My work does a weekly “meeting” that’s specifically just a hangout for everyone in the company, just to hang out and talk about whatever.

It’s like a social hour every week, so we can get to know the boss and eachother.

I’ve worked at the place less than a year and there’s been two in person social events so far with everyone, and at least three with my team additional to that.

The culture of the company is clearly important for them, and I’m happy about it. They do what’s needed, and losing an hour of productivity every week isn’t as important as giving everyone the opportunity to connect with eachother.

I was informed by Google music, when they shut that down and forced everyone on Yt music, that all my uploaded data would be erased.

I downloaded it all and sorted it into my personal music on my PC.

May I ask what app you’re using there? I don’t see that on Yt music on Android… At least, I can’t find it if it’s there. Maybe I’m blind.

I’ll have to look into this. I appreciate the heads up. There’s a few things I’d like to put on my library if I can.

Yt music for me because I needed more Google drive storage. I just couldn’t get around it anymore and had to get more (long story explained elsewhere). Anyways… The recommendations are generally trash but it’s free and ad-free with my Google one thing, which I share with my family, so there’s like four or five of us getting it for the cost of one subscription. It’s one of the lowest tier subscriptions too.

I also know the Plex/radarr gambit, and it’s been wild to say the least.

I swear that if there was a unified online video platform, the same way that music is distributed, where it doesn’t matter if you’re on Disney+, Hulu, Amazon Prime video, Netflix, Paramount+, whatever, you just get all the content regardless of platform and the platforms are affordable, then I’d turn all that shit off. It’s not worth the headache.

Music companies are fighting with very little piracy as a result of their openness with people like YouTube music, Amazon music, Spotify, Apple music, etc… Specifically because no matter which one you get, you have pretty much all the music ever. It’s packaged slightly differently per service, but it’s all there. Sure, it still happens, but it’s pretty rare IMO. I hear more and more stories like yours so over, and very few where anyone feels the need to start warehousing music data.

There will always be a market for high fidelity/physical music, and there will always be a few that want their own copies of the music to have, and some of those may get that through piracy, but the fact is, it’s way down from the days of Napster, when just about everyone was doing it.

I’ve long thought that the video media companies should take a page from the music industry and just open up the licensing, but they’ve gone the other way on it. IDK. Seems dumb.

They’re still fighting with piracy and shit, so…

I did/do. I share gdrive stuff with friends and family for all sorts of reasons, bluntly, I don’t trust most cloud storage providers, and I certainly don’t trust them any more than I trust the big G… Not saying that the big G is without flaws, but I haven’t seen any major data breaches from them that were handled poorly, unlike a lot of other providers. Meanwhile, they’re one of the biggest online entities, making them prone to getting attacked.

As far as security of my data from bad actors on the internet, the big G seems to have it where it counts for security…

There’s obvious problems with them willingly sharing data to other organizations, but that’s a risk regardless of who you give your data to.

And please don’t start with the self hosted stuff. I can’t even begin to describe how tired I am with trying to get people to use anything that’s didn’t ship pre-installed on their phone. I have a handful of friends that could navigate a FOSS file sharing system, and a large number more that would need to have their hands held through the whole process every time they accessed it, which bluntly, I don’t have time for.

Plus, everyone in my circles already has a Google account for one reason or another, so they already have some idea how to use it, and access controls are made easy by that fact. I really don’t want to have to set each of them up with an account and guide them through the process of accessing it and everything. They are used to Google drive at this point and I’m not going to change that, since it took so much damned effort to get to a point where it’s actually functional for everyone.

I get stuff like spreadsheets shared with family where they can input stuff like their bills and stuff (for tracking payments and trends), and sharing pictures and video, to keeping backups of important files. I can build a FOSS file depot for that, but once I move everyone over to it, I need to spend even more making it redundant with offsite backups and shit…

I’d rather pay the $5/mo and just not worry about it. I’m on one of the lowest “Google one” plans and I don’t see a reason to upgrade or change what I’m doing. I work in IT, I manage enough already, both for my work, myself and for my family. I don’t want to add to that burden because “big G bad”.

Most of the people around me have long ago given all their data to Google, Meta, Twitter, tiktok, etc (or some combination of those). I don’t think they care about having more data in the “cloud”.

Plus, I can share my Google one benefits like YouTube premium, and YouTube music, with my family, so individually it works out to maybe a bit more than a dollar each per month. It’s truly not a bad deal.

