Yeah but for blur tooth in the car it’s no problem for me

128 is perfectly fine / it’s What you are getting most movies you download and way better than FM and most DAB.

I pay for family spotify - we all use it a lot and the Daily Mixes, Release Radar, Discover Weekly playlists are unbeatble. I’ve used Tidal, Deezer, Youtube music before but their playlist creation is nowwhere near as good.

However I do download from Deemix as a backup . For me 128kbp is totally fine for what I need - yes its not the highest quality, but through bluetooth speakers in the car or bluetooth headphones it sounds absolutely fine for me. It might not be CD quality, but its better than broadcast radio, which is perfectly good enough for me.

I beleive its in Cyprus now - but fair point - NextDNS might be a better option in that case

iOS users have plenty of options here too

• AdGuard Pro (paid)
• AdGuard DNS (free)
• other free dns blockers - NextDNS, ControlID etc
• Safari addons
• browsers with blocking built in (eg brave)
• VPNs with ad blockers built in

DNS and VPN blocks will work on most apps and all browsers.

I prefer Asguard dns and then Safari extension or Brave

Yeah Thats the ad supported version - you dont get that once removed.

Yesh - the huge majority of malware in relation to piracy is from people deliberately running ‘setup.exe’ from some untrusted source, ignoring or overriding AV warnings and then wondering what went wrong. Its not from movie files and it certainly not from movie files on Linux.

Kindles can read epubs now anyway. You literally don’t have to do anything.

You don’t have to whine -literally just get on a chat and ask them ‘please can you remove these ads’ - they’ve done it for two kindles for me no charge, no question.

It’s not about a media player ‘attempting to execute random code’ - an exploit is found which lets it run a command that it shouldn’t. You used to be able to jailbreak phones by loading a .pdf file that used an exploit to gain root privileges and execute code. It wasn’t a feature of the PDF reader. It was a bug that could be exploited when a specific string of characters was entered to effectively crash the pdf reader and let it run its own code instead.

A txt could easily contain malware - any file could.

We don’t - but the risk is minuscule compared to windows. The actual chance of finding some working Linux malware in the wild is practically zero.

Much prefer to use FOSS where I can.

Most people absoljutely do not ‘need’ photoshop or MS Office, but are too lazy to try out free alternatives. Sure they don’t offer 100% of the features, but for most home users they are more than enough What are people using Word for at home anyway? Creating a CV once every few years - its not like they are knocking out documents day after day.

Yeah but most of them *haven’t *learned - how to search, how to follow instructions, how to read, how to seed, how to install and adblocker, how not to get malware…

because idiots need somewhere to ask ‘what exactly is seeding’ for the 100th time

Well, the sub had gone downhill recently anyway - endless memes or posts about ‘what is seeding’ ‘what is a vpn’ ‘what is plex’ or just idiots who got an ISP notice and think it means they are going to jail.

Heh - except it’s more like a a couple of minutes

You know that ebooks exist too right?

This is silly - the delivery medium is irrelevant.

VPNs create enough friction for authorities to stop them

Its not ‘authorities’ you are hiding from when pirating, its just copyright trolls. All they do is scrape IP addresses from torrenst and automatically send a notice to the relevant ISP. If that IP belongs to a VPN provider, the compaint will never reach you.

Exactly - snd yet people still claim their ‘VPN ratted them out’ - it didn’t - it might hve failed, or the user never turned it on, but the VPN provider didn’t get a copyright notice from Disney and forward it an ISP.