Privacy Workshop # 5 - Don't Be A Rube, Be A Pirate

mindhawk (52)in #privacy • 6 years ago

Years ago I came to the realization that the human species has Solved(with a capital S) the problem of Copying.

I grew up with 8-tracks laying around, records and needles I was never allowed to even touch, cassette tapes where I had to flip it over in the middle, and CD's that were always getting scratched. As a musician, for many years into my adulthood I still dreamed of being the recording artist superstar as I noticed that every year there seemed to be fewer and fewer of them. At the same time I noticed there were fewer and fewer live venues for local musician to play at and even the fledgling record companies the rich kids in my college town started for themselves went the way of the dodo bird as the Itunes Music Store(tm)(sic) became some sort of centralized music marketplace.

When I got my certs and started repairing apple computers for a living, I noticed that the people who purchased songs at the apple music store had a lot of trouble maintaining music libraries on those early ibooks and powerbooks, that when the hard drive crashed, people got locked out of their itunes, or they had files that for some reason were the correct size of mp4 but for some reason couldn't be 'played on this computer.'

Around that time netflix became the next big thing, and I noticed that my favorite shows that I finally had the chance to rewatch as if it were finally the fullness of times, were edited and boxed in such a way as to become unwatcheable or shadows of their former selves, and here I'm talking about the X-Files. And the caching. (I also took many, many support calls about netflix going slowly even though I was able to test the strength of the complaint-ants connections to confirm that it was not their connection but netflix itself.

The pattern is, that when these big business corporations with more money than the holy trinity set forth to create a centralized repository of culture, they always ruined it. They never deliver 100%, not even 75% if you ask me.

Further, Netflix and the apple music store are ultimately centralized repositories that simply Do Not have everything you might want to see.

Two movies I find very important, Hamlet 2 and The Age of Stupid, are simply not available for sale or download in the world right now. I had a chance to show them to my family and then realized we would have to watch them off my usb drive, despite the roku, apple Tv, netflix and who knows what other content subscriptions he had.

In this case, my strategy of maintaining my own collection was key to being able to relay my culture to my family.

I was able to do this because, and this is maybe the worst kept secret in the world, I am a pirate.

Let's run down the list of reasons why corporate central repositories of culture suck, see if we can step back and stare at all of the reasons at once.

-selection sucks

-availability depends on the network, which is not in any case a given(remember I have taken over 10k tech support tickets, let me assure you, the internet breaks...but im pretty pretty sure even the queen of england knows that at this point)

-centralized distribution is a huge burden on the network, if everyone wants in the country wants to watch a live stream of the superbowl, guess what, no one can.

-i'm not allowed to store the content for later viewing, i must use my bandwidth over and over again, and i must ask for it over and over again, and i must continually be in a place where i have internet and the money to subscribe; in other words for me to watch my favorite content truly on demand and not just in word only, then there is a fairly long list of stipulations that are out of my control. And when I am disconnected from
the internet and lost my job due to the incompetence of others, guess what, that's when I really want my favorite content to cheer me up.

-these centralized repositories now also KNOW EVERYTHING I WATCH and WHEN I watch it and guess what, now my viewing schedule is on my permanent record for people in the future to maybe move me onto different lists of people who, idk, for instance watched True Detective #1 and might actually believe the evidence of what happens every Friday night on Epstein's island.

-steem users should get the next one really well, I am not allowed to curate the content. Netflix curates the content. Apple curates the content. They ultimately decide what will be available for me to see going into the future, and what will not be. Old episodes of the A-Team? Politically inconvenient for the proles to watch. Person of Interest? We'd prefer people not notice our supercomputer AI predicting their every move, so we just can't afford that one this year.

-this is another big one, it breaks my computer. When you have a song with Digital Rights Management(DRM) it is actually broken, the song is encrypted and can only be un-broken with their service. When you stream a video, all of the bits that make the video are on your computer, and could be easily stored for later viewing, but the programming of netflix breaks the computer such that this obvious, tier 1 functionality is unavailable, as if they neutered your computer and you must Unbreak your computer to get your computer to do what it was designed to do.

-artificial scarcity, there is no shortage of movie information anymore. It is plentiful, our machines can store and copy it easily and with hardly any burden until you reach a certain scale. But if you go out looking for that one beatles song, it only legally exists in 1-3 central repositories, controlled by 1-3 corporations. And those corporations are middlemen, lawyers, accountants and advertisers who are raking money hand-over-fist while the content creators generally end up with only 'monkey points' as eddie murphy calls them.

