I’m sure every cent will be spent on lobbying for ID checks to get online or use a computer in the name of child safety.

Yes. Certs can expire after whatever time the issuer wants to set for them. That could be six months or 20 years. Some infrastructure has limits on max and min lengths (more max than min usually) but not all and there are best practices as well.

More importantly the certs could have been five years old by the time this person got the TV for a total age of 8 years.

Unfortunately with AI induced RAM pricing prices are up across the board so cheap is out if you want extra functionality.

You can get as someone suggested the OSMC device. As well as various other third party streamer devices that support OSMC or CoreElec though the Vero does hit near the top for features for video watching as per the spreadsheet linked here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=385600

But if you want general purpose distros that allow emulation you probably want an N150 or similar mini-PC. The tricky part there is that while you can get lets of cheaper older used mini-PCs for emulation if you want to do hardware 4K HDR video content decoding then you need something more recently made for efficiency sake so you’re not pushing the processor to the max just watching videos.

If it has to be under $250 then your options are things like the Vero V or other streaming focused devices but you give up general purpose distro and emulation (I think, Kodi does technically offer a games feature but I’ve never used it and am not familiar) OR else you’re going with a used mini-PC that will okay for general purpose distro and light emulation may struggle with your 4K HDR content depending on video codec used and bitrate.

If you can afford a bit more >$250 but <$350 you can get an N150 or similar intel system that should handle all of the above.

A caveat on the N150 route though is currently there is no support for Dolby Vision, HDR+, etc. You only get plain old HDR and that’s not likely to change anytime soon as it’s a driver issue and no one makes one.

If streaming your own video content is your most important goal and you may need things like DV and other HDR+ formats then go with the Vero V or another item listed near the top of the Kodi list like the Ugoos or Homatics.

I’m guessing they don’t want to pay the costs of the fraud.

Still it’s a shame for children and the under-banked parts of the working class who are struggling. Anyone without a credit/debit card now in the US at least has to pay a 3 - 14% tax ($5-$7 per card activation fee) for a $50 to $200 gift credit/debit card to load up steam instead which is a pretty significant hit.

Bad for anonymity too. Anyone who wanted to maintain an anonymous Steam account is going to be out of luck as I suspect even those gift credit cards are likely going to require identity verification or face scans within a couple years before you can use them.

Yeah until it starts hitting widespread hardware decode support (streaming devices and phones) it’s pretty much just a curiosity to all involved as the only things traditionally powerful enough to software decode these codecs at 4k without overheating are computers and I don’t see that changing.

If h266 gets hw decode support on a bunch of common chips first it’ll be a real blow licensing freedom or not.

IMO it’s fair to read this as an NSA/eyes move. AMD is embedded in the western global mass surveillance architecture and by closed sourcing they can hide NSA back doors more easily.

Fact is the west is locking down all computing and doesn’t want there to be anywhere to flee for hobbyists or the Chinese. This also prevents the Chinese from benefiting from these tools if they slap sanctions on.

It’s not a fallacy when multiple countries/states have passed laws that explicitly demand some form of ID confirmation/scanning and others have stated an intent for it. It’s not a fallacy when you understand what the purpose of this push actually is.

The fact is the end result isn’t going to be compliance with the least restrictive standard but the most. That’s how regulatory compliance always works. You always comply with the most restrictive because it encompasses the least restrictive as well. Further if you stopped to think and analyzed history scientifically instead of it being a series of great man events or whatever you’d understand how capitalism in crisis reacts by crushing the working class using tools like fascism. That the 5-eyes spying abuse far from being some deviation from liberalism embody the deeper desires and wants of the modern western world to spy on and control their citizens and the world and that a free internet has been an incredible threat to state power since day one.

It’s just the first big moment where their propaganda failed, where their narrative was undermined was the Gaza genocide and they will do anything to prop up the Zio-Nazi entity occupying Palestine and prevent their other narratives from suffering the same fate in future. A man in the “free speech” loving EU was unpersoned FFS and can’t be given money, buy food, stay at hotels, use banks, anything for deviating too far from the approved EU narrative. These are the people we’re dealing with.

It’s also not a fallacy when AI has created a crisis for private/government spy fusion platforms like Meta, Google, etc in both gaining ad dollars due to AI bots being hard to discern so hard identifying humans is a must for not only spying but profits from ads.

