921–930 of 963 posts
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I've paid for Spotify for a while, so its been some time since I've heard an ad. But from what I remember, if you put the volume below ~30%, the ad pauses.
There are headphones where %30 volume would do some damage.
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> They allow advertisers to run JS on your device, and ads are a trendy way to deliver malware. I wonder if the ad industry is onboard with HTTPS yet? In 2013 when I was last looking at ads as an attack vector, none did, and many executed JS, or gave privileged access to system APIs on device via JS, which meant that it was fairly trivial to intercept ad delivery, return malicious JS, open a "reverse JS shell" and po…
iOS/MacOS block HTTP requests by default unless you request (and for apps on the App Store, are granted) an exception. So, I’d think that in-app advertisers on iOS would want to support HTTPS.
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Physical media still exists for a lot of music, but I know first-hand that some music, collections/anthologies/compilations and playlists containing some original content are becoming increasingly digital-only. Check for an artist's profile on a music service that allows you to purchase and download the content. Bandcamp (no affiliation) is one such service. Then you can make your own physical or digital backups exte…
Remember, even CDs aren't safe from DRM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... I guess Vinyl is the only way to go for true security-minded individuals.
Good. Spotify has a pretty cheap paid option that removes all of that. To those who justify wanting the paid service for nothing by saying Spotify won't "take responsibility" or "assume liability" for their ads or those ads "might deliver malware" or are "intrusive" as a weak rationalization, you present a false dichotomy. There are at least three options: 1. Pay for the service 2. Suffer through the ads 3. Don't use…
I am surprised that they continue to believe that they should have any revenue "[W]hen people aren't willing to pay for 1-2 coffees for a month of unlimited music streaming."
It's like realising people do not want to pay for what you are selling and then, instead of owning up to the fact you therefore have no viable business, you turn around and vengefully sell those same people out, keeping them around by reducing price to 0. There is no business regarding that service. You find a new customer (advertisers) and sell something else (ads). Then you portray the original "service" as your business.
No matter how popular this has become, it is still a sham.
Selling ads is a different service with a different customer. It is not the same business.
There are probably some Internet service companies that do manage to sustain themselves on paid subscriptions. Perhaps they are few and far between.
Pretending that a successful ad sales business is the same thing as a successful Internet-based paid subscription service is disengenous.
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15 year old me had basically nothing. Paying $10 per month for pretty much anything was unthinkable. I still wanted to listen to music though, so I found ways. I really don’t think that was so terrible, and neither do I think the few million people that block ads are.
That's great, but you live in a country that have these things called laws and you have to follow them whether or not you personally think that breaking them "isn't so terrible" or not. If enough people think the laws are terrible, then lobby your representative to have them changed. This is how the system works. Half the reason it doesn't work is admittedly our corrupt officials taking the big media money (RIAA and…
No. There are laws and breaking them may result in actions taken by a group that has claimed the right to infringe on my liberty. The action is right or wrong, independently of the law.
In this case the sole consequence is that a person has to create a new spotify account.
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> $9-10 I can buy 10-12 CDs per year This is good in other ways! One of the problems with Spotify is that the musicians don't really get paid a realistically useful amount. I say this as someone who has both a Spotify subscription and musician friends whose music is on Spotify. That said, I personally find the subscription price surprisingly low for what I get, but I wouldn't try to tell you what to do with your mone…
I'm willing to bet that your musician friends wouldn't be getting much of a payout if Spotify didn't exist either. The actually popular artists make great money from Spotify.
> The actually popular artists make great money
Is this so? As I recall, Spotify pays tenths of a U.S. cent per stream. The gross payout for a million streams is a few thousand dollars.
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Yeah, but I don't have anywhere to run iTunes :/
c’mon, ur on haxxor news and u cant run a windows vm? there’s a free image on microsoft’s homepage, and I bet you’ll manage to get itunes working and transfer the music within the free trial period.
All so that the artists get about $1 from my $10.
Or I can download a torrent and give those $10 to Vapors of Morphine on their Bandcamp page, which is much easier for me and will net them about $8 instead.
So fuck the leeches, I'll keep pirating.
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For whatever it's worth, I think there's a difference between mentioning libertarianism in a negative light and holding it responsible for society's ills. I think libertarianism is worth debating, and the political Libertarianism practiced in America is often ridiculous and utterly biased against individuals. But I don't think that being refused access to a service if you reject risky and unethical advertising practi…
I agree, yes. Maybe it's a sort of corporate motive that takes hold in each of our countries and in the US it's become infective within the libretarian section. I could just as easily see a twisting of a socialist angled view being twisted in the same way, "Our advertising supports our service in a necessary manner and it'd be unconscionable to deprive any resident the access to our service." As an aside, isn't it am…
The US is incredibly thin on socialism, even nominal socialism, and we already see traces of this when public-interest arguments become convenient. The Net Neutrality fight is a hideously good example; once ISPs decided their monopolies were too blatant to use free market rationales, they went out and astroturfed a narrative where cheap and fair internet was an attack on minorities and the poor.
And yes, I can't deny that US libertarianism (the party and a lot of the individual voices) is weirdly pervaded by a willingness to abandon libertarian principles in deference to corporations. It wasn't that long ago that you could find conservatives complaining about excessive "civil libertarianism" in calls for social progress. Today, it's horribly easy to find people arguing that Wells Fargo should be allowed to stretch their forced arbitration clause to cover outright fraud, because apparently the bank's rights are the only ones which we need to protect.
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On a related note, getting unapproved access described as "stealing" (or theft, or piracy, or...) didn't stop being a nasty rhetorical trick just because it became standard. Creating another copy or playthrough of a song without permission doesn't have zero cost, fine, but the entire conversation is cheapened when people talk like it's the same thing as pocketing a cassette tape from a store.
If I took a copy of Stephen King's next book off his editor's computer and post it for free online before he sold a single copy, would it be a nasty rhetorical truck to call that stealing/theft/piracy...?
You switched the topic from receiving for personal use to distributing. Demand promotes supply, I'm not unaware, but that doesn't make them equivalent - unless we'd like to equate drugdealing with possession, and scalping with buying a secondhand concert ticket? You also escalated from 'distribution' like burning a CD for a friend to invading someone's computer and publicizing a nonpublic work. This is the same sort of dodge the RIAA has been using for years, pursuing downloads and uploads indifferently and targeting private, unpaid sharing with laws aimed at systematic, for-profit fraud.
But even ignoring every part of that, yes. It's still a rhetorical trick. Theft is, by legal, dictionary, and common-use definitions, an act that deprives the victim of the stolen property. Stealing King's manuscript off his editor's desk would be theft. Copying the book would be a lot of things, like a real CFAA violation, probably either B&E or wire fraud, and debatably trespass to chattels. Posting it online would prompt another list of crimes and civil suits relating to the potential monetary harm to King.
I'm not excusing all acts described as 'piracy' or 'theft'. I'm saying that the label actually matters, and the discussion is harmed by applying law and rhetoric about deprivation to an act of duplication.