When you look at these all together, the way content is legally provided in the United States is anti-computer, anti-artist, anti-art and pro-surveillance.

The intersection with surveillance is where Privacy Workshop gets involved, the rest of this is just moral justification.

Capitalism always wants to say that you have to pay for everything, but then it always turns out the corporations themselves didn't pay their way, for their pollution, for their workers who get hurt, for their generally detrimental effect on society and culture....and when the FBI decides to go trolling for people to put on some list because they watched some movie that means they know something they shouldn't, do we get paid for making their jobs easier? Do we get paid, or even notified, for being in their surveillance database of all movies watched by all people? Do the marketers who use Max Mind to determine which ads to send to your address give you money for making their database more effective? No on all counts.

But when it comes to the reproduceable works of artists, it is especially egregious. If I tell a friend about a band and he buys their album, do I get a cut of the advertising budget? Nope. If I maintain a collection and the entire world collapses and in 30 years I am the only one with a listenable copy of Phish's New Years Eve 2000 concert, is anyone going to throw me a parade? Nope. (well in this case maybe lol)

The fact is, fans do a lot of work for artists, probably a lot more than the lawyers, accountants and marketing people do. And these lawyers, accountants and marketing people are frequently an arm of the police state.

Do you know how they catch people who are 'stealing' content? They share it themselves! They break the very law they are trying to enforce in order to entrap people in such a way they can prove they downloaded it under the wrong circumstances.

How screwed up is that? Very. And the same people doing all of this, breaking the tech, spying on people, greedily hoarding all of the artists' earnings are the same ones who get all high and mighty and self-righteous claiming that pirates are Breaking The Law.

This aspect also illustrates that the fabled hobby horse last stand argument of anti-piracy types, 'You are stealing!' is absolutely nutso. If it is stealing they why are the record and movie companies giving it to me!

And if it is stealing, then after all is said and done, WHY DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR ORIGINAL COPY? If you accused me of stealing a stick of gum from a store, the gum better damn well no longer be there lol. If I took a copy of the gum, it would be a whole different type of crime with a whole different type of word.

Anyone who claims that filesharing is stealing is simply a liar and a simpleton to whom the meanings of words simply doesn't matter so much as their sense of their own orthodoxy.

They are truly in the category of people who are allowed the think because they do not know how. (and I hope this stings them somewhat when they read this, because I am done letting these dopes take the moral high ground.)

I hold and assert that it is a fundamental right of sentient beings to freely share, procure, preserve, curate, collect, listen to, and watch whatever files they want at any time and by any means using any technology, which does not affect the privacy or personal rights of another person. So if someone shares a file with you, you can have it but you can't break into their computer to take copy it from them yourself without their consent. Once an artist's file is in the wild, Metallica has no right or grounds to try and take it back or erase all the wild copies of which they disapprove. (see note 1 below for important exceptions)

The stance of an artist is, "I have created something wonderful that the world needs." This stance, to be consistent with the entire concept that you are an artist and that the world DOES need your work, precludes hoarding your own work and putting it under lock and key. If an artist restricts access to their material, I am forced to think that they aren't really an artist and are more of a burlesque stripper covering their nipples with pasties, then running away giggling once the audience is aroused. The stripper did not want to have sex with you because she isn't really a prostitute, in the same way the artist hoarding their own work is not really an artist.

As a musician and comedian, I have adapted to this attitude. I no longer want my work in the itunes music store so that all the rich kids in high school can brag about it to each other. I do not want the films I write to end up viewable only on youtube or only on netflix. I don't want any of these middlemen profiting really at all, because I have just seen over and over how these types treat artists and I don't want to feed them. I see them as a danger to my work, and sanity.

The goal of the technology should be to resolve all of these issues, and steemit is a breath of fresh air in this regard. I have entered, with happy results, the steemit open mic and seen how the number of submissions has grown exponentially. This model where someone says, hey post your stuff here, we will watch it and the audience will upvote it with crypto-coin, is revolutionary to the entire art world and the world is responding. The people would rather watch 120 mediocre recordings of real people they could interact with on steemit than another 10 albums of elite globetrotting 'artists' who are ultimately more media creations than people.