For a long time the material interests of the massive tech companies and their financial backers and shareholders did not particularly benefit from this kind of ID law and so they pushed back and disallowed it. Now thanks to AI their interests align with those of the state, the capitalist propaganda organs, the moral crusaders. There is in other words nothing major standing in their way and tons of power centers pushing for this as a result of AI, the Gaze genocide breaking containment, etc and it has gained momentum.

I’m afraid this isn’t the win you think it is.

One of two things will happen in the near future:

1. Nearly everything you do online from banking to shopping to social media (including online gaming) to paying your electric or internet bill to yes porn will require OS-level attestation to access and use the site. Linux lacking this will become an incredibly private OS that is useless for anything online making this a defeat for Linux having any hopes of real desktop market share and/or forcing it to comply. Microsoft, Apple, Google would love to push Linux as an OS option off the table.

2. Kids will start using liveboot or installing Linux and evading these controls, Christian fascists, tech overlord capitalists, and the government will take notice and write a bill to close this “loophole” and within a few years having already established the idea in the popular conception that age verification is okay will face lesser resistance in quickly ramming it through.

Doesn’t work. Not a Linux issue. No graphics card or motherboard maker connects the hardware correctly to support CEC on PCs. It’s an industry-wide practice.

There is the pulse eight injector which together with software can inject CEC with a USB connection with the caveat it can’t turn your computer on and it’s a hacky and imperfect solution for tinkerers rather than production ready equipment. Also it’s only HDMI 2.0 not 2.1.

Dust, fingerprints, etc.

Allegedly they may check these things under black lights at the factory for any evidence of opening to attempt to deny warranty. With drive prices having doubled since I bought it and all capacity bought out they’d be extra eager to find any excuse to attempt to deny. Magnuson–Moss warranty act should prevent them from doing that but I don’t have a high power law firm on retainer to sue and intimidate western digital into compliance if they tell me to pound dirt.

Thanks for the kind offer.

Funnily enough I have a WD HDD enclosure that I shucked a drive from not too long ago. I do recall someone mentioning the circuit boards on those being functional as a USB to SATA bridge but I suppose I presumed they need mains power and didn’t want the extra mess. That and I guess I wanted to keep the one I had pristine in case I need to RMA after putting it back together again as I’ve heard people have real mixed experience with RMAing shucked drives and with prices the way they are well I’d rather not take chances given I’ve only the one.

You don’t understand.

The alternative to device based private attestation which is what this is or could be part of is constant online verification by Palantir.

Is every time you want to view porn or adult content you have to verify your real identity so evil corporations and the government who pays them know exactly what your fetishes are and can blackmail you. So they know exactly what you’re posting online because you have to face-scan and ID-scan to set up an email account, a social media account, any account with anything that allows posting content online. Is training the population not to enter a date for their kids or themselves when setting up a computer or device account for the first time, once but upon demand scan their face, scan their ID, comply, sit meekly in fear because everything they do online is known.

What does this know? Your birthday. That’s nothing. As it stands it you can enter anything you want. Fight them when they come to add a verification system to this and point out parents would be in a position to set this up for their kids anyways and its just spying. Fight on stronger ground.

We’ve already lost the maximalist position. The internet scanning and ID verification has already been enacted in several states and countries and we risk a world where it becomes the norm and hosting companies drop anyone who doesn’t implement it because they’re made liable as well. This stuff won’t be repealed. People don’t live in democracies. They live in a dictatorship of the wealthy and the corporations. Your dissent doesn’t matter and it cannot reach most tech illiterate people who have far more pressing concerns than to riot over this.

This is a compromise solution and I wish more people would see it. If you can bend you don’t break. If you don’t bend and your enemy is the government they are stronger than you and they will snap you like a twig.

Linux desktop market share is too small to matter. And if you make this push fail then the only alternative, the only viable solution these politicians who are being cajoled and urged to implement this will see is online live-scan face and ID verification and it’ll sweep everything. You’ll have destroyed the internet and having saved Linux won’t matter. After that it’ll be a quick move to ban encryption that the government cannot break and ISPs will block traffic they can’t inspect. Game over. A simple maneuver from the place you force them to by refusing to cooperate and enact this compromise, privacy-preserving solution. We need strong defensible positions to protect privacy and the internet and free software and to understand that the old ways have been lost, they’ve died, they’ve been strangled and a compromise position must be taken up to endure and avoid a total loss.

Edit: To be clear, I agree with you in general. I just got bugged a bit by those three things 😅

You do not. You are misinformed and propagandized. Your choice of examples revealed that clearly and nothing you say can refute that fact. Read Marx, read Lenin, your understanding of the state is lacking.

