Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
on 17 Dec 2023 04:24
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Oh noā¦ Iāve believed the propaganda uncritically for most of my life and am just now realising how absurd it was to ever trust the establishmentās narrative.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
on 17 Dec 2023 05:13
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Idk, I think itās normal to believe proaganda. We all do, and sometimes itās even true. Iām just commenting on it because Iām so used to automatically criticising the mainstream message, so Iām usually on the other side of this discussion. But for a long time I worried about viruses from piracy, but it only just dawned on me that I am now far less afraid of that than of corporate proprietary spyware.
It never occurred to me before that of course the pirates are more trustworthy, they always have been. The mainstream propaganda is so pervasive that itās going to leave little bits stuck in your mind for a long time.
systemglitch@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 14:06
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Iām still wary of some pirated content, but when using the right trackers, that fear basically disappears.
Rentlar@lemmy.ca
on 17 Dec 2023 01:30
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Yeah, in some cases piracy feels more straightforward and honest than having to sign away all my rights and data so I can do something as simple as reading a book.
Uranium3006@kbin.social
on 17 Dec 2023 02:22
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It used to be you worried about getting a virus from pirated books, now the corpo options are provably malware
porksoda@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 02:55
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Not just probably, theyāve literally done it. Look up the Sony rootkit scandal.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
on 17 Dec 2023 04:20
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They said āprovablyā, not āprobablyā, so the good news is we all already agree :)
AFLYINTOASTER@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 05:47
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Well politicād, friend
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 09:50
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You donāt even need to go back to the early 2000s Bertelsman-Sony copy protection scandal.
Millions of people install rootkits on their PCs today in the form of anti-cheat software that has a greater level of system access than Bertelsman/Sony ever had.
Ring 0 level kernel access. Code that can be executed with above admin level privileges and do anything it wants to with your system. Shit, it could reflash firmware on your PC if it wanted to, allowing malicious code to survive OS reinstalls.
And not only that - itās not even effective as an anti-cheat solution, leading to the question of why they bother with it anyway? Data harvesting? Security theatre?
Yeah thatās spooky. Could we even tell if data is being harvested?
I know thereās also secret op codes and hardware. Real spooky shit. We really need open source hardware.
DashboTreeFrog@discuss.online
on 17 Dec 2023 01:06
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I honestly hadnāt considered that eBook licensing data could be used in the way they describe in the article.
EBooks becoming part of big data surveillance somehow feels especially disheartening to me.
Lately I feel like Iāve been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase āif youāre not paying for it, youāre the productā but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays youāre STILL the productā¦
But a pirate is always free š“āā ļø
Deceptichum@kbin.social
on 17 Dec 2023 01:23
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Yar har, fiddle de dee
Being a pirate is alright to be
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
You are a pirate!
mihies@kbin.social
on 17 Dec 2023 06:50
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Also it's free to not read it and it's more fair as well. Or, you know, buy a dead wood copy.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
on 17 Dec 2023 08:21
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Pirate the ebook, buy a paper copy to support the author (they generally even earn more per paper copy, iirc). Ideally at a local book store, as they are a dying breed as well.
Donāt like dead trees around? Gift it to someone. Or ask the local library if they want it
mrcrilly@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 12:49
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Excellent advice. Iād add: if you cannot gift it, or the library doesnāt want it, give it to a charity shop or book club.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 09:39
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Lately I feel like Iāve been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase āif youāre not paying for it, youāre the productā but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays youāre STILL the productā¦
Yep, I take issue with that phrase as well for two reasons.
like you say, most of the time you pay and your data is still harvested, because if youāre not collecting all that valuable data your shareholders will demand to know why youāre ignoring such a massive revenue stream.
plenty of stuff IS genuinely free without you being the product. FOSS as a general rule will not track you and you arenāt the product.
Now I appreciate that people who frequent Lemmy probably know about that exception to the rule, but plenty of people donāt, and Iāve seen people refuse to use open source software because they believe it being truly free is too good to be true, so they stick with an inferior paid-for alternative thinking some black box proprietary code is more private and secure so long as you paid for it.
DarkPassenger@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 01:55
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Never considered my library was spying on me. Spent years hyping the library system to save money on ebooks. Does pirating all your ebooks solve the problem or does tracking also take place on the e-reader side too?
uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca
on 17 Dec 2023 02:04
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I used a Kindle, but get the lionās share of my ebooks from Annaās archive. Books are often delivered to my Kindle through the email to Kindle service.
I have no illusions that every single book I read is fed through Amazonās data machine. The Kindle estimates the time to completion of a book based on your reading speed - everything that it could possibly interpolated from your readingā¦ Will be. And you can bet it will be sold, or at the very least advertised to you on Amazon.
