Probably a plea deal. Plead guilty to a few charges and others are considered closed. If you do not have the millions required to litigate this mess, it is probably the safest option.

I find it very dubious to conflate running a hosting service with piracy, even if piracy was all over it.

All of the people who need to be in jail to protect us from them seem to never go, and they are busy busting people like these guys and Ross Ulbricht who were actually advancing use of technology.

They have done this for years, unfortunately. Admins are the weak spot in Reddit, not the jannies (ironically). My sympathies!

Win 11 is a bag of crap and shit.

It seems to glitch a lot and slow down common tasks. I have never had an operating system drop typed characters in the modern era. It also seems randomly hostile to pre-win7-era software.

Are people just now discovering that Reddit has run on full censorship for a long time?

Reddit is just going to demod everyone who wants to keep it closed and hand the sub over to whatever compliant stooges they can find. It’s what they did to /r/drones.

We all appreciate the gift of fire.

Link rot on YouTube is insane. I have been scraping old demos in case the accounts get reported or zapped for impolitic speech.

It’s going to be difficult to jam outside of the cities. I imagine people are going to set up private wired networks in their neighborhoods, or use Wi-Fi mesh. The good news is that at that point, laws against piracy will be totally moot.

Good idea. It’s probably a niche community, but when people discover it, they will probably download at least a few gigabytes of the early years material.

Yes, frequently. They also like to keep stuff off of Wikipedia with arbitrary “notability” rules. There used to be a great community of Wikipedia critics, but I’ve lost all the links.

Regret is a powerful teacher!

Bet it happens for political reasons. First rule of suppressing revolutions is to cut communications.

I feel the same way about music, which is why I am an obsessive buyer of physical music.

I never understood this until I saw link rot in action. Great projects just disappeared when people forgot to renew domain names or hosting contracts. Others went away when big services like Geocities vanished. Wikipedia and Google censorship took out a lot of others.

Sort of. I like archiving and passing on stuff that is useful and likely to be forgotten. Laws and morals just get in the way. Hail Satan, praise Prometheus, and fuck the police!