Come on, this is Google we’re talking about. The ads come before opening the app.

Video content never changes, but the order and content of ads do. Automated browser, record the video 2-3 times. Diff the frames and slice out the ones that don’t match between runs.

For better or worse, the landscape has shifted since then. I can’t imagine people love Steam for being Steam, but rather for being the most consumer-friendly platform on PC.

Refunds? No questions asked if it’s within 2 weeks and 2 hours of playtime.

User reviews and ratings? Yes, and even comments on those reviews.

Community content? Steam discussions, guides, art, etc. Even mods with the workshop.

Bribes development studios for exclusivity deals? Nope! Devs can release games wherever the fuck they want.

Platform support? PC. Not just Windows, but going out of their way to make Linux a first class citizen. They even support Crapple despite its miniscule market share among PC gamers.

It’s pretty straightforward to use, in my experience. There’s a web UI, so you won’t need to worry about the nitty gritty details unless you go beyond what’s supported through that.

Students would set them up incorrectly and cause a series of problems with colliding DHCP servers

That’s an IT problem, not a user problem. The downstream ports should have been isolated at both the link and packet layers. Configuring a router to share an unrestricted LAN between a dorm full of untrusted users is a disaster waiting to happen.

If somebody goes and causes an outage, I would expect nothing less than a tech walking around and trying to triangulate the offending router.

But in OP’s case, it’s an external ISP that provides internet services to the dorm. As long as nobody gives them a reason to start looking, I don’t expect a for-profit ISP to be sending out a contractor proactively beyond the first week of move-ins. That costs them money, and likely a lot more money than they would recover by catching the handful of people trying to dogde the per-device upcharge.

If they go looking. It’s unlikely they went out of their way to purchase and configure specialized devices in the building to catch it proactively.

That’s assuming they’re actively looking. Hiding your SSID is more to prevent someone from getting suspicious and calling out the ISP.

You shall not use or attempt to use a device or software (such as NAT, Address Masquerading, Proxying, or the connection of an additional wireless router) that would allow you to connect more than the number of devices set out in the Service Information to the Network.

One of the ways they detect this is by checking the TTL of the packets coming from the “one” device is less than expected. If your router is using OpenWrt, you can configure an iptables rule to reset the TTL of outgoing packets to the default.

Turn off SSID broadcasting entirely. Hidden networks require more technical expertise to discover than most people have.

The ISP techs will still be able to find it, but there’s little reason for them to go looking when nothing seems out of the ordinary.

There’s no suitable metaphor for ad blocking IRL

Sure there is.

Every week, your community puts on an old movie in the town park that everyone can watch for free. You, an avid movie enjoyer, watch this movie every week.

But, the movie equipment isn’t free. To make this event happen, the community accepts a donation from The Church of Microwaving Babies and Kicking Puppies. In exchange, the Church of Microwaving Babies and Kicking Puppies pauses the movie every 50 minutes and puts on a small two-minute presentation about why you should consider joining and what puppy-kicking can do to improve your life.

You don’t care. You do not agree with their views, and you definitely are never going to join. Instead of paying attention to their mandatory presentation, you stare at your phone and read Lemmy. Then, when the movie is back on, you once again pay attention.

That’s ad-blocking. Some group gains revenue from their publicly available service by having an advertiser peddle their crap through said service. You take an active role in ignoring said crap, while most people just sit there twiddling their thumbs and pretending to care. The only tangible difference between you ignoring the ad while it plays and you blocking it is 60 seconds of your time and the bandwidth required to serve the ad.

Advertisers don’t like it—but fuck the advertisers. The difference that you as an individual makes in how much money is made through advertising is less than a hundredth of a cent. If the impact of the collective using adblockers is enough to be an issue in sustainability, then advertising was not the correct business model to begin with.

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned porn yet. Like it or not, it does drive growth.

Metric is excellent until it gets into data units. There shouldn’t be a difference between 4T and 4TB, but it’s actually a (1024⁴-1000⁴) ≈ 92.6G (99.5GB) difference because of the fuckers who decided to make data units metric and rename the base-2 data units to “kibibyte”/“mibi*”/“gibi*” (KiB/MiB/GiB)

From: douchenozzle@bigcorpo.com
Subject: [ACTION REQUIRED] Work Policy Violation

Dear Wayge Slavei,

Your working performance has been reviewed, and you have been found to be in violation of Bigcorpo workplace policies. As per your contract, you are required to take a 30-minute break for lunch and entitled two additional 15-minute breaks to use at your discretion.

As identified to our policy review process, you have multiple periods of inactivity throughout the work week, including:

• 42 to 59 minutes of inactivity during Wednesdays at 2 PM
• 27 to 56 minutes of inactivity every day from 12:30 to 1 PM.

These periods of unsanctioned inactivity are against corporate policy, and you will be required to attend mandatory training, which will take place virtually on Wednesdays, after the company-wide weekly All-Hands Project Alignment meetings from 2 to 3. Continued violations will result in your termination.

Thank you,

Douche Nozzle

Welcome to modern DRM.

I’m not sure which two trolls decided to downvote your comment saying “fair points,” but here’s an upvote for being a good sport about listening to me explain why your preferred implementation of blocking might not be more effective than what we have now.

A privately-stored salt would fix that :)

Chaotic good admins are my favorite kind of admins. 👍

The easiest way to to take a look through a kbin/mbin instance, which exposes the vote information through the interface for everyone. The harder but equally valid way is to run your own Lemmy instance. Other instances will tell yours exactly who voted for what, and as an admin, you even get an option on Lemmy’s web interface to see it.

I’d be great if the block would make them unable to downvote you and your posts as well. And it’d be nice if it wouldn’t even let them reply to your posts.

I’m not entirely sure that’s going to work out the way people think it will.

Suppose I’m some jackass that gets off on harassing you: if blocks prevented me from interacting with your content, and you blocked me, I would have confirmation that I’ve successfully gotten under your skin. I can then just make another account and continue what I’m doing.

If blocks don’t notify or provide indication to the blocked party, they would either escalate their behavior (while you are blissfully unaware) and get banned by a moderator, or give up and move on to someone else.

There’s also considering how that’s going to work with moderators and admins: do they get to bypass the block and continue to comment and interact with you against your wishes? Does it hide your posts from them if they’re blocked? It’s a lot harder to design this type of blocking on a community-centric platform than it is to do for a microblogging platform like Twitter or Tumblr.

Because muting doesn’t stop the poison the spread, just my personal ability to not see it.

That’s what mods and admins are supposed to do. It’s not the users’ responsibility to moderate the behavior of others, and it’s a lot less stressful than trying to stop toxicity when you only have words in your moderator toolbox.