I think the home media collector usecase is actually a complete outlier in terms of what these formats are actually being developed for.

Well yeah given who makes it but it’s what I care about. I couldn’t care less about obscure and academic efforts (or the profits of some evil tech companies) except as vague curiosities. HEVC wasn’t designed with people like me in mind either yet it means I can have oh 30% more stuff for the same space usage and the enccoders are mature enough that the difference in encode time between it and AVC is negligible on a decently powered server.

Transparency (or great visual fidelity period) also isn’t likely the top concern here because development is driven by companies that want to save money on bandwidth and perhaps on CDN storage.

Which I think is a shame. Lower bitrates for transparency -should- be the goal. The goal should be to get streaming content to consumers at a very high quality, ideally close to or equivalent to UHD BluRay for 4k. Instead we get companies that bit-starve and hop onto these new encoders because they can use fewer bits as long as they use plenty of tricks to maintain a certain baseline of perceptual visual image quality that passes the sniff test for your average viewer so instead of getting quality bumps we just get them using less bits and passing the savings onto themselves with little meaningful upgrade in visual fidelity for the viewer. Which is why it’s hard to care at all really about a lot of this stuff if it doesn’t benefit the user in any way really.

And which will be so resource intensive to encode with compared to existing standards that it’ll probably take 14 years before home media collectors (or yar har types) are able and willing to use it over HEVC and AV1. :\

As an example AV1 encodes to this day are extremely rare in the p2p scene. Most groups still work with h264 or h265 even those focusing specifically on reducing sizes while maintaining quality. By contrast HEVC had significant uptake within 3-4 years of its release in the p2p scene (we’re on year 7 for AV1).

These greedy, race to the bottom device-makers are still fighting AV1. With people keeping devices longer and not upgrading as much as well as tons of people relying on under-powered smart-TVs for watching (forcing streaming services to maintain older codecs like h264/h265 to keep those customers) means it’s going to take a depressingly long time to be anything but a web streaming phenomenon I fear.

Disclaimer: I’ve not used that exact machine but have worked with similar Lenovo/Dell stuff.

On HP’s spec sheet it says the max HDD size is 2TB. Do I need to do anything to the BIOS to allow bigger drives?

Set mode to UEFI and/or GPT possibly. Some very old BIOS may simply refuse to boot off a drive that big while some may work as long as the boot stuff is in the first 2TB.

I’ve heard it’s possible to add a third 3.5in HDD in the DVD drive bay. Can anyone confirm? Do you need a bay adapter or whatever?

Often these form factors have a SATA plug for a DVD drive. Be aware that this one is usually only SATA 2 at best so slower than SATA 3 (only 3Gbps vs 6Gbps) and often only SATA 1 (1.5GBps) in fact given DVDs need significantly less than that. Not technically a huge limiting factor in anything but bursts and saturating the cache as mechanical hard drives are going to tend to struggle to get much above 300Mbps sustained write anyways but a consideration. I wouldn’t put a RAID drive on it if possible as RAID drives should be on SATA adapters of matching speeds.

You can use a bay adapter and you can set the drive directly bare on the surface but it may induce vibrations and in theory for mechanical drives could shorten the life of the drive in addition to being annoyingly noisy. An SSD located there wouldn’t have this problem as it’s safe to set the SATA ones on a bare surface. Though if the SSD is getting heavy regular use you might consider still investing in some sort of heat solution like an aluminum dock for 2.5" drive to place it in and set that there.

As far as if you really want to set a 3.5" spinning disk HDD there without paying for a dock, at least put rubber between it and the metal of the case. Either little rubber standoffs or a flat rubber pad. This may induce heat issues but should solve the vibration one at least.

You can of course buy a PCIe SATA or SCSI card and connect to that to get higher speeds.

The other questions I’ll leave to other people. Technically hardware RAID tends to come with lots of problems for home lab setups and software at the host OS tends to be more recommended as easier to recover with and less prone to various problems.

I would go for an Apple TV 4K box with ethernet (don’t burden yourself with wifi when you can have gigabit ethernet for $20). No ads, simple, works, looks really nice, apps are very responsive, I can fly through my home media collection’s wall of posters using the remote without any delays in loading images. Compatible with all the major streaming services. Has infuse for streaming local media as well as Plex and Jellyfin apps.

