Mordikan

The most common I remember (I was like 5 at the time) was to go to the video rental store and rent a bunch of movies on VHS. You’d also rent a VHS player. You take the rental VHS player home and cable it to your existing VHS player. While one is playing the movie, the other is recording. Quick way to get a massive library of movies all named with sharpie markers and those little VHS stickers.

The real question is how many times you write over that movie and have to cross out what it was because you obviously can’t be bothered to go and buy more VHS tapes.

I remember the IRC channels where you would interact with channel bots to have them list what they had available. You’d make a selection, possibly end up in a queue, and then start downloading at 56k.

Honestly, none of it felt like or was treated as piracy. You were just sharing games (a physical thing you lent your friend). Even the game manual anti-piracy stuff was just treated like something you needed to work around. Your friends would just write down a few examples (like pg 43, line 26, word 12 = “punisher”) and just retry until that question was asked.

There are a lot of Docker GUI tools out there. There just isn’t Docker Desktop. Here are a few:

1. Portainer
2. Podman Desktop
3. Yacht (pretty sure this is unmaintained currently but still should work)

Yeah, you can’t just use wireguard directly on a home network depending on provider (CGNAT) and you can’t just switch providers as most providers are in a non-compete with other providers. So, Cloudflare Mesh or Tailscale is the best option for those.

So that’s not actually true with DNS exactly.

State actors can and have compelled ISPs to redirect DNS traffic. The most notable case I can remember is Turkey assuming control over Google’s anycast address (8.8.8.8) via BGP hijacking to enforce Twitter bans (that was in 2014).

If we are talking DoT/DoH, then BGP hijacking has a more limited impact as there is encryption involved there, but it still requires IP routing the same as anything else, so modifying BGP routes would be effective if the goal was to break non-compliant DNS providers.

To be fair, the move to Linux has nothing to do with user rights. That is strictly a move to become less reliant on the US as the US has become increasingly unstable.

They have more than one product. They provide anti-cheat as well as anti-tamper

“Rules for thee, not for me”

As a networking guy, for homelab setups the router is not core of your network. That role falls on the switch. In a perfect world, you’d have a layer-3 switch handling traffic between segments and only send traffic to the router for egressing the network or a few other cases. But in the real world, you have to start somewhere and that’s what you did. Don’t let anyone tell you that you did it wrong. If someone can’t make things work without having the perfect equipment, its probably the wrong hobby for those people.

Regarding network-wide adblocking, I had a squid proxy running that did this. Every machine was issued a self-signed certificate and the connections were basically MITM so I could check the calls being made. You can run into some issues with SSL-pinning in Android or things like HSTS for common websites sometimes, but overall it did function pretty well after tweaking.

If you do decide later to replace your existing router, I’d suggest trying to build your own. My current router is a mini-PC with dual NICs running Arch configured to do packet filtering, routing, a few automations, etc. It was refurbished and cost me about $80 USD. Its a really good experience in building servers and learning how various routing protocols work.

You can but its dependent on the phone and USB-C adapter being used. Originally I was attempting to use 5G cellular as backup internet via a refurbished Samsung A54 5G. I was able to build the GRE tunnel between the phone and router, but the phone would either charge or provide ethernet, not both.

I’ve been looking for a new book server and discovered Booklore/Grimmory as well. Here is the history I can find on it as some of what people are saying is not 100% correct.

1. It was not vibe-coded. The original project predates genAI, so that wouldn’t have been since. I think some of the newer code might be, but the core seems unchanged.

2. The security issue mentioned is an API authentication bypass whereby book files were exposed if the endpoint was reachable (CVE-2025-62614). This has an 8.7 rating on severity, but realistically the end result is your books could be copied.

3. Licensing. This is the real skullduggery in my opinion. The maintainer had plans to switch from AGPL-3.0 to BSL. That might not be legal and it cuts out any contributors and sets the project up for monetization.

My concern with Grimmory is that it is too embedded with the flaws of Booklore. In testing it was really sluggish on mobile. I still need to do more testing, but aside from being graphically nice, it didn’t feel that stable. I was hoping to move away from Calibre-Web due to auto-importing not being supported, but in the end, I’ll likely just write something to support this on my end.

The problem with religious texts is they are so badly written that essentially anything you want to do is permissible. Look at a comment you made:

The basics argument is taking anything from anyone without their consent is morally wrong and haram.

Who did take from? You couldn’t have taken a game from a developer/publisher if its pirated. You took it from a bittorrent seeder. Did they provide consent? Yes, they were seeding it to you.

If I tell you a joke that I heard from someone who heard it from someone, etc. did I steal the joke? At what iteration of copying something does it stop being theft? Is it theft to begin with to make a copy?

No, that’s not how the new EU legislation works. The new laws build off existing Digital Services Act (DSA) and legacy E-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC) requirements. The DSA states again that you would have to lock down access to the material (once you become aware) and then inform authorities.

All site operators maintain safe harbor with EU authorities unless those two points are broken. In both US and EU pending legislation, no requirement to scan all STLs is required, so you do not have to automatically check all files like you mentioned.

I wouldn’t let that be a deterrent to starting an instance. Just make sure you understand the obligations you have as site owner when it comes to misuse. Maintain good logging and follow legal requirements (which in the US is locking down and preserving evidence and reporting to law enforcement hotlines - depending on the nature of the misuse).

I think the supply chain issue is probably the most pressing out of all of them. The other points people have are either non-issues or a result of dropping usage hogs into existing electrical infrastructure. Infrastructure can be updated, though.

Supply chain is different. There isn’t a supply shortage of chips, its that profitability dictates you should sell them to datacenters or adjacent industry. Unlike infrastructure where you can just build out more, adding more supply for chips just means you have more to sell to datacenters. Since the demand is there, end of day profits will always win.

Saw it was already commented about CO2, so I thought I’d counter-point your environment claim regarding water usage (since that is something I’ve seen a lot of too).

The ISSA had a call to action due to the AI water use “crisis”: https://www.issa.com/industry-news/ai-data-center-water-consumption-is-creating-an-unprecedented-crisis-in-the-united-states/

68 billion gallons of water by 2028! That’s a lot…right? Well, what I found is that this is somewhat of a bad faith argument. 68 billion gallons annually is a lot for one town, but those are numbers from a national level and it isn’t compared to usage from anything else. So, lets look at US agriculture (that’s something that’s tracked very well by the USDA): https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/Census22_HL_Irrigation_4.pdf

That’s 26.4 trillion gallons of water annually. So, AI datacenter represents 0.26% of agriculture consumption. If AI datacenter consumption is a crisis, why is agriculture consumption not a crisis? You could argue that agriculture produces “something useful”, but usefulness doesn’t factor into the scarcity of a resource. So, either its not a crisis, or you are cherry picking something that has no meaningful outcome to solving the problem.