Age verification is a great success I see. I feel so much safer now with this shit in place so kids can’t watch porn…
The worst was watching porn on spotify…
It has absolutely nothing to do with kids watching porn.
Of course.
*so that the government can say kids won’t watch porn.
Rule 1 of computers that everyone who has taught an ICT class learns - if little Timmy wants titties, he finds a way.
God forbid people teach their kids sex/getting off is a drug and can be abused.
Who taught you sex is a drug? As long as words mean their definitions, it’s categorically not. Plus it’s probably kinda harmful to pile on the stigma already surrounding sex by conflating it with drugs and all the stigma that comes with that.
Hopefully I’m wrong, but it’s kinda giving a nofap pseudoscience red flag to me.
Parents definitely should be teaching their kids about this stuff at the appropriate time, but they should stick to the facts.
First they came for the sex, then they came after the drugs. Now they’re trying to take my rock and roll
I’ve heard music is a drug, too. It was all drugs, all along. We probably should’ve known, honestly.
Did you know that rock and roll is actually a plate of spaghetti?
Spaghetti = Carbs = Sugar = Addictive Drug
Sex on drugs is awesome…
I mean… it is a rush of dopamine and can become addictive. Same as a videogame or gambling though. Not a drug but can get unhealthy if it leads to maladaptive daily functioning.
In Sweden pretty much anybody has Bank Id, an app which is connected to a bank account and which can function as a valid identification.
App belongs a private company, but it’s still trustworthy and everybody can sign government docs with that.
This is how you should do age verification, through a third party app, not like any site will get your id/picture to just end in their DBs ready to be stolen.
Every government should create an app for the online id, I don’t get why this seems so hard to achieve.
Credit cards should roughly do the same, but both of those aren’t “great” for privacy and really exists to make profiles of adults while pretending to negate the need for parents to parent (the only real way to reduce/prevent harms of kids witnessing age inappropriate media). Your ability to do financial transactions shouldn’t be tied to your speech or content you view.
Removed by mod
My point is you shouldn’t present any id to a random site, it should exists a government app that does it for you.
Same as the passport you show at the border and it should not even show name or picture, is should just say if you are over 18 or not.
People shouldn’t be in the need to show a credit card to watch porn.
Let this be a reminder to never turn away from piracy. It needs to constantly be in the background and if any company gets like they always do, then it comes back out. But if we let the knowledge fade away then it’s impossible to rebuild it.
Piracy preserves media.
Piracy preserves art.
Piracy makes sure, that future generations still have access to the creations of humanity.
Data hoarding is a service to the public.
“Keep circulating the tapes!”
It doesn’t take much for media though to parade out the “lil guy and change the opinion of people about how your basically attacking small indie creators”
Or you know you could punish parents for not parenting. Like if kids are watching porn and caught and if it’s actually against some law then go after the parents.
It’s not hard to teach parents how to implement a filtering DNS. But no, countries think they need to be the nanny.
“Protecting children” is just the pretext under which governments can sell increased surveillance. The fact that there are more effective ways they could act to protect children, yet governments everywhere continue to push for ID checks and monitoring online activity, shows that the aim isn’t what they say it is.
Protect from what? I mean seriously. Most of us (guys at least) probably saw porn way before we were old enough and most of us probably didn’t end up as rapists or pedophiles. It’s not a good thing by any means, but it really feels like we’re trying harder to keep sexual material from entering their brains than we are trying to keep them fed, clothed, educated, housed, healthy, loved, and physically safe. Of all the things I mentioned the last seven have a monumentally greater affect on their success and well-being as an adult.
I’m convinced sex is used as a leveraging tool to control society.
🌏👨🚀🔫👨🚀
That’s just the pretext they give to justify it. The real reason is surveillance. Now they have a way to confidently tie your accounts to your individual identity. And most of these solutions use third parties which will then sell that data as well, so now anyone can tie your account to you without you ever knowing.
Even if the government is barred from surveilling citizens in these ways, third parties aren’t, and the government can just buy that information, no warrant needed anymore.
And these laws never stop at porn, it’s drugs, LGBTQ information, etc. and they can always easily add additional things later with little fanfare.
This is it. Theyve been going after encrypted messaging apps for a long time, ig they realized theyre not getting anywhere and figured to just hit it head on.
The internet has always circumvented this kind of shit, just look at TPB. The ones who are getting really beaten up by this is the older generations and the ones lacking technical know-how.
Yep. “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
LOL, wrong on that last point! Gen X and Millennials are generally hot shit on tech. It’s the young folks who don’t have a clue if something doesn’t “just work”. Present company excluded of course. :)
It’s not about kids and never has been, it’s about surveillance of the internet and the death of anonymity.
Going against the parents is impopular and would make the parents vote against you in the next elections.
As a parent, that’s my take as well. If my kids break a law, I should be the one to fix it. Don’t do my parenting for me…
They could just offer a child protection browser where parents could set to child mode and require adult material offering sites to check if user has something like “attention not 18 year old user” in the headers.
Would be way cheaper, I think.
Don’t threaten, just do it. Enshittification must end.
The only reason we have mainstream paid video streaming now is because early Netflix was genuinely better than dodgy, pop-up riddled mirrors on movie4k.to. The convenience was well worth 8 bucks a month. Same for Spotify.
Fast forward 10 years and Spotify wants me to pay 15 €, scan my face and listen to forced podcast ads AND pay extra for paywalled audiobooks that used to be free? Meet my good old friend youtube-downloader, then.
The news can’t easily report on users actually returning to piracy; who would admit to it? And how would you get data on it? Much easier to truthfully report on users who talk about returning to piracy.
what’s even the point of age gating “explicit” music?
