That was a while ago, when they changed the license for Terraform. Meet OpenTofu!

They already do to an extent, and they're ratcheting it down tighter because just selling simultaneous streams doesn't prevent people from sharing accounts.

I refuse to give Disney any money, so I'll use Netflix (And their recent crackdown) as an example.

Netflix's typical plan is 2-streams simultaneously, but unlimited devices. This makes sense to me, because my family has it installed/working on nine devices, (parents' phones, parents' tablets, two TVs, two laptops, and a Playstation) but we almost never have it running more than once at a time. I think the last time we had two running was five months ago.

Recently Netflix on my wife's iPad started complaining and told her she needs to login from our "home network" at least once a month or Netflix will cut her off. She only ever watches Netflix on her iPad when she's away from home (Waiting in the doctor's office, on vacation, airport, etc) because when she's home, we have it on the TVs. Netflix doesn't care. Disney doesn't either. It looks to them like she's sharing my account because we don't both login from the same IP all the time, and apparently roaming is only good for a few weeks.

I wish this were the case for me.

MOST of what makes it through my spam filter (But is spam) is bullshit McAffee, WebRoot, and even CoinBase invoices from hacked GMail accounts. I know it's from GMail because it passes their SPF and DKIM verification.

Or hacked Yahoo accounts pretending to be a now-dead relative. It passes because their servers sign and send it to mine, making DKIM and SPF checks almost useless.

Yes, quite a few do, actually. I've worked at several. It stacks up pretty quickly, especially in clustered and redundant setups.

They have a "free" tier now, they didn't used to. They added it about the time they locked out downstream. Any system built in this free tier must be registered and attached to RH's CDN, and communicate with it or you will not get updates. It breaks yum/dnf.

Oh, also it's only for Developers. If you're a company, organization, non-profit, or anything else, you have to talk to incredibly aggressive and pushy IBM sales-droids, who do not negotiate, but will be happy to low-key threaten your deployments until you sign the contract. The only way to get to less than $350 per install is if you're paying them about $50k/y for Enterprise licensing.

Spam uses English words, mostly. JavaScript uses variables and various kinds of brackets and punctuation.

Google it sometime. It's sadly impressive.

Then use something like LibreElec or CoreElec rather than building your own software. I haven't had to rebuild a front-end box in the last couple of years.

If it works for you, you like the performance and features, great! More power to you.

When I started with CoreElec, I had an old Chinese Android TV box that was nearly unusable (4-core, 1GB RAM, 8GB flash, Android 7). It took almost 3 minutes to boot, lagged just scrolling the menu, CPU and RAM utilization were constantly over 80% and it stuttered randomly. And that was after installing vanilla Kodi for Android on it. The wife and kids wouldn't even use it. After I figured out how to reboot to the prepared microSD card and CoreElec, it was like a new box. It booted in 35 seconds from connecting the power, CPU and RAM use dropped to about 20-30%. I did have to follow instructions to setup the remote, but everything else Just Worked.

After following instructions to get the Jellyfin plugin installed and setup, the family loves it. Now they whine when Netflix or Prime on the TV takes minutes to start, doesn't play the new "live event" video (cough), or lags as bad as the old Android apps did. Kodi hasn't given us a single issue in a couple of years now. Plus I don't need an internet connection to watch local video files.

Without even looking, I will state that the warrant specified "ALL CAMERAS", I guarantee you. It's boiler-plate verbiage based on overly broad affidavits that cops have recycled for decades. The judge rubber-stamps it, the cops take everything, then (theoretically) discard what's not relevant post-case.

Ring won't fight a subpoena and sure as shit won't fight a warrant. It's vastly easier to have an intern dump everything from the account onto a thumb drive and ship it off. If they get sued by the customer (Yeah right), all they'll do is go to court--the same court that issued the warrant or another, it doesn't matter--show the warrant/subpoena and say: "we complied with a lawful request." The judge, who rubber stamps plenty of overly-broad warrants themself, on the regular, will say "case dismissed, with prejudice". About the only way this goes against the cops is if customer is loaded and spoiling for a fight.

Everyone keeps treating this kinda behavior like it's a bug. It's not. It's a feature of the system.

True. Personally I've had great success running the fork CoreElec on cheap Amlogic "Android" boxes. Even have my non-tech family using them because they're cheap, easy learning curve, and come with a remote.

Neither is FOSS, neither have Kodi's playback abilities, and Plex at least is pissing off its user-base left and right. Jellyfin is an Emby fork that has exceeded its parent, and its Kodi plugin works fine for me and mine, including syncing watched status.

Okay. What non-smart TV can I buy in 2023?

Just before the Pandemic, we had to replace our garage door opener (Last one physically broke, and no replacement parts can be had for a model that old) and the only option came with a service called MyQ. I let it sit for years before I tried to connect it to my IoT WiFi and get that part working. More recently I started getting into HomeAssistant, which has a MyQ integration. I thought it might be useful. I figured that since the wall panel let me open/close the door, switch on/off the light, allowed me to change settings, and gave a temperature readout in the garage that they'd export that through their app and I could pull it in and do something useful with it. I mean, the data is there, and so it should be accessible, right?

Do you know what the integration gave me? "Door goes up"/"Door goes down". That's it!. I get no temperature readings at all, there is no way to partially open the door (And triggering it from the integration/app flashes the garage light and loudly beeps the entire time the door is moving), and if I want to turn the light on/off, I have to buy an add-on light from the manufacturer. However they have relentlessly pimped me their "Amazon Key" service so I can get my packages delivered into my garage when I'm not home. That didn't stop until I disabled that account.

Don't even get me started on how the "Easy" ThinkQ junk built into my new dish washer failed to even pair with its App and do anything.

Until and unless the manufacturers get their act together and give us something useful, there will be no more of that nonsense happening at my house or the houses of anyone I'm close to.

Good luck doing that on any Samsung device, my friend.

Pretty much everything, since they're the middle man for Android phones, between the customer and the manufacturer. Even if the manufacturer releases an update, each carrier has to vet it before they release it to "their" variant of the phone. And since 98% of Android users use the phone they got from their carrier, they're at the carrier's mercy.

Congrats on breaking out of that cycle, though.

I don't disagree with most of what you've outlined above. I try to avoid Meta properties, and I'm not at all comfortable with how much Google tries to pry into my life and I've taken serious steps in getting away from them (And I'll never forgive them for breaking GTalk federation). As for iMessage, I don't have any Apple hardware anymore, so I don't use it (But let me tell you, seeing messages like '$so_and_so liked "$your_last_message"' get irritating quickly).

But let me ask you a question, if you don't mind. How well does your solution work with people using super-popular e-mail systems such as Gmail and Office365?

My needs are "Something like Signal". Something that I can use across desktop and phone, something I can get my family and friends to use. I've already got chat systems (XMPP, Nextcloud Talk, etc) including audio/video chat, file attachments, etc, that work great but no one uses them.

The only way I was able to get anyone to use Signal in the first place was that it could replace their (factory) messaging app.

Thanks for the recommendations though. I'll look into them.

I'm right there with you. The loss of SMS is going to render Signal irrelevant. WhatsApp already does most of what Signal does and has a much larger network. My wife has been complaining about it constantly since the last update popped up that message at the bottom of SMS chats. I can't even get my paranoid father to use Signal exclusively. I've been trying for years to get my whole family onto Signal but still half of them can't be bothered. According to Signal's own (in-app) stats, I'm less than 50% encrypted messages.

What this is going to do is push most of us back into the arms of Google Messages or iMessage. Ugh!