251–260 of 325 posts
(They don't seem to be going for the "serious, clueful privacy and Internet freedom" demographic, or they wouldn't be using Discord.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know that? Source is closed. Is a network analyzer enough to determine?
People usually don't compile their browsers from source anyway. And of course, technically, a program can check whether monitoring tools are running and adapt its behaviour accordingly, but this is malware territory and it makes no sense for any reputable browser. Also, technically, one can do that on router level anyway and not have this issue. So yes, I would say that analyzing the network is enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are limited to 720p you might as well pirate it even if you do pay for it if you intend to watch it on your computer rather than on a TV.
One correction to my message above: apparently Chrome on Windows is still 720p for Netflix, it was Edge that had 4k support. Or you can install the Netflix App on Windows too. I agree it's a bit silly, but I think a lot of people don't really care about quality so long as they can watch it. I guess that'd also explain how Netflix gets away with such low bitrates for even the "high quality" versions of content.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm good point. The issue is also the distinction between widevine L1, i.e hardware-backed DRM and L3 (the software backed one). Correct me if I'm wrong but to stream 4K, studios require a hardware root of trust and a verified media path. They need a guarantee that the video frames are decrypted inside a trusted execution environment and sent directly to the display without the OS kernel or user space being able to r…
> Correct me if I'm wrong but to stream 4K, studios require a hardware root of trust and a verified media path. Oscilloscopes and signal analysers exist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One correction to my message above: apparently Chrome on Windows is still 720p for Netflix, it was Edge that had 4k support. Or you can install the Netflix App on Windows too. I agree it's a bit silly, but I think a lot of people don't really care about quality so long as they can watch it. I guess that'd also explain how Netflix gets away with such low bitrates for even the "high quality" versions of content.
I think people most do care about quality and most watch on their TV.
- 15% PC
- 10% Smartphone
- 5% Tablets
- 70% TVs
In terms of viewing hours https://www.statista.com/chart/13191/netflix-usage-by-device.... So definitely most viewing on TV, but still something like 1/3 of households with TVs don't have a 4k TV at all (as of 2025) in the first place. Hard to definitively say more since Netflix & others don't seem to publish the numbers often.
I'd love to find out I'm wildly wrong though and have a bunch of people willing to push Netflix to have higher quality content... but so many people don't even seem to pay for the premium plan with 4k (anecdotally, Netflix doesn't seem to publish numbers on that) that I'm not holding my breath as I sit here with UHD Blu-Ray quality instead :D. It seems like most people just want something quick to turn on in the background than something to really sit down and bask in every detail of.
There is some strange irony in this. Apple initially used the khtml code-base to build Safari but it quickly became impossible to back-port the changes from the Safari branch of khtml back into Konqueror. Now, 20 years later, someone has made an open source version of Safari.
Who?
No source code? That's pretty disappointing, and makes it DOA for most Linux users.
Most Linux users couldn't care less whether or not their software is open source. They are drawn to Linux for practical benefits, not ideological ones.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can tell me what phone can give me access to all the standard apps I would need, has good build quality, doesn’t funnel my data to Google, is backed by an entity capable of providing multi-year device support, has cloud storage integration that lets me keep my data securely offloaded from the phone’s storage, can handle modern apps and websites as far as performance, has a very good camera, and has the equival…
I have a Pixel 8 running GrapheneOS and it does most of the above: - slightly lesser build quality than my iPhone 15 Pro but comparable - doesn't funnel data to Google unless you explicitly let it, you can circumvent a lot of the Google Play stuff by restricting permissions and using Aurora Store - is backed by, well, Google and the Graphene team porting over security updated. They have a fairly good track record by…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> managing an open source codebase of this size would add real strain to our small team Can you please elaborate what do you mean when you say this? This is something I do not understand. How licensing terms affect your codebase management beyond setting things up so the code is available to users? Publishing something under a FLOSS license doesn’t mean anything except that you grant end-users certain rights (the fou…
> you’re saying your legal department doesn’t have capacity to handle licensing concerns My read is their legal department isn’t fleshed out enough to defend the work when e.g. a tech giant steals it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> managing an open source codebase of this size would add real strain to our small team Can you please elaborate what do you mean when you say this? This is something I do not understand. How licensing terms affect your codebase management beyond setting things up so the code is available to users? Publishing something under a FLOSS license doesn’t mean anything except that you grant end-users certain rights (the fou…
> you’re saying your legal department doesn’t have capacity to handle licensing concerns My read is their legal department isn’t fleshed out enough to defend the work when e.g. a tech giant steals it.
As I wrote, If the concern is that they cannot figure out a way to distribute it as paid software as others may redistribute it for free, that’d be a valid point of concern (and there are plenty of options). But that’s not what they’re saying.