DarkPassenger@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 02:39
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I do the same by feeding my kindle via email. Got my kindle but wonder if there are more privacy friendly readers
emerica@sh.itjust.works
on 17 Dec 2023 09:32
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I have a Kobo, you can set it to āsideload modeā and you donāt need an account of any kind. It disables the store and all that and I never turn WiFi on so itās completely offline.
I use Calibre, an amazing FOSS ebook manager, to sync my books to the Kobo.
Pretty much just download whatever from Annaās Archive, throw it in Calibre and get it to fetch all the artwork and metadata if I want it and sync to the Kobo.
Calibre takes a little getting used to but itās not too bad, itās also extremely powerful once you learn more about it.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
on 17 Dec 2023 14:18
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No ned to pirate. Just send your ebooks through Calibre to remove DRM and put them on your privacy friendly* reader. Maybe donāt buy them all from Amazon in the future.
* may need some work. PocketBook doesnāt track you, Kobo is pretty good too, Onyx must be debloated to not send telemetry (like any Android device), Amazon devices are Android too?
DarkPassenger@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 15:53
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Can you point me to a good guide to set up calibre to remove drm?
clubizarre@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 16:09
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Pirating and Librera or e-reader nevernconnected to internet.
banneryear1868@lemmy.world
on 17 Dec 2023 17:43
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Ebooks are so fucking annoying to use with licensed books, like anyone who has a mom that got an ebook reader knows what a pain it is to set it up with a library and teach her how to use it, then you have device restrictions etc.
Just another example of media where pirating is so easy and so much better. You download an incredibly small single file, copy to the device, and you have the book, easy. If I can get it from the library and pay for that service with my taxes, if I ācheck outā the book and then pirate it, thereās no ethical issues with pirating it.
Personally though I prefer either audiobooks or hard copies, I just find the ebook readers too annoying to use and manage. Iād honestly rather buy a book then donate or lend it to someone when Iām done with it. In high school through college I had a job where I drove for about 20 hours every week and I basically went through all the classics in audiobook form and then got in to popular history and philosophy then into more academic territory, was surprising what I was able to get in audiobook format and just became accustomed to it.
Ayuuuup. Libgen, calibre, and Apple Books for me these days.
Iāve bought around 1000 kindle books over the years, but that shit ended this year when I found out about this stuff. Spent a week stripping the drm from all my purchases (the ones Amazon didnāt burn up in the memory hole, anyway; bout a dozen of the books I paid for are no longer available for download), adding them to calibre, and backing the data up.
Now I use the apple books app on my phone to read them. Itās not as convenient, but fuck Amazon.
threaded - newest
.
Piracy is becoming the safe option, think about that.
šØāšš“āā ļøš«š©āšš“āā ļø
Oh noā¦ Iāve believed the propaganda uncritically for most of my life and am just now realising how absurd it was to ever trust the establishmentās narrative.
.
Idk, I think itās normal to believe proaganda. We all do, and sometimes itās even true. Iām just commenting on it because Iām so used to automatically criticising the mainstream message, so Iām usually on the other side of this discussion. But for a long time I worried about viruses from piracy, but it only just dawned on me that I am now far less afraid of that than of corporate proprietary spyware.
It never occurred to me before that of course the pirates are more trustworthy, they always have been. The mainstream propaganda is so pervasive that itās going to leave little bits stuck in your mind for a long time.
Iām still wary of some pirated content, but when using the right trackers, that fear basically disappears.
Yeah, in some cases piracy feels more straightforward and honest than having to sign away all my rights and data so I can do something as simple as reading a book.
It used to be you worried about getting a virus from pirated books, now the corpo options are provably malware
Not just probably, theyāve literally done it. Look up the Sony rootkit scandal.
They said āprovablyā, not āprobablyā, so the good news is we all already agree :)
Well politicād, friend
You donāt even need to go back to the early 2000s Bertelsman-Sony copy protection scandal.
Millions of people install rootkits on their PCs today in the form of anti-cheat software that has a greater level of system access than Bertelsman/Sony ever had.
Ring 0 level kernel access. Code that can be executed with above admin level privileges and do anything it wants to with your system. Shit, it could reflash firmware on your PC if it wanted to, allowing malicious code to survive OS reinstalls.
And not only that - itās not even effective as an anti-cheat solution, leading to the question of why they bother with it anyway? Data harvesting? Security theatre?
Yeah thatās spooky. Could we even tell if data is being harvested?
I know thereās also secret op codes and hardware. Real spooky shit. We really need open source hardware.