You may notice that over the last few years fewer and fewer artists in the united states got recording contracts, and more and more of those tend to be the 'new world order'(from 8 mile) or TSwift(sic)(tm) variety, their parents bought them their career and that's their big secret to success that they never reveal. (only it finally came out about TSwift, much to my joy...)

The best way to check this? Have a look at Thepiratebay.org, goto 'top 100', select 'Music' and then check out who and what are there. In the top 100 there are only about 5 albums total(and frequently one of those is still Michael Jackson's, which is no easy feat post-mortem...)

The rest are radio hit singles of varying quality, frequently mumble-rap but whatever. The fact of the matter is, there are so few slots for the Record Deal With A Label avenue of success that just forget it. Even someone as skilled as Ed Sheeran would not even be known if Jamie Foxx had not by some miracle been at an Open Mic in LA and invited him to live in his mansion to record. Think about that.

All that is left for the millions of other singers, songwriters, guitar players, bassists, piano players and drummers is the DIY route.

And guess what you need in order to DIY?

you won't have money to buy stuff on itunes, so if you don't find a way to listen to other artists without paying for it, you will be hopelessly handicapped in your field
you need a personal computer and internet connection where your intellectual property cannot just be appropriated by whoever is spying on you, and if someone does steal your stuff, you are going to have to have records of your work that are organized and intact and not tampered with
you are going to need to secure your passwords and keys to all of your various media accounts so that no one can just take your stuff and say it was theirs, or just destroy your work to be mean.

In other words, you are going to need privacy and the operational skills to maintain it.

And you know what else?

you are going to have to work on your skills, compositions and recordings for YEARS without compensation, distributing low quality demos and open mic recordings that these TSwift type 'artists', and their record label functionary hangers-on, are going to sneer and scoff at. (believe me, I can testify that most Americans are unable to listen to a demo recording without disgust, they feel they are too good to have to hear anything lo fi at this point, which is indicative of a widespread mental illness in my opinion, one where people starting out are basically kicked repeatedly in the teeth for not being rich and perfect. I truly cannot stand this attitude. I could listen to someone play guitar over a tin can and string telephone and tell you if the person can write a melody or not, and most of what I hear on the radio is absolute garbage.)
melodies are codes. they can be easily stolen, the content can be changed, and next thing you know the most popular song at every cafe in china is your protest song rewritten as an anthem of the People's Liberation Army(sic)(tm). It could happen.
you are going to need recording tools like protools and ableton, and guess what the person recording their first song doesn't have? (among many things...) They don't have 500 bucks for recording software, which they may lose the license key to anyway if they are not careful.

There are two sites that I use for almost all of my content:

https://eztv.it
https://www.thepiratebay.org

and then one site I trust for information related to these sites:

https://www.torrentfreak.org

Neither of these sites is reputable, I do not know who operates these sites or why other than for clickbait booby links, but I am suspicious on a deeper level. I would not be surprised if intelligence services had taken over both of these sites years ago. I know for certain that the founders of the pirate bay hate the current iteration(and believe the internet is lost and is now a monster...) and that novaking and his team were scammed out of the eztv domain about 3 years ago and no one really knows who these very elite scammers were who tricked the registrar with social engineering. I kindof hope these are just people who want click revenue from cornball titty ads, but I am in no way sure that's' all they are. All I know for sure is that I haven't detected any virus activity on my media downloads, although it is clear that a risk exists in applications.

A virus released hidden in the first DVD Screener pirate download of the new star wars movie(which is awful enough as it is, a virus might actually improve it or help us eradicate it from history...) could be a real global problem. The trouble with viruses like that is they would have to affect all platforms, and that just isn't a thing. Idk, maybe if it bricked all intel processors...but see, even the NSA and Putin know that if they released a virus on pirated movies that there is a decent chance on of the teenagers that lives in the house with them would get it lol. So there are reasons to think this is unlikely.

But still, let's examine how we can pirate files.

