Of course he did. He's a fucking baby and .world is a toxic shithole. lolol
PTB!
I'd like to laugh, but when I was really new I probably would have asked the same question. I remember back in the day, it was fucking hard for me to even figure out how to work with torrents.
Hmmm, I never really thought about it. Not sure if it would be worth the effort or just me screaming into the digital void in a slightly more organized format.
I just like digging into weird corners of digital/hacker/pirating history and tossing it out there.
And I figure there's probably a lot of younger Lemmy's around here who never got to see the wild shit from yesteryear that this whole scene is built on. :)
No full source. I couldn't find a good article that wasn't just police facts, so I had to write it myself. Info came from Wikipedia, CNN reports of the arrest, and a book (unfortunately again, pro-police) that I read, called "CRACK99 : the takedown of a $100 million Chinese software pirate." (available on annas-archive.org)
All of them painted him as some kind of evil on society, so I just had to write my own, more sympathetic article. I was really hoping to find some in depth pro-pirate articles on him, but nope....
Fair point. I don't mind paying for something that's worth it. But way too much stuff is just becoming bloated and expensive.
I was actually paying $7 a month for Microsoft Word subscription. At the time, having access to it was helpful, and my workplace/school used it. But fuck that noize, I canceled that today too.
LibreOffice all the way for me, baaaby!!
After Adobe announced yet another subscription price hike recently, I finally decided to walk away for good. I’ve used Adobe products for over 30 years; I was a professional graphic designer before I retired. But enough is enough.
Modern versions of Photoshop and Illustrator are cloud-locked and subscription-only, which makes them difficult to pirate or even just use offline. Older versions are still out there, but you have to dig through crack installers, run scripts to block network access, and constantly deal with system-level headaches, especially on a Mac. Maybe it’s easier on PC, but for me, it just wasn’t worth the time or risk.
And honestly, I’ve had enough of Adobe’s monopoly. I didn’t even feel like looking for a workaround.
So today, I switched to different software that does most of what I need. And I wiped every trace of Adobe from my system. No subscriptions. No lock-ins. From now on, if I’m going to pay for software, I want to own it. And it better run whether I’m online or not.
Never again.
It just so happens I have one of the first ones from 2005. It's been in my garage for 20 years. Fired it up as I read this article, and it still works:
From the article: "Personal computers functioned differently in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike domestic computational technologies such as video game consoles or pocket calculators, the Apple II and many of its competitors were not designed as proprietary or closed systems. Indeed, the entire appeal of a personal computer was that it put computing power directly in the hands of users. It was essential that users be able not only to program on their machine but also to save and distribute the work they did."
It needs to be like this now!
I was in my early teens in the 1970's and 1980's. My family was way too poor to afford any of the computer. The only people in my hometown who had this stuff were wealthy. So I think this authors use of the term "relatively inexpensive" sorta downplays how much that shit cost in the day.
The first actual computer I ever saw or got to play with was a RadioShack TRS-80, that my then-gf's dad had. The 1977 cost for that was $599 USD. Adjusted for Inflation, that's around $3,000 USD in today's dollars.
In-depth article about how shadow library sites like LibGen came to be and why they matter.
Breaks down the history and shows how helpful LibGen is for regular folks and us amateur scientists who just want to learn without hitting paywalls.
I realize this is an older article from 2016. But it's just so good, I had to share it in case some here aren't familiar with her. Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan and she's the person behind Sci-Hub, a library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways.
And she's my personal hero. :)
Not me. Never heard of the guy. I mean, it's nice that I'm on your mind all the time, but brah, calm down. Not every single person who disagrees with you is me or some "alt account" of mine. lmao
What’s even stranger to me is that so many people still think I’m a troll, even though most of what I’ve said isn’t even controversial in our modern times. A lot of the hostility for me goes back to the 2024 presidential election, when I openly supported voting third party. No one would even blink an eye about someone saying that stuff now.
Looking back, my comments were pretty tame compared with a lot of what people say now. But some people still treat my support for a third party as proof that I supported Trump, which was never my position. At this point, I mostly find it funny.
Two years ago they tried to bully me off of Lemmy. But I'm still here. lol