That’s the only pinch as far as I can tell. Some of the people who prefer face-to-face communication, are the bosses. So they force everyone into return to office for their own comfort/convenience/preference…

Those that prefer WFH be damned I guess.

The problem is, you can’t really say no to the boss, you either comply, or find a new job. Not everyone is in a position where they can quickly/easily find a new job that suits them better.

In my experience, the highly skilled long-tenured staff tend to lean towards WFH, but it’s not an absolute. Plenty of skilled people who prefer in-office work… My point is that a disproportionate number of long-tenured workers are finding new jobs when RTO policies are put in place. There’s a lot of highly skilled workers in the market looking for WFH positions. Easy pickings for anyone wanting to hire for remote jobs.

Obviously a lot of the people who prefer in-office aren’t really looking for anything right now, so the job market is kind of crazy. WFH jobs are snapped up and in-office jobs are posted for weeks or months… Simply by allowing people to WFH, a company can pick up some highly skilled talent pretty easily.

As an aside, WFH has saved me upwards of $5k/yr on gas, parking, wasted time on the road, maintenance on my vehicle… It’s quite remarkable.

Fair enough. All the business owners I’ve met have said something to the effect of “my way or the highway” about it. So I personally just aligned myself with a job where the bosses “my way” is the way I prefer.

In my case, work from home.

My current job doesn’t even have a physical office. We’re all work from home. I like it.

I got YouTube music and YouTube premium because I needed more Google drive storage.

Loved isn’t the word I would use.

It’s adequate for day to day background noise that isn’t ad-filled garbage and music I hate.

Honestly, I think this is the biggest reason that music subscriptions are popular.

Nobody cares enough to curate their own music collection anymore, even if it’s entirely legal, it’s just too much damn work for most people.

Unless you have a special interest in music, eg, audiophiles, then it doesn’t matter enough to spend any time on it. As long as you can listen to what you want, when you want, who cares?

Important to note that they don’t stay in FLAC after being uploaded.

Also, I’m pretty sure you can’t do this anymore.

I know some people like this too.

To be fair, a nontrivial number of them are middle/upper management, but it’s not the entirety of the people I know who want this.

The answer isn’t work-from-home, nor is it return-to-office. The answer is: give people a choice.

If you want to work from home, cool, we don’t need to maintain your cubicle, and/or, we can hire more people without needing more office space. If you want to return to office, cool, your space is waiting for you.

A few will retain the ability to switch back and forth, but the majority of people I’ve talked to about it, either want office or home exclusively. Very few want hybrid.

I agree. And that’s problematic. Each company will have different policies, so it’s important to know what companies do with your data, at least for the subset of companies that you actually use.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, corporations treat you like a product. Whether you buy something from them or not. People are becoming the product that they sell.

I usually don’t care very much until it starts to affect pricing for stuff based on some algorithms impression of how desperate you are. That algorithm started with travel (airlines, online booking fees for hotels and stuff) and has expanded.

If I need a new computer because mine isn’t working, I don’t really care that advertisers come at me with ads for their computer products. I need one, they want me to buy one, it’s marketing. No worries.

If I need a new computer and suddenly all the prices for new systems goes up by $100 because it thinks I’m desperate enough to pay that, now I have a problem.

I still don’t like them selling my data, and I’ll do what I can to avoid it, but marketing is going to do marketing things.

As a tech savvy person, it’s already a gaping chasm. Making it wider and deeper isn’t a huge change.

I get what you’re saying, and I think it’s more that the copyright folks want the ISPs to banhammer whole households when violations happen.

First, that’s going to punish a whole lot of people who have nothing to do with the piracy. Imagine having family over for a weekend, and their snot nosed tweenager brings their laptop, gets on your wifi and their torrent program fires up… Come Monday, after they’ve gone home, you try to sign in to your work at 9AM for your work from home job and you have no internet because of a copyright troll.

Second, they already know which subscriber it is. I dunno if you’ve downloaded a car movie illegitimately ever, but the ISP spams your inbox with notifications about “cease and decist” bullshit about it. Usually this goes to the ISP provided mailbox which nobody uses, so a lot of people don’t realize it’s happening, nor care, but they’re already legally required to forward that shit on to you. They know who is doing it. They send those messages and I’m sure have systems that tally up how many of their subscribers get them and at what frequency they are recieved.

Third, ISPs are not the police. They’re literally the messenger that carries your traffic to and from the rest of the internet. They just want to happily continue doing that for the ludicrous amounts of money they’re paid to do it.

