The Doctor

I haven’t seen it on any of the instances I hang out on.

Any idea of the IP addresses they were coming from?

We are statistical outliers, etc etc.

“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” –Cardinal Richelieu

Take a look: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/video/hope-2020-panel.html

I just use a new copy of that HTML page with minor edits for each video.

Peertube instances are self-hosted sites that happen to interact with the greater fediverse in general.

Depending on your file format and hosting situation, you can also host videos on your own site with a template HTML file.

It’s a bit of history well worth studying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

This. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

I guess nobody remembers the Halloween Memo, because that’s the gold standard strategy for gathering up and locking in users.

Why do we need to be mainstream?

That is a PKzip-style self extracting archive, so running unzip on it works the way you’d expect. I ran the same string of commands on it that I did on the archive downloaded from Intel, and it looks like NNResources64.dll is the culprit, clocking in at 193 megabytes. The next biggest file in the archive is RTAIODAT.DAT, which weighs in at a comparatively svelte 55 megs.

I have no idea why they need to be that big. It makes no sense to me.

The ones on Realtek’s site are absurdly tiny by today’s standards (which probably means they’re somewhat sensible and decently engineered): https://www.realtek.com/en/component/zoo/category/pc-audio-codecs-high-definition-audio-codecs-software

Edit: I hit “post” instead of toggling preview mode off. Still getting used to this site.

You didn’t say specifically which Realtek drivers you were talking about, so I took a peek at the contents of the .zip archive here: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19336/realtek-high-definition-audio-driver-for-windows-10-windows-11-for-intel-nuc8i7be-nuc8i5be-nuc8i3be-products.html

(unzip -l Audio-Win10_Win11-6.0.9360.1.zip | grep -v '^Archive' | grep -v '^ Length' | grep -v '^----' | sort -b -k1 -n | less, if anybody’s interested)

The byte hogs appear to be the IntelSSTPreprocStreamer.dll files which, and I’ve no idea, are gargantuan. Almost 75 megs each. There are lots of other files that I doubt anybody but two engineers who haven’t been on vacation in thirty years know the purpose of. Lots of what look like localization files.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, “what” is pretty easy to answer. “Why,” on the other hand… your guess is as good as mine. Ring up Richard C. Hoagland or something, because anybody’s guess is just as good as anybody else’s.

Techdirt isn’t really afraid of being punted from their usual social platforms or losing access for interviews.

https://joinplu.me/

https://writefreely.org/

I think every big-ish company has pet names for employees. It might be a requirement to IPO.

Or only return GCache pages for Reddit.

The cost is why I’m probably not going to plug it into my Searx install.

Back home it was sometimes speculated that the invasiveness of background checks was to gather dirt on the subjects to hold over them, just in case.

As for federation/decentralization/whatever, it doesn’t solve the mass collection issues at all. We already know how and where they do it (contracting with providers of all kinds and monitoring at IXPs). Unless we get off the Net entirely, there’s no way to stop it.

It’s okay so far. I’m still getting used to the UI.

Nope.