I honestly hadnāt considered that eBook licensing data could be used in the way they describe in the article. EBooks becoming part of big data surveillance somehow feels especially disheartening to me.
Lately I feel like Iāve been duped for years since I used to believe strongly in the phrase āif youāre not paying for it, youāre the productā but it feels like with every paid product or service nowadays youāre STILL the productā¦
But a pirate is always free š“āā ļø
Yar har, fiddle de dee
Being a pirate is alright to be
Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free
You are a pirate!
.
Also it's free to not read it and it's more fair as well. Or, you know, buy a dead wood copy.
Pirate the ebook, buy a paper copy to support the author (they generally even earn more per paper copy, iirc). Ideally at a local book store, as they are a dying breed as well.
Donāt like dead trees around? Gift it to someone. Or ask the local library if they want it
Excellent advice. Iād add: if you cannot gift it, or the library doesnāt want it, give it to a charity shop or book club.
Yep, I take issue with that phrase as well for two reasons.
like you say, most of the time you pay and your data is still harvested, because if youāre not collecting all that valuable data your shareholders will demand to know why youāre ignoring such a massive revenue stream.
plenty of stuff IS genuinely free without you being the product. FOSS as a general rule will not track you and you arenāt the product.
Now I appreciate that people who frequent Lemmy probably know about that exception to the rule, but plenty of people donāt, and Iāve seen people refuse to use open source software because they believe it being truly free is too good to be true, so they stick with an inferior paid-for alternative thinking some black box proprietary code is more private and secure so long as you paid for it.
Never considered my library was spying on me. Spent years hyping the library system to save money on ebooks. Does pirating all your ebooks solve the problem or does tracking also take place on the e-reader side too?
I used a Kindle, but get the lionās share of my ebooks from Annaās archive. Books are often delivered to my Kindle through the email to Kindle service.
I have no illusions that every single book I read is fed through Amazonās data machine. The Kindle estimates the time to completion of a book based on your reading speed - everything that it could possibly interpolated from your readingā¦ Will be. And you can bet it will be sold, or at the very least advertised to you on Amazon.
I do the same by feeding my kindle via email. Got my kindle but wonder if there are more privacy friendly readers
I have a Kobo, you can set it to āsideload modeā and you donāt need an account of any kind. It disables the store and all that and I never turn WiFi on so itās completely offline.
I use Calibre, an amazing FOSS ebook manager, to sync my books to the Kobo.
Pretty much just download whatever from Annaās Archive, throw it in Calibre and get it to fetch all the artwork and metadata if I want it and sync to the Kobo.
Calibre takes a little getting used to but itās not too bad, itās also extremely powerful once you learn more about it.
No ned to pirate. Just send your ebooks through Calibre to remove DRM and put them on your privacy friendly* reader. Maybe donāt buy them all from Amazon in the future.
* may need some work. PocketBook doesnāt track you, Kobo is pretty good too, Onyx must be debloated to not send telemetry (like any Android device), Amazon devices are Android too?
Can you point me to a good guide to set up calibre to remove drm?
This is the method I use for my Kindle (and some Google Books) purchases.
Keep your ebook readers dumb and use them offline. Load them up with books and read them.
Thankfully, the only ebooks I have only gotten so far are classics from Gutenberg website.
Pirating and Librera or e-reader nevernconnected to internet.
Ebooks are so fucking annoying to use with licensed books, like anyone who has a mom that got an ebook reader knows what a pain it is to set it up with a library and teach her how to use it, then you have device restrictions etc.
Just another example of media where pirating is so easy and so much better. You download an incredibly small single file, copy to the device, and you have the book, easy. If I can get it from the library and pay for that service with my taxes, if I ācheck outā the book and then pirate it, thereās no ethical issues with pirating it.
Personally though I prefer either audiobooks or hard copies, I just find the ebook readers too annoying to use and manage. Iād honestly rather buy a book then donate or lend it to someone when Iām done with it. In high school through college I had a job where I drove for about 20 hours every week and I basically went through all the classics in audiobook form and then got in to popular history and philosophy then into more academic territory, was surprising what I was able to get in audiobook format and just became accustomed to it.
Ayuuuup. Libgen, calibre, and Apple Books for me these days.
Iāve bought around 1000 kindle books over the years, but that shit ended this year when I found out about this stuff. Spent a week stripping the drm from all my purchases (the ones Amazon didnāt burn up in the memory hole, anyway; bout a dozen of the books I paid for are no longer available for download), adding them to calibre, and backing the data up.
Now I use the apple books app on my phone to read them. Itās not as convenient, but fuck Amazon.