ISPs are already bearing the cost of upgrading all their stuff to support the ever growing sets of standards they have to meet to continue being an ISP, set forth by the FCC and other regulatory bodies that they previously stole millions of dollars from promising to upgrade their networks to fiber, then paid themselves insane amounts instead… They want to afford their next yacht and live life in luxury, not be the security guards for some copyright troll with a grudge.

Not to mention “ISP” is an incredibly broad term. You can consider international transit providers as ISPs. If they’re headquartered in the USA, they have to abide by the rules too. That means the “ISP” for the dedicated server farm for your local online delivery place could be shut down, because someone logged into one of their “cloud” desktops to watch finding Nemo on popcorn time, causing the datacenter ISP to cancel their internet. Poof. No more delivery because Jim doesn’t know how to hit “sign out” before setting up his work laptop to be a babysitter for his kids.

The implications of this are huge.

I haven’t read the text and maybe there’s exceptions for service networks and connections. Maybe it’s only targeting residential connections. IDK. But from what I’ve heard so far, that’s not the case. Given that this is patent trolls and government representatives writing this garbage, I doubt they know enough to exclude those groups.

If I’m right on that, and I hope to all fuck that I’m not, and they didn’t exclude service/business networks, then this legislation will be the single most disruptive thing that happens to the internet.

Services like Dropbox and other “cloud” storage systems will jump up and down, going offline regularly because people want to share x movie with so-n-so, and don’t know how, so they dump it wholesale into Dropbox, getting their internet service cancelled.

Even if I’m wrong, and it’s only targeting residential subscribers, it’s still a massive pain point. Work from home will be difficult at best, and most people won’t have internet service regularly. Given that the internet is presently regarded as more important than the fucking telephone, which the government annexed as an essential service when it was the only “fast” method of communication, and we’ve since dogpiled most of what was considered an essential service into the internet (like telephone calls), this really really can’t, and shouldn’t happen.

To continue my analogy to telephones, this is very similar to having your phone line cut because you played a copyrighted song for a friend over the line. Now you can’t call 911. Get fucked. In an era when telephone is the only game in town (before the internet), that would have been completely unacceptable. You got cut off because you called your friend to play him the new hit “enjoy the silence” by Depeche mode over the phone (in 1990), and now you can’t call 911 to get an ambulance for your visiting elderly relative who just had a heart attack, and they die.

gg copyright trolls, you sure “won”.

No. Fuck that. The internet is a critical communications network, not something you get grounded from because time/Warner/Disney (?) got angry about your use of it. Fuck them. Fuck this shit. Fuck the government for even considering it. Fuck everyone who supports this garbage. Access to the internet should be immutable. You can’t cancel someone’s connection because you take issue with how they live their life.

I understand what the copyright holders are doing and it makes me sick. They want to take away your internet because you didn’t pay full fucking price for some bullshit they’re peddling. You’re a source of entertainment at most, stay in your goddamned lane fuckers. You’ll take the exorbitant amounts of money the majority of people are willing to pay for your shit stain of a streaming service, and you’ll like it just the way it is. They want to make us comply through fear of losing access to shit like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all the crap we browse on the internet to bring us some iota of joy, so that the public will be so fearstricken of losing it, they they’ll fork over whatever they need to, in order to do things “legally” and we’ll be screwed into using their service… or else.

It’s a fucking money grab because they’re to chicken shit to prosecute people individually like the RIAA did during the Napster incident.

Either sit down and shut up, or sue the people responsible the way the RIAA did, which already has a judgement on record that you can’t hold the individual who is named as the subscriber for the illegal use of the service they’re subscribed to.

No really… At least one of those Napster RIAA cases went to a judge, and IIRC it was deemed that there was too much opportunity for it to be not the named subscriber that the named subscriber couldn’t be reasonably held liable for the actions of someone else connected to the internet through their connection. Wifi, pretty much guarantees that outcome.

So come at me bro. Good fucking luck you dillholes. Unless they catch you specifically in possession of the illegally obtained products, you’re fine. Just be sure to memorize the “erase everything and catch fire” command for your particular storage. As soon as you get the legal notice they must give you for the lawsuit, run it. They won’t have shit for evidence and the courts will throw out the case, forcing them to pay your legal fees.

And that’s exactly what they’re trying to avoid doing, by punishing people with this legislation. This is essentially a slap suit against the whole fucking country.

It must not pass.

It’s hard to compete when you’re basically a warehouse and your market is the literal population of the internet.

Yeah, microcenter, even if it’s the only computer/electronics store for 100 miles, can still only hold so much, and they only reach people in/around their city at most. It’s not like people are crossing state lines to get to a computer store… Unless you live on the border of your state, I suppose.

