Oh man.

Stremio + torrentio plugin + real debrid subscription.

I used Usenet and then torrents for 20 years or so but this stremio stack allowed me to get rid of all that *arr crap, also VPN, and private trackers et cetera. Not to mention a hot, power hungry home server.

Others will be along to disagree with me any moment, but for me this stack is infinitely better.

Downloading and storing stuff doesn’t make any sense in the era of unlimited data.

Oooh.

I’m a borg guy. I’d never heard of kopia. This is from their docs though:

Each snapshot is always incremental. This means that all data is uploaded once to the repository based on file content, and a file is only re-uploaded to the repository if the file is modified. Kopia uses file splitting based on rolling hash, which allows efficient handling of changes to very large files: any file that gets modified is efficiently snapshotted by only uploading the changed parts and not the entire file.

So looks like they do append only.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a chat protocol, and all IRC servers host chat rooms exclusively.

If you know where to go, you can find bots. You interact with them with private messages, commands like "!download ". Upon which the bot will create a DCC (direct client connection) with you and transfer whatever you requested.

Of course, lots of bots will enforce some sort of requirement on you, membership on some web site or some such.

My guess would be braiding, like rope or leather or jewellery.

It was pretty funny when push came to shove and they all pulled their heads in. “Well if I don’t do what they’re saying they might remove me so I have to do what they say for the good of the community”. That’s… not how that works.

That’s not how legal matters work.

Firstly, imposing on someone else’s intellectual property is not “illegal”, because that usually refers to crimes. This is a civil issue, as in the some company is demanding the dev stops or else they’ll sue him or something.

Secondly, it doesn’t really matter whether the dev is “right” or could prevail against a legal claim - because you just wouldn’t bother trying. Imagine you have an ok job, take care of your family, and made this plugin on a whim just because you can. Your days are full of taking your kids to the park, spending time with your wife, playing around with your hobbies, that stuff. Maybe you’re not wealthy, but your salary is enough to look after your family and make your mortgage repayments. Then Haier threatens to sue you, and although you could likely prevail mounting a defense would probably cost you a years worth of mortgage repayments. Maybe you could represent yourself but that might take a years worth of saturdays writing and responding to legal stuff that you don’t really know much about. Bear in mind that there’s no financial support from the open source community.

It just doesn’t really matter whether Haier has a legit claim.

That’s pretty much it, yes.

There’s no central control.

In a practical sense this creates a better experience because if an instance does something like… allow too many bots, or include ads, everyone can just block them

The first part of the sentence you quoted says “subject to the terms of this agreement”. The most salient part of the agreement is the sentence you omitted.

Your claim was:

You’ll have to be fine with Cloudflare having any and all rights to the data transmitted through the tunnel, while you in return have none.

… and you omitted the sentence which describes the rights you have as the user, contradicting your assertion that users have none. If you don’t think that’s disingenuous then I don’t know what to tell you mate.

Cloudflare is a business and if they see more value in selling you out, and legally you agreed they may, then they will.

Exactly. My whole point is that there’s no value in selling you out. Their whole strategy is to garner favor with privacy conscious individuals like your good self.

Acting “antiethical”

You realise antiethical is not a word right?

I would pay you $5 monthly for all the data going through your tunnel

I don’t actually use any cloudflare products. However, I believe this is more or less the crux of our delightful tête-à-tête: how do you propose to derive value from my data?

Surely you have to acknowledge that it’s disingenuous to copy the last sentence of the clause and omit the first sentence that says the exact opposite of the point you’re trying to make.

You’re reading “bad faith” into the vagaries of a terms & conditions document. T&Cs will never say “we will never monetise this data”, that’s just not how T&Cs work, and it’s naive to conclude that the absence of such a statement means that cloudflare intends to monetise the data.

If you look at cloudlfares strategy here, they want to be the sweetheart of everyone who knows what a VPN is in order that they will be selected by those people for corporate projects. Monetising the data that flows through their network is antithetical to that objective.

Additionally I would venture that the data doesn’t really have any value, it would be impossible to use it to build data about an individuals browsing or buying habits.

This is disingenuous.

The full clause says…

You and your End Users (as such term is defined in the Privacy Policy) will retain all right, title and interest in and to any data, content, code, video, images or other materials of any type that you or your End Users transmit to or through the Services (collectively, “Customer Content”) in the form provided to Cloudflare. Subject to the terms of this Agreement, you hereby grant us a non-exclusive, fully sublicensable, worldwide, royalty-free right to collect, use, copy, store, transmit, modify and create derivative works of Customer Content, in each case to the extent necessary to provide the Services.

So to paraphrase, you retain your interest, but assign sufficient rights to cloudflare for them to provide the service you’re using. For example, they can’t give you a CDN if you don’t give them the right to transmit your data.

Friends don’t let friends self host email.

Easy enough to make it work, but maintaining 100% uptime and 100% deliverability is very difficult.