Use separate computers. One for downloading content, browsing any website you want, running pirated media software like ableton and then use another separate one for posting to steem, banking, emailing, and social media. Do not do risky surfing or downloading (especially teh pron!) on your steem uploading, key holding, self-identifying, secret keeping machine, which should be a Linux system that would suck at those things anyway. Anyone who doesn't use a macbook pro for their main mediea player baffles me, but to each their own. Also I stopped upgrading at El Capitan since Sierra intergrates with 'the cloud'(you know the one the russians routed through their FSB headquarters for 10 minutes...)
Store your huge collection(mine is over 1TB now) on a separate external drive. I have cowboy bepop, firefly, the entire king of the hill series, the entire larry sanders show, etc on an external usb 2.0 drive from costco that cost $60 and a second one i back that up onto. Don't watch anything off of your collection drive, it's motors and platters are preeeeeccious. Copy them to your local drive.
Install SSD drives on your computers to extend the length between hard disk crashes. Hard disks will always crash, but ssd's are lasting a long time now. Platter drives have a lot of moving parts, SSD's are essentially like ram, no moving parts and they are faaaast. The two computers I use both cost $200 used and I paid cash so there is no apple store etc record that they belong to me. The replacement cost of my computers in dollars would be around $700, but the reconfig time, re-entering all pw etc, whew. That would suck. But then again, who would steal 5 year old computers from a guy that looks like he would defend them to the death and could give a good chase? (lol)
Use VLC media player and only VLC media player.
Use Transmission to download torrents, use magnet links.
Only run Transmission when your VPN is active in a country that does not care about piracy like the netherlands, sweden, or norway.
If you run windoz(don't, but if) you are going to want to scan the files before you doubleclick them. When I see evidence of a doubleclick media file that affects linux and mac, I will change my m.o. but I have not seen or heard that yet. This is why two separate computers, even if I get another one of those israeli malwares on my mac, I can wipe this easily and don't have to reenter passwords. I reinstalled my mac 4 times in 2017, and it didn't take that much time really. I forgot my disk level encryption password on my linux system after I had entered the pw's, happens to the best of us, that was annoying. But I learned my lesson.
Use Malwarebytes about once a month or if anything strange is happening on your system.
Organize your own files. Itunes is the bane of everything reasonable in this world. If you use it, it will double copy everything and then even if you do organize your stuff, it will all be borked when the new .1.45.67 version comes out tomorrow. Itunes can kiss my ass. I hate Itunes. I organize my own folders. Some artists I throw all in one big 'rock' or 'soft rock' folder, others like LCD Soundsystem I keep in their own folders. I have a 'masters' folder where I put the artists who truly intimidate me as an artist, like Rufus Wainright or The Tallest Man on Earth. I have a 'chill' folder that is generic house music, and an orchestral folder that has things like Explosions in the sky. I have 100gb of music that i can play, truly, On Demand(not tm)(not sic) and that stored in two locations, and it is constantly being added to and modified. If I hear a song in my chill folder that isn't chill enough or irritates, out it goes. No skin off my back. After years of curating this folder, I can listen to that folder alone on random play for basically days a time if I had to. When I'm writing, I can play wordless music that soothes me and helps me get into a trance. My collection is curated to suit me and my life, not someone else's concept of software design or marketing, not to make ads pop up in my player to suit some marketer's idea of what I should buy next. It is my personal collection on my personal computer.

I download everything to my downloads folder, and things like Samantha Bee I will watch once then move to the trash, but things that I downloaded for my collection get tested then relocated to the approprate place in their collection.

This seems like a lot of work, but then again, when I feel like watching a specific episode of Firefly, I could have it playing in less than a minute from where I'm sitting right now. Or the famous Chuck Jones cartoon Riki Tiki Tavi, or Adam Curtis's Hypernormalization, or the best documentaries ever made about the Assassination of JFK at the hands of LBJ, George HW Bush and the Zionists.

Last but not least:

Throttle your torrenting for best results. If you are the only one home on a broadband connection, 500kb is appropriate. Even over a VPN ISP's get irritated and interfere with your traffic if you are downloading over 500kb of something they can't see. VPN use should generally look like you are a work from home employee downloading pdf's and using exchange lol. If other people are on the network, don't piss them off. Throttle to 200-300kb. That is more than enough. The torrenting way is you say, I want to watch this some time in the next week. The first time you watch it, it is not necessarily On Demand(tm), but once you have it, it will be available on demand for a very long time. That is the tradeoff, which I think is totally worth it. Throttling settings are in, you guessed it, the Transmission settings. Also, unless you are on your own connection, it is best not to seed so that you don't put any liability on the person whose name is on the connection and also uploading is more taxing on the network as the connections are not assymetric, you get less upload data/sec. When I can I try to seed at minimu 5kb/sec. see note 2.