Amazon has, at the very least, dozens of warehouses across the country that can deliver whatever it is you want with remarkable efficiency because postal/parcel services have been systematically improving over the past 50+ years.

I’m not saying I’m a fan of Amazon, but bluntly, is it really surprising, in the slightest, that Amazon can out price everyone else?

To me the AI thing is about big vs small.

Steal from a big company, that’s the cost of doing business baby!

Steal from a small business and… WTF do you think you’re doing?

The AI thing is largely large companies stealing from everyone. Large and small alike.

Real-world example: I’m not alone in this, as has been made clear from my time on the internet, but if I saw someone shoplifting groceries from Walmart or something, then, I didn’t see anyone stealing from Walmart. I didn’t see shit. Turn that around and say someone stole some handmade trinket from a booth at a convention, I’m going to go find the nearest security guard.

AI steals from small artists and authors, commentators and you and I, as much as it steals from big businesses. We, the people, don’t have the same capability to fight against someone like openAI taking our shit, compared to a multinational media conglomerate. The AI folks seem to believe that it’s fine as long as nobody complains, then enter agreements with meta and Reddit to buy up all of our written, photographed, and otherwise self-published information to buy everything we’ve ever submitted to their platform.

The big companies are raping us of our intellectual property, claiming it as their own, and selling it to other businesses for fun and profit. We generated all of that content that they sold and they gave us nothing for it. They got it for free, all the while, selling us ads and confusing “algorithm based” feeds of bullshit to try to enhance their bottom line.

We’ve been lied to, stolen from, intellectually and financially raped, and we’ve gotten nothing in return. They took our inherent need to connect with one another, and turned it into dollars in their bank accounts. They’re not providing a service, certainly not providing one worth using… What they are doing is farming us to line their own pockets. Our ideas, thoughts, comments, videos and pictures are their crops that they repackage and sell to whomever will pay for it. This is just the latest in “people are the product” things that gets repackaged and resold back to the people it came from, and we get the privilege to pay to use the AI they develop off the backs of our labor.

If AI wants to steal from big businesses like news media outlets, or companies like Disney, nobody would give any shits about it. Go the fuck ahead. You want to wholesale steal the thoughts and ideas of every person who has ever submitted anything to the internet? Fuck you.

AI is borderline useless anyways, just the hallucinations of a machine that’s doing it’s best to regurgitate the most likely combination of symbols that will make the “success” metric go up. The order of those symbols is entirely based on a long history of what symbols, in what order, followed a real interaction between two flesh creatures. Emulate the response of the flesh creatures, win the favor of the flesh creatures.

It doesn’t think, it doesn’t care, it gives canned responses from a mind bogglingly large dataset of possibilities. The ones that are given the blessing of the fleshy creators are ranked higher than those that don’t. It’s a tape recorder with more steps. A lot more.

Mitigating the loss isn’t the point.

Pirates account for some of the most significant internet users. Pirates generally buy higher tier plans, and actually use them. These are high value clients to the ISP.

Most households have maybe a handful of people, let’s say, 4 on average, where each can be doing around one thing on the internet at any given time. Some of the highest bandwidth activities that they can legally engage in, aside from bulk downloads (games, files, etc), is video streaming. Most 4K video services are streaming at around 25-40Mbps, across four people, that’s 100-160mbps. Accounting for overhead, most households don’t require more than 200mbps.

These are small fry users for the ISP, since presently 200mbps is very middle-of-the-road for available speeds in most places.

Pirates are usually in the 500+ Mbps plans whenever they’re made available, usually at a significant premium for the speed, and for the unlimited bandwidth that they need for their consumption. They’re the prosumers that see the value in the extra speed and cost… And there’s a LOT of them. Whether it’s casual piracy, like watching licensed content for free on some ad-riddled shady site from overseas, to full on data warehouse pirates who download terabytes of data every month… There’s a large number of users that pirate content of all sorts.

ISPs know this, they see the copyright claim notices, and they know how much of their userbase is going to vaporize if something like this passes.

You think it’s maybe half? That they should just increase pricing to make up for it? Yeah, they did the math, if that was the problem, they wouldn’t care, nor spend the money to fight it.

The fact that they’re fighting against this should be extremely telling that this kind of legislation would significantly impact the business. They would lose a huge portion of their clients. They would need to overhaul the business to stay afloat, if they can survive it at all.