If you’re interested in spending some money and want something better without the Apple ecosystem (be warned, Google seems to be cracking down on sideloading so who can say how much longer that lasts but do as you feel right) I’d recommend something from Dune-HD.

Considering how old the Nvidia Shields are at this point, the disinterest from Nvidia in refreshing them periodically as Apple does, the insertion of ads, framerate switching issues, etc I think Dune-HD makes the superior product for upmarket non-Apple TV streaming. People have been waiting for a Shield update for 4 years now. In that time Apple dropped their own prices to make Nvidia look like even bigger clowns still selling old hardware and chips all these years later at such mark-up.

They support AV1, dolby vision, atmos and 2 of their 4k models have a dual OS set-up. One is Netflix certified Android which gets you full support for 4k streaming, DV, atmos, etc from all major streaming services, the other is a special virtualized container running a customized version of linux with a media center which you can install Kodi, Plex, Jellyfin, etc onto.

People who say “just run it off a PC you install Linux on” are not very serious or not very discerning (or more hardcore than me in their refusal to ever pay for any streaming services). Quality from such non-certified devices is capped at 720p without dolby atmos, dolby vision, etc from nearly all the major streaming services.

If you don’t want to drop as much as Apple or Dune-HD charge I’m not sure what to say. Walmart’s onn USED to be a great choice as you formerly could root them but they changed that and locked them down since 2024 I believe. Just get something beefier than a stick that plugs into your TV IMO, any kind of box is going to be superior in terms of ability to deal with heat.

Make a version of Office that works on Linux natively.

Okay you say this but these tools are privately owned. What happens when one day the provider slams them with a 1000% price increase? They can either pay or go back to doctors who detect cancer even worse. It gives these AI companies undue influence and turns a tool into a crutch and an addiction which can be leveraged to drive up healthcare costs and punish providers who don’t play ball perhaps resulting in deaths from doctors in systems that don’t have access to the tool because they’re in a payment dispute with it or they had it but stopped paying for it and patients may not know any of this.

This is a nightmare for human beings who have fought hard to grow smart, to be intelligent as a species and to have educated professionals who have learned to use their brains be instead trained by these machines to stop using their brains, to atrophy them, to become dependent on these systems and worse than before the moment they are removed.

It will be used to attack the wages of doctors and I guarantee that they won’t be compensated with cheaper schooling (doctors need at least 6 years of university plus additional years in training before being able to practice on their own, it’s an immense expense and burden in a time of rising costs and huge debt). Which will lead to shortages of doctors and they’ll be replaced with AI and nurses not up to the task and we’ll be told this is fine. Having access to a thinking human being may become a gated luxury that few insurance companies want to shell out for until after you’ve been evaluated by AI systems several times and only IF those systems deem it necessary. Some AI systems will make mistakes that kill patients and insurance companies will be fine with this as a quickly dead patient is usually cheaper than paying for months or years of treatments and/or surgeries so they’ll have a perverse incentive to push patients towards those systems. Doctors take an oath not to do harm, not all take that as seriously as they should but usually there’s some compassion there whereas a computer system would not care one bit if you’re denied and unlike a doctor won’t fight for you against the insurance companies.

If the UK is serious about blocking VPNs that don’t comply they’ll mostly succeed for the big ones. They’ll get them removed from app stores which will prevent most normies from finding and using them. They’ll apply network blocks to their entrance IP addresses (laughably easy, there are commercial vendors who sell data like this so they don’t even need to invent the wheel here) and make it difficult. They wouldn’t be able to prevent truly determined VPN providers from providing service but the days of $4/month for privacy/torrenting would be gone as the prices would likely be higher and you’d have to do things like mail cash.

Beyond the known IPs, VPN traffic is fairly easy to flag with DPI solutions and could be detected and blocked or dropped by ISPs acting under the law. This could also be used to stop people running tunnels to hosted VPS solutions outside of the country or run by friends from their homes. There are obviously ways around these, disguising traffic, various techniques but for most people they’d give up and either stop browsing porn or cough up their ID. Of course this would create a dangerous state of affairs where anyone using a VPN without being KYC’ed is clearly a criminal, at the very least a suspected video pirate, at the most a dangerous child predator or terrorist.