For one, anyone educated would understand that Americans are the best example of sheep in the world and that many Europeans are good second examples. The British for example with their high tolerance for a surveillance, laws that criminalize all manners of small trivialities, etc, etc.

“We have to comply with the law”. This has become Russia or China where the sheep people do whatever an oligarchy dictate.

“What are we a bunch of Asians?”

Also China isn’t run by an “oligarchy” but by a dictatorship of the communist party via a mandate of the masses (they execute CEOs and rich people there, we let them rape kids and commit horrific crimes of greed and fine them less than they made off that crime). Russia is but so is the west and I prefer the term capitalists or if you prefer the original French “bourgeoisie”.

There was a study from one of the big ivy league universities that showed that in the US the people don’t get what they want, popular policy is consistently not passed nor popular will acted on. Princeton I think.

So it’s not what people per se want, it’s what the ruling class (capitalists in the west) wants. And they’ve decided that because the rate of profit falls and their demand for profit grows that they need to put the population under lock and key because they’ve made economic conditions worse and they’re going to get worse yet. They need a police state to control the workers who might want better conditions or gasp to take some or all of their wealth. This is part of that.

This is also because China is rising and they are terrified of people seeing a more equal, just society that can be created through socialism. They are terrified of dissenting voices so they want to remove anonymity so they can terrorize dissidents and opponents into silence. They saw what happened with their attempts at narrative shaping in Gaza, they are deeply alarmed that tik tok won’t be the last thing, a new one could pop up anywhere, right now they play whack a mole, they want to control the whole thing top to bottom.

As to people being sheep. It’s more like they’re beaten down. You defeat this today they come back in a year and then again and again. They have all the money, all the time and are willing to wear people down, use their capitalist owned media to propagandize and sensationalize for this until the people are exhausted and stop fighting it so hard. People work long hours, they take home less money than ever, the government openly abuses people, the police don’t act fairly and persecute black people, there’s a sense of there being no fairness and not enough time. The people are also mis-educated. They’re led to believe there’s this big problem, they don’t understand technology and passively accept their leadership has some amount of good will in how they pass laws and govern to address real problems the bourgeois press has done its job of propagandizing them for. They can’t see the whole picture because of these facts.

All that would happen absolute worst case scenario if MS breaks this is your users would get a whining complaint about not being activated. Get a small “Activate Windows” logo stuck in the lower right hand of their screen and would lose the ability to change wallpapers, customize windows colors, etc.

To be clear it wouldn’t break the install and it would leave it in a state in which you could use an updated version of MAS (reminder MAS supports multiple activation options) to fix it remotely.

If you’re going intel you can check the ark.intel pages for the processors in the devices you’re looking at. Intel does pretty good documentation so it’ll show you what integrated graphics they have and all that.

Ideally you want a chip that can do hardware decoding (and if possible encoding if you’re serving media to others and intend for it to transcode and not direct-play) of common codecs so you’re not eating a massive power bill or generating tons of heat or getting bogged down in resource utilization.

AV1 support is the only tricky part when it comes to hardware decode support. Maybe you don’t use it yourself but typically only the newer chips support hardware decode of AV1 files. Something to consider if that’s likely to be an issue for you if you have or plan to have lots of AV1 encoded files. (Though there is software decode of course)

The Intel N150 can do a 4K desktop, you won’t be doing 4k gaming on it at all but it can do the desktop and video playback and is a low power consumption chipset. Should be able to support at least 2-3 4k transcodes as well. A lot of enthusiasts use it for just this purpose in fact and it’s fairly snappy for uses like these.

Anything more powerful than an N150 will be fine as well for 4K video viewing, transcoding, 4k desktop, etc. So if you want to spend more and get a more powerful Intel chip you can. Just avoid 13/14th generation i series (i5/i7/i9) especially used because of the hardware damage bad design did to those and there are a lot of messed up ones floating around from people trying to offload.

144hz may be the really tricky part. Lots of these mini boxes are capped at 60hz so definitely double-check that. There’s always the option of displayport to HDMI cables too if it has a DP output that supports the necessary 4k framerate. N150 might struggle driving that to be honest.

Oh and be aware of thermal throttling. Lots of manufacturers stuff Ultra 9 series in things like laptops and minis with inadequate cooling and they thermal throttle like crazy so you pay $800 and get something with the same performance as a properly cooled Ultra 7 or 5 series.

To loop back around to whether you need a dedicated GPU. You have to ask yourself are you transcoding streams for others or is it