You’re comment is reductive and short sighted. You don’t seem to realize what their actions actually mean, or at least, what they imply. ISPs are not fighting for us out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re not charities. They’re profit mongering business people who only care about the bottom line. So if they’re going to bat against the MPAA/RIAA for something that will benefit their clients who are doing things that are clearly illegal, what does that say about how this will affect their bottom line.

IMO, if this goes through, then we’re going to see more than a few ISPs go chapter 11.

Can we ask the question?

… Why are people getting violent at a fucking grocery chain?

Are the customers disgruntled because it’s too expensive?

Are the employees disgruntled because you treat them like wage slaves?

What’s going on at Loblaws?

I used to work grocery before I graduated college, and for the most part, my time there was positive. Granted, that was many years ago, so I have to wonder wtf happened? A nontrivial number of years for me were spent working at a Loblaws subsidiary store. I had not experienced, nor heard of anyone else experiencing violence from a customer. It just didn’t happen.

So what in the glory hole of corporate greed, happened?

Also, why the fuck are body cams needed? Most of their stores have security cameras out the ass. What the fuck could they possibly be hoping to capture by making the employees, who are already on the security cameras, wear additional recording equipment?

Sounds like bullshit to me. This excuse for the extra camera is just blowing smoke up the ass of the civilians to make them think it’s for their protection, when they just want to monitor their employees and what they’re up to when they’re not in front of a camera.

IMO, this is about control.

I prefer security keys. At work I use a yubikey, and I have Google’s security keys for my personal stuff. I tend to use totp as a backup.

For everything not banking, it’s great, I agree. I still prefer my security keys to everything. It’s hard to duplicate a digital key when it only exists on protected storage on a physical device, where that key never exists outside of that physical device.

In case anyone doesn’t know: FIDO works using a pair of asymmetric digital keys, the public key is sent to the remote site, and only the private key can decrypt anything encrypted by the public key. So a challenge (usually some mathematical calculation, not sure), is encrypted by the site/service that is handling the login, it sends over the encrypted request, which is passed, in it’s entirety to the fob. The fob requires a physical activation to process the challenge (usually a touch, but some require a fingerprint). The challenge is then decrypted, processed, the response is encrypted, and sent to the site for login, which decrypts the response with the public key, and compares the result to the result of the challenge that was sent.

There’s no part of this that can really be compromised. An eavesdropper can obtain the encrypted challenge (unable to be decrypted in any reasonable manner), and the response/public key… The public key isn’t useful, and the response is only valid for that specific login because there are aspects of the challenge that are unique per login.

All information in flight is unreadable nonsense. The only unique information to the key that is sent anywhere is the public key, which is supposed to be public.

Totp has the vulnerability of needing to relay the seed, usually by QR code. The only vulnerability there is when you set it up and the seed is shared to you, it can be intercepted. If that seed is stored anywhere that becomes compromised, then it becomes meaningless. It can be mined from an authenticator, or captured in flight.

Both of these are better than alternatives. Email/sms codes can be intercepted, either by an administrator or by an internet relay, or by sim duplication, etc. You know that already.

I don’t hate totp, I just recognize the faults in it.

There’s problems with physical security keys too, mainly in the fact that, if you lose the fob, you’re screwed. So it’s recommended to have a backup. Either in the form of a second fob, which is setup for all the same accounts which is stored securely, or in the form of another authentication method like totp.

Personally, I use a backup FIDO key for my accounts whenever possible. I also have a password manager that can store my totp so everything is in a single vault. If the vault is compromised then I’m screwed though… 90% of my accounts use a password reset email which is not stored in my vault. Only two things are not in my manager: that recovery email login (secured by my Fido key) and my bank (obviously also the vault login).

At work, I use the yubikey for everything that supports it, with totp as backup in my work’s duo authenticator account (duo is also setup to use my yubikey). So it’s all Fido/totp.

The only service I really want to use my security keys with that doesn’t support it, is my bank account… I suppose, also my government stuff, but almost all of that is informational. I can’t really make changes to my government stuff from their webpages. It’s generally just the government telling me things about my tax returns and whatnot (all SMS secured).

I hate the trend of companies requiring an app for 2FA… Something that’s not totp, but similar. You have a specific authenticator app for a single service on your phone only and it’s not great… Obvious examples include steam and Blizzard. Fuck that. I hate it. Go away. Give me normal MFA options… Dick.

I’ve ranted enough. Back to work for me.

Well, I have no arguments with what you’ve said. I think security keys/FIDO tokens should be more prevalent too. Otherwise this is 100% correct and I feel the exact same way.