If you implement these 9 steps on top of the other suggestions in #1-#4, even someone stealing your computer will not get your keys, will not be able to erase your work, will not be able to steal your work and nothing on any of your computers will be vulnerable to anything besides an actual computer malfunction, for which there is really no mitigation besides idk not shaking it, not letting it overheat, not spilling water on it.

As a repair tech, I can tell you another rule that I follow even though it isn't related to privacy, but it is part of securing your personal computer:

MINDHAWK'S LAW OF COMPUTER REPAIR - Few people have to repair their computer who don't set drinks next to it, who don't leave it hanging off the edge of tables(especially not next to the pool or the tire of a soon to be moving automobilie...) and who gives the computer more air space when the fans kick on. At the repair shop, you see people who do not follow these rules all day long. Frequently they are not only careless but are in the TSwift class of society I might add...

Also, there is a really sweet piracy addendum to the other laws of privacy set forth in #3, I will spare the extended titling though:

The NSA and other state agencies who run bulk collection have to filter and throw out all the torrenting content because it is useless. Every added torrenter makes their job more annoying, just as every VPN user does. Also, if you want to run torrents while you do highly secure things, anyone sniffing all your packets is going to, guess what, be annoyed.

If you follow these philosphies, instructions and guidelines and adjust youself to live in the age of computers, where copying is easy, but being original is not, then you will be able to acquire those aspects of your culture which you need to remain relavent in your chosen field, you will have the tools you need to do your work even if you are just starting out. You will have a collection curated to suit you that serves you, and you will have the means to create without the fear of who knows who looking over your shoulder trying to actually steal your best and most original work for their own use. You will have 2 smoothly running systems, each with their own categories of use, and you will be reasonably assured that you are not compromised by script kiddies(or worse) and their scummy .mpg files.

And you will become about 10x more annoying to people who want to encapsulate your brain on their f(&(& spreadsheets.

BONUS LINKS:
TPB Top 100: https://thepiratebay.org/top
Reason: https://thepiratebay.org/search/reason/0/99/300 (see note 3)
Ableton: https://thepiratebay.org/search/ableton/0/99/300
Final Cut: https://thepiratebay.org/search/final%20cut/0/99/300
Cowboy Bebop: https://thepiratebay.org/search/cowboy%20bebop/0/99/200
Firefly: https://thepiratebay.org/search/firefly/0/99/200

SPECIAL TREAT:
Riki Tiki Tavi: https://thepiratebay.org/search/rikki%20tikki/0/99/0

note 1: of course cp or revenge p and other edge cases would not be included in this as it violates the rights of another person.....

note 2: One day, maybe in another life, I will reward the people who seed to me. I try, however to do this with my art, a lot of which I give away. ie my soundcloud has 1000+ listens and no one has payed me for those either. If I had a dollar for every laugh I have gotten, well, that would be a whole different story lol.

note 3: Cool developers like Reason know that people starting out can't afford their stuff, so they truly don't care if you pirate it so long as you buy once you become more successful. If you don't buy after you become successful, you will have a difficult time getting to heaven in the afterlife.

bonus note 4: since we are talking long term future as relates to morality, despite the open season on copying the content of creators, there is an absolute iron law against stealing the instruments and tools of creators(i.e. guitars, paintbrushes, computer systems used for editing...). There are special hells created for only those people who steal instruments from musicians, and if I were you, I'd be afraid, Very Afraid, of such a fate.....

Homework:
a. organize all of your mp3's into a music folder, organize by category and create large random play folders with tunes of similar moods
b. organize all of your video files into folder, separate by category, copy to backup
c. pirate an application you have always dreamed of having but can never afford, only install on your less secure media system
d. promote an artist that you like to a friend and note how no one from the record company shows up to give you money

Free your mind, and the rest will follow. - En Vogue(although I really really doubt that's who thought of this awesome sentence first but whatever, credit where it's due...)

Questions and comments welcome. Privacy Workshop is just that, tech support questions will be addressed within reason.

Time taken to create this post ~8 hours. This was a full time day of writing, which I enjoyed mightily. I have wanted to write these ideas all down for a long time. These processes are the result of many years of fine tuning a system that works for me, so that I hope you can pick and choose what works best for you.

Please share widely, resteem and reflect back to me as much as it helps you so that, and I know you've heard it before, THE GOOD VIBES GET A LOT STRONGER!

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Peace, Harmony, Reason!

#privacyworkshop #thepiratebay #freedom #anarchy