• web browser: piracy tool
• JavaScript dev console: piracy tool
• curl: piracy tool
• TCP/IP: piracy tool
• Router: piracy Tool
• laptop: piracy tool
• morse code: piracy tool

TVs are also piracy tools used for viewing pirated content

Film studios are piracy tools. 100% of pirated films were produced in a film studio

this is how they sound to me

ban everything to prevent piracy

or just kill the need for it

I'm not going to pay apple to show me ads while I watch slow horses

If there were no people, there’d be no piracy. We’re all piracy tools.

i found that i have zero tolerance for ads after blocking all the ads in all my devices at the firewall.

now i marvel that people are able to tolerate it somehow -- they can literally watch the same one hundreds of times in a few minutes and they don't seem to even be aware of it.

It always confuses the hell out of me when I see an ad from someone's phone or computer when showing me a YouTube video or something. It's so jarring that I feel like I got malware on my skin lol

What firewall rules do you implement that effectively blocks YouTube ads?

Your phone has a camera and mic so piracy tool

prolly pihole

pfsense and i got it to work like pihole does.

people share lists of regular expressions to use as a filter and i found one tailored to youtube.

however it's only partially sucessfull w ublock origin doing heavy lifting as well.

it's technically not just youtube ads -- it's all ads and done through pfsense.

i think ublock origin and youtube sponsor block is more effective for youtube specifically

You jest, but i know a person that was accused of "hacking" a website by removing a client-side form validation check

With the below tangent ramble aside, I commend the person you know for their honesty. My plan if I were ever confronted was "nuh uh, the website did that by itself".

I assume it went nowhere, but how far did that accusation actually go before the accuser died of astronomical exposure to lead paint?

When I was at university, the online course registration system was entirely home-brewed. The core issue was that the implementation did not fully map to the registration rules laid out in the faculty handbooks.

e.g. if you were a fucking idiot like me and failed calc II in the second semester, you were not eligible for a whole bunch of fucking classes in the subsequent semesters

This was a big fuckup because it effectively extended the time you spent at university by at least one year.

You had to request (fucking beg for) special permission from every faculty's Dean and each department's head administrator if you wanted them to waive the calc 2 prerequisite for a course. (Which I painstakingly did)

You would still be unable to use the piece of shit e-registration system by conventional methods and needed to stand in a 4-8 hour long physical registration queue for the rest of undergrad during every registration period.

Conventional methods. I swear on my dog's life that I did not use the client side authentication to register for anything that was not permitted by the faculty handbook. Studied that shit harder than calc II (attempt 2).

I showed someone else how to do it and he instantly proceeded to register himself for a chemistry class that neither of us could pronounce. Still no clue why the fuck he did that.

Guy needed two days in the queue for administration to unfuck that "accident".

Ppl have been accused of crimes for pointing out, in a 100% white-hat way, that a site lets you access other ppl's accounts just by incrementing a number in the URL. No verification against it.

If someone abuses that maliciously? Sure, go after them. But these were honest security white-hats trying to warn, before scammers exploited it.

To be fair, being accused for that is exceptional, not normal. But it has happened. More than once!

IKWYM!

I think ppl get used to it and it starts to feel normal. But if you get out from under it, and you see it even once, it's awful.

Different person here, but with yt-dlp I never see ads. Well, not the ones YT adds. The only thing I ever saw is if somebody diverts into speaking an ad in their own voice as part of their stream. That's harder to prevent. For YT ad inserts tho, can't remember ever seeing one.