Additionally the UK isn’t like Russia or China, lots of western CEOs and employees pass through and within its jurisdictions and if a particular VPN is providing service without this they could try and arrest c-suite people or engineering staff associated with it and slam them with jail time. So that’s a problem.

then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function

A little credit here. They’d rephrase the law to only target VPNs whose purpose is offering as a service to the general public (as opposed to exclusively employees and contractors) the ability to connect to a private network with exit points / the ability to appear as if their traffic originates from outside of the UK.

On a related matter they could also require know your customer for all VPNs, require all VPNs keep logs available on request for police inspection and those who don’t are banned. All companies keep extensive logs for corporate VPNs so this wouldn’t present any additional burden to private enterprise but would be the end of anonymous VPN services.

I really don’t think this is more of the spectacle and move on. Not this time. I think Palestine has them spooked because they lost control of the narrative and the best way to seize control of the internet and clamp down on people conveying information they don’t like is starting with things like this.

Probably the best choice if OP is dreading 11. Put it off, hope that in 3 years Linux support has matured even more for their use cases.

MS support has used this software themselves in an edge case where they couldn’t get Windows to active properly.

You have two options here:

1. Enable the extended support (no pay needed with this software but if OP absolutely refuses to run it they can pay Microsoft money directly though it takes work to find where to do that at) and run on that for 3 years until 2028.

2. Upgrade to LTSC IOT using the method they outline at the link there. Again they have two options, one is free, the other is following that guide but paying for a gray-market key (G2a for instance) for LTSC IOT which would avoid running this software on their PC but would mean paying someone some money for a corporate volume key they’re not technically allowed to sell. Which means support until 2032.

No. It’s fine.

Tor uses its own DNS system to my recollection. It’s true there is DNS as part of fingerprinting and DNS leaks are a concern for VPNs (see for example https://www.dnsleaktest.com/) but Tor is not vulnerable to this and it’s more a problem of you’re using a VPN to appear to be in NYC but your DNS shows Phoenix so that’s a big discrepancy that raises the uniqueness of your fingerprint on a VPN and even lets threat actors guesstimate where you actually are. As I said though this is not an issue on Tor.

So understand that the DNS from Mullvad will only affect other programs not Tor. It will prevent say your ISP’s DNS from seeing your video games calling their domains that way. Your ISP can still see you’re connecting to infrastructure for as an example Genshin Impact when you launch the game because they can see where your traffic is flowing and the IP addresses as well as traffic patterns, ports, etc. It somewhat limits the data and visibility they get but there is something called SNI snooping as well as of course the fact they know the IP addresses where your connections go. So it’s perhaps better than nothing but understand the limits of it as they still have a lot of visibility though they shouldn’t be able to see your web searches regardless just that you’re accessing google or bing or duckduckgo as those sites use HTTPS.

Pretty easy honestly.

You do something like remove section 230 (or whatever the EU equivalent is) that provides safe harbor from liability for transit providers like ISPs and content providers like websites that host user submitted content. You condition any safe harbor on the services in question being able to turn over and ID exactly who the offending person was without fail and tie any and every packet to a real world person. You make explicit that not being able to scrutinize content (because of encryption) is not an excuse. Thus someone pirating or sending CSAM over your network via a VPN makes you liable for not stopping them.

As a result this forces ISPs to block all encrypted traffic detected via deep packet inspection. Only traffic encrypted with public key infrastructure that has government issued keys that allow snooping on it is allowed.

Tada. There’s no way around this that doesn’t involve painstaking steganography which can possibly be nailed by AI anyways. Things like embedding a secret message in pictures you send with some pixels shifted to hide the data and your friend having a program and key that can decode it. Or things like taking all the capitalized letters and applying rot13 or something to them with some sort of algorithm but then you need to find a way to make the message intelligible on the surface as if you’re sending constant unintelligible messages you might get flagged and blocked or visited by the police (or the police get a warrant and have your mobile company deploy malware onto your devices and spy on you as a threat because of that).

The only other alternative is using alternative infrastructure. HAM radio type network transmission via a series of hops with similar activists but this wouldn’t be practical for most given the expense and the bandwidth would be awful. Also probably illegal and if they wanted to it would be trivially easy to identify and arrest those running these nodes and relays due to triangulation.