“oh no! “Speak To Me” by Pink Floyd has the fuck word in it! can’t let my kids hear it!”
We live in a rural part of Canada that has been left behind by modern times. Mostly by the choice of the residents. I grew up during satanic panic. It was crazy here. My wife and I let our kids listen to anything they want. They always have. They’re 10 and 12.
Their friends often comment about swear words and “sex, drugs and rock and roll” themes of the music they listen too. As an old man I get to regale them with stories of how crazy the Christians were over heavy metal and punk rock when I was a kid, including their grandma.
Now I yell “you’re gonna go to hell!” As a joke to them every time their friends bring it up and I am around.
“you’re gonna go to hell!”
if where all the “christians” go is heaven, then i’d rather go to hell
Just get me the kid bop version
what are “spotify fans”? Spotify paid 150k $ for Trump’s inauguration party, f them. They do not deserve my money
I left Spotify for many reasons including this. They’ve only proven that they do not care about artists at all. I remember before I left, many of the tracks that came up “based on my playlist” were just random AI generated crap.
If I am paying for my account personally, with a card in my name, what more do they need?
Back to Piracy! ✊🏴☠️
Really though? It isn’t necessary. Use Bandcamp, you probably have half your artists covered. The rest - one of those Spotify alternatives: Tidal? Qobuz?
Personally I do selfhost btw. Jellyfin, though I heard of a better alternative specifically for music recently - and forgot the name again 😥 Something lowercase,
like a verb… “normalize” or some such.Navidrome! Thanks @0konomiyaki@aussie.zoneGo to shows, buy the albums from the merch tables and use the events (to the best of your individual ability) as a means to connect with like minded anti-fascists.
That is of course even better. Just wish any band I’m interested in would ever come to play this quiet corner *sigh*
Bandcamp is the best
I have Jellyfin for movies/tv, and gonic for music!
Harmonize?
more like 3% bandcamp availability. i know this is a linux/trans/selfhost/overpayeddev/westeu/foss echochamber, but im not wasting electricity and money on selfhost if a 1tb sd card in my phone can do the same thing offline.
A VPN is a must if you wanna go down this route
Soulseek (and I recommend the Nicotine+ client over the official one) is a fantastic source for all music in all formats, and particularly obscure off-label shit you won’t get anywhere else. You’ll even have some success finding audiobooks there, although this is very hit-and-miss. I wish audiobook pirates would use it more heavily. It’s P2P, like Napster used to be. You’ll have to share something or you’ll get auto-ignored by most users.
RuTracker is a great non-private/non-ratio-monitoring torrent site for music (does require a free account though). I’ve never had a single torrent from there that wasn’t seemingly seeded by a Godzilla’s dick. Obviously it’s in Russian, but there’s really no difficulty navigating around. The only thing you might struggle with is signing up for an account, but just have your favourite translation tool open in another tab 👍
If you don’t mind slow download speeds (from the likes of RapidGator), I enjoy Exystence. It’s a blog that shares link to the latest albums and offers both lossy and lossless versions. Nice RSS subscription to have.
If you do find yourself using RapidGator a lot, don’t waste money buying a sub directly from them, it’s insanely pricey. Instead, get a reseller like Real Debrid, which costs like 10% as much and also covers you for about two-dozen other file hosters. I highly recommend putting as much distance between your credit card and the company as possible, just for safety reasons. Using PaySafeCard is fine, as Real Debrid will never see your details in that case. I don’t have any specific reason to be weary of them, I just don’t trust random/small/hitherto unheard of companies as a rule.
I’ve been using RuTracker for years and it usually has all the music I need. And it has more than music, great site.
All good advice. I used to find a lot of stuff by entering “site:rutracker.org” behind my query in my favorite search engine - don’t know if that still works but I never needed an account there…
Never stopped. Get your own mp3s kids.
Why mp3?
Usually when someone still use mp3s it’s for the ubiquity of the format. Every device that has a USB port handle mp3s. I personally use opus and it’s not common at all.
It’s really interesting when you think about that.
In the video world, we’ve had an arms race all throughout the last 25 years for the lowest possible file size at the best possible quality, with new codecs and containers constantly coming in and out of favour. Hardware playback has always been spotty at best, with little guarantee you’ll get a file to play on any device in particular.
Meanwhile I could rip a CD and put it on even my first-generation MP3 player from the year 1999, and it would work. A blessing we rather take for granted.
I guess there just hasn’t been sufficient pressure to toss MP3 out completely. From an evolutionary perspective, just like the horseshoe crab, it is “good enough” and so it endures.
You just reminded me: A while back there was this slew of articles coming out of the tech press saying MP3 was now dead.
And why did they say that? Because the last Fraunhofer Patent on an MP3 related invention ran out.
Instead of reporting the format was now fully free, those idiots thought that meant it was now dead 😂
I mean, the Spotify CEO invests in AI weaponry being used to murder kids in Gaza so the morally correct thing to do would be to leave Spotify over that.
Source for this?
Not the one who mentioned it but I was curious about this as well and found this;
The streaming services are run by shithead C-suites who think last quarter is the way it’s always been. They forget the only reason most of us use their services is someone more visionary than them made it more convenient than piracy half a generation ago. Let’s remind them there’s an alternative.
I have like 5 alternates I would use before Spotify.
Well bully for you
Even if your not in the UK you should go back to piracy. Steal from corporations as frequently as possible
You’re way better off with your own music collection. That is what I have. I use Tauon music box it handles large playlists well.
Already using Spotify to pirate music.
ReVanced? Or a Spotify downloader?
Just a web-based downloader, I’m patient and simple:p
Zotify
