Now with the news of the impending discontinuation of syncthing android app, everything changes. Without Android support, syncthing is no more irreplaceable for me.

So, has anyone tried Resilio Sync 3? Is it good?

Intro: Webtoon is an app/website where (mostly Korean) comics are released in short episodes. Those episodes aren't released all at once but usually once a week, you have a free unlock a day and if you want you can have more by either watching an ad or by paying with coins, that are paid with real money. With the smallest purchase ($6), an episode can be unlocked with 3 coins (¢35) up to 7 (¢80). You can also skip the wait by paying with coins. I used it for years and I was ok by watching the ads at the end of each episode. It limited myself to one a day, otherwise I would scroll for hours. But, at the end of June 2024, they did the IPO, so that means ✨enshittification✨

So the guide on how to push away users to piracy:

1. Have a scary reminder at the beginning of every episode that says that piracy is illegal. (I can't screenshot that without a rooted phone, it's blocked). This helps the user to have a daily notification that yes, this content is also available somewhere else and you're not bound to artificial limits.

2. Put the last three episodes of a series started 3-4 years ago in perpetual paywall. No more "just wait one week to get the new episode". You want to see how that 200 episodes story that you're reading almost every day for 3 years ends? LOL pay $6 to buy a coins package!

3. Now that the user is pissed that they can't know how the story ends, they'll just search it on the illegal sites, since over the past years they had to skip through 200 reminders that yes, this story is also available over there.

And it failed spectacularly.

We only needed a simple form, but we wanted to be fancy, so we used "nextcloud forms".

The docker image automatically updated the install to nextcloud 30, but the forms app requires nextcloud 29 or lower. No warning whatsoever. It's an official app, couldn't they wait that it was ready for NC 30 before launching it? The newsletter boasts "NC hub 9 is the best thing after sliced bread" yet i don't see any difference both in visual or performance compared to NC hub 2

Conclusion: we made our business to rely on nextcloud forms as a signup form, but the only reason we were using it was disabled who knows how many weeks ago.

Many users bought Resident evil for iOS because it was working offline. Perfect for long trips. But a new update adds a mandatory DRM online check at start-up.

I wrote bought, but actually the word is rented. One day Capcom stops updating the games (and this is 100% guaranteed) and a few years later the "owner" gets "This app needs to be updated to run on this iPhone"

Meanwhile, people who pirated a cracked ipa, don't get any issue in playing the game offline. DRM exclusively hurts the paying customers.

One day many years ago I had too many drinks and being stupid and naive and I bought adobe cs5. I still use it on the same computer I installed it a decade ago. Activated and installed only once. Today they revoked the access to it. Clicking the link they say "revoked because purchased from an untrustworthy reseller"

Yeah... untrustworthy reseller, look at the invoice and see who sold&shipped that physical copy...

Contacted support, they said that they won't do anything about it because it's EOL.

Moral of the story: don't do like me. If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing. Never give your money to Adobe.

TL;DR: for a whole decade YouTube allowed a copyright troll to claim all the rights on a recording of a washing machine end cycle chime

The account of the copyright troll is still standing and it's not permanently banned

IMHO in this case YouTube should permanently ban at the first offense any copyright troll that maliciously claim as their property something that's in the public domain

Also: if it wasn't that it affected a big streamer with lots of followers, YouTube would have ignored the problem

I've enough.

Last year the automatic updater was rebooting windows without any warning after the uac prompt. The problem continued for months before being fixed

This year I got an update a week. Very annoying to get the same "why u no reboot? I need updates" question every single time I turn on my PC.

Today when updating it kills explorer.exe without any confirmation and doesn't bring it back to life.

I don't think that their paid enterprise customers are doing the ~~beta~~ alpha testers like this. Is it really necessary to push nightlies to end users? It can't be tested casually for a couple of days then pushed?

I disabled the updates check and will update the nextcloud desktop client manually every 5 years if I can remember. Added an exception to Winget so it doesn't update it. I lost my patience.

It's a 8th gen Intel laptop CPU with 64 GB of ddr4

Definitely a bargain!

I want to try bitmagnet on the dev server at work (yes, we have permission to use it for personal reasons as long it's legal) but for obvious reasons it must be tunneled through a VPN.

Bitmagnet it's a local search engine that discovers content via DHT. It just asks peers for content, then when you come back the following month it should have found many interesting stuff

Problem is that from a network point of view it looks I want to download every single torrent ever made so I wouldn't want to have my workplace ip address associated with that.

Because the network traffic is minimal and for this content I don't care if the provider does data mining, I would like to use a free VPN with gluetun.

But I can't find a free one that works. From the officially supported only windscribe and proton have a free offer, but windscribe free doesn't have OpenVPN or wireguard, while proton VPN free blocks me immediately as soon as the program talks with other peers, even if I don't actually download anything.

So back to the question, which free VPNs are working with gluetun, someone has experience with that?