Turns out the whole liberal west with freedom of thought and speech was in fact a lie. Kept around to use as a stick to whack at the USSR with but now dropped at the first signs of serious popular discontent and trouble in favor of total control. Supposed values quickly dropped with no more excuse than “Russians” or “think of the children” or the usual criminals and terrorists.

They can’t stop a really determined actor from engaging in encrypted messaging but they can stop 98% of the population and that’s more than enough to control thought and action of the population.

Hmm how long until Hollywood sees this and demands the same of anyone discussing engaging in online piracy?

Also an interesting thought. What if this isn’t actually meant to get all drug producers or users talking online but the companies? This could be meant to be used as a threat and a sledgehammer against the tech companies. Basically they pass this, let them rack up not reporting anything for months, years, then come and hit them with a lawsuit demanding internal moderation logs and data and threaten to rake them over the coals for thousands of built up violations BUT then they offer to instead drop all that in exchange for them changing their moderation policies in a certain political way to suit the administration and some token reforms to address the law which won’t be scrutinized further if they comply with the political censorship wants.

The billionaire tech class was created by the Internet and are actively damaging the world for their own personal gain.

I hate to tell you but there were billionaires and multi-millionaires way before the internet and they were damaging the world horrendously for greed and personal gain. They even have this system structured around allowing them to do that called capitalism.

So no the internet didn’t create that. Capitalism created that. Just as it created the climate change denial oil industry and the people who made money off of destroying the planet with that and would still be doing so without the internet. Just as it made dishonest press barons who loved Nazi Germany such as Randolph Hearst way before the internet existed and for a more modern example Rupert Murdoch. Just as before that it created incentives to hide and denial tobacco caused cancer or that asbestos caused cancer and other diseases or that lead poisoned us especially children. And on and on. Or the Triangle Shirt-waist fire and thousands of incidents just like that around the world where people are killed in poorly maintained factories kept that way out of greed. Or companies that pump poison into the water and air because it’s cheaper. I could go on forever.

There is no special burner that turns regular DVDs and CDs into M-discs. M-discs were a special product that were special because of the disc itself. This doesn’t answer OP.

Lessons from this were applied when designing BluRay discs which are much more resilient than DVDs.

M-discs are just premium BluRays now. Probably not worth the difference in cost given you can buy two BDs from two different batches for the same price as one M-disc. Just avoid LTH BDs which use quicker degrading components.

M-discs are a meme that were made for and only had relevance in the DVD era.

PIA is run by a sketchy company with ties to zionists. Please do not support them.

If you need a cheap VPN go with AirVPN or even Nord over PIA.

No.

This is where you provide a streaming link file like m3u8 or a link to such a file and watch streaming content provided by others. For example NASA has a channel like that, so does CNN, and various other ad-supported TV network streams. There are also paid providers that require a subscription for example to access content.

Third party anti-fraud database providers that have access to private databases with info on people. Things like public records, private records, data brokers, etc.

Kids whose schools set up their chrome books inadequately and who found a way around the strict controls to watch porn.

• He used to follow (probably still does) open white supremacists and Nazis of the Richard Spencer/Lauren Southern type and got called out for it and privated his follows on twitter. That was many years ago but given he’s never done a u-turn and say started attacking gamergate and other reactionary gamer politics or loudly supporting broad coalition progressive politics I think we can assume he still holds those politics and more importantly he dog whistles and is part of a pipeline of radicalizing young men, specifically gamers into hate.

He also used to follow a ton of open white supremacist NAZIS on Twitter like Laura Southern and that guy who got punched in the face. People screenshotted it and he noticed and privated his follows. That was many years ago. But you don’t follow open Nazis if you’re just some gamer dude (if he was some sort of respectable journalist you could have an excuse of having a newsworthiness angle but he followed them because he liked their posts because he is a NAZI).

I think he’s more greedy than committed to bringing about Nazi goals so is somewhat careful about not exposing too much of that part of himself but he’s part of the white supremacist gamergate to white supremacist streamers pipeline and should be called a Nazi until they day he 1) admits he was a Nazi, 2) disavows that. 3) disavows other Nazi gamer streamers who exist in his “edgelord space” 4) becomes openly progressive and goes out of his way to denounce and attack fascists and white supremacy. Until that day he should be assumed to still be a Nazi.