Oh no by all means do preach. I was just about doing the same about schroot. :p

And, like I said, it’s not that I don’t like it. It was just too much for the rather small usecase I had back at the time. I’m pretty sure if at some point I move to a distro less featured than Debian Sid I’m gonna have to pay more attention to Flatpak and Nix again.

I basically took the general idea from this Ubuntu doc and made som changes. After installing debootstrap, I followed these general steps:

• set up an user for Steam, with adduser steam.
• created a directory to host the “virtual machine” at /var/lib/chroot/steam64.
• used the page linked above to create a schroot profile directory with the chroot data I want.
• used the page linked above to create a schroot profile entry for the chroot, adding steam as one of its allowed users.
• set up an Ubuntu 18.04 schroot with the following command: debootstrap --variant=buildd bionic /var/lib/chroot/steam64 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
• on the host, allowed cross-“host” applications to lauch windows with xhost +local:.
• once completed, entered the schroot as root and added the needed i386 arch and packages for Steam and for bubblewrap / Chrome containerization.
• still in the schroot as root, installed enough packages for a basic graphical environment (basically: a text editor, xnest and xterm; between their dependencies, they’ll take care of most of everything).
• exited the schroot.
• entered the schroot as steam and fired up the Steam launcher manually.

It’s not perfect, there are a few issues (in particular with audio) but once I had the installed schroot ready, I never had to worry about its 32-bit packages ever again. And that was back in… like, 2019 or something. Six months ago I copied to old schroot to my new machine and resumed playing, with no more cost than having to set up the schroot packages and the steam user (with the same old UID) on the new machine.

Here’s a sample of the schroot profile file I’m using. The “steam64.local” is the profile directory, which is basically a copy of schroot/buildd (or of schroot/minbase) with some configurations in fstab and copyfiles to account for eg.: isolating /var/run and dbus, and giving the schroot access to the home directory for the steam user.

Tried Nix once, I liked it but overall found it too complicated to setup and manage for the [counts fingers] three programs I was using it for. Might be worth the while if I need a larger library of programs from Outside, but so far Debian and AppImages have not failed me.

Do they get to stay in the tautology club?

Part of the problem is, sure, that installing an entire arch for a package touches up a lot of stuff… What I did was I set up a debootstrap schroot and added i386 arch to that so that neither they nor Steam touch my main system. Not only did I never have problems with Steam again, but I actually resumed pretty much from what I was when I got a new machine, simply by copying the schroot files over. Didn’t even have to install anything (but the schroot serve on my new system itself).

My understanding is that Matrix is worse than XMPP in basically every way.

Signal is unfortunately as vulnerable to this as Telegram is, as it is a fully centralized service so once the CEO is grabbed is Game Over. Something like jabber / XMPP would be better.

Only after the researchers tried a Bayesian analysis

If I remember my college classes right, this basically means “we invented data to fit the curve we want”, right?

No need to invoke copyright. They’ll just do it to own the libs.

I’m totally fine with something like 540p or 480p, although I guess that’s because my preference is good ol’ TV shows that aired in the 90s or 00s over TV cable, so I’m fine with SDTV quality. And honestly, there’s not much sense in downloading all seasons of, say, Ally McBeal in 4K when you can download 8 full glorious 90s shows with their entire seasons in SDTV in the same space.

Even with “modern” stuff, I’ve seldom found a movie or TV show post 2012 that merits anything higher than 720p. I don’t get why don’t movie codecs get a multi-res options so that for example you can get the action scenes in 1080p, even 60fps if you want, but the melancholic scenes and the quiet drama scenes and the credits in 480p. Would save lots of space without losing quality where it matters.

Oh, you believe law is fair? You sound so cute.

Maybe filing a charge.org petition to raise an alternative service to charge.org. Maybe something in the Fediverse, even!

Because when my IP address changes all my websites stop point to the services

Stuff like no-ip and dyndns exist for that specific usecase.

From an ethical standpoint, in the modern world, not teaching your children how to pirate is being an irresponsible parent. Not just because the “download stuff for free” aspect of piracy, but because piracy is associated to a number of moral and ethical decisions and tenets that also form important ideologies. Getting ready access to information, and being capable to redistribute information, for example, is a key element to anti-fascism ideologies which is why eg.: punk places an emphasis on radio. Being able to fight your own fights instead of only trading on the currency (digital or otherwise) other people impose on you is a core element of both digital and physical sovereignty, which is one of the reasons why stuff like KYC laws or banning of sex workers in economic operations have to be fought against.

Would need a change to eg.: DMCA as well because even if the IP was lost to the public domain, having to crack the DRM to get the game working in the first place would still be illegal.

Heck, just taker the oppoerunity and also redo DMCA from scratch.

If there was a way to do that, i’d be more happily inclined to spend my money on a decade year old game.

True. And this falls squarely on their responsibility. If they set up a Patreon or Kofi something, for example, and make it known, then we can support them directly.

Or they could just publish the information required to do a cash mail / wire transfer. But I don’t know how the fees would work for that with small donations.

Because you are not exhausting parts that actually get exhausted, nor that can actually get a harm to reputation in their industry due to association to the corpo. If you want to go after a corpo, you go after the employees, the physical facilities (they cost money and time to rebuild / migrate) and, if possible, the jobhunters.

I’m talking about exhausting the corpo and damaging their imag

All you’ll be exhausting is an AI. They’re using AIs now to write the DMCA requests, which actually does lead me to wonder if such takedown requests are even legal (an AI can’t, to my knowledge, legally represent the interests of a legal person). But the point is, if you’re thinking of “exhausting a corpo” you’re thinking it wrong.

Devil’s advocate: “If you copy it, the [original] owner doesn’t lose anything…”

They loose the right to distribute it or not distribute it to who they choose.

They already lost that right when they gave their product over to a licensor or distributor. Especially more in some industries such as book publishing.

If morality is tied to law,

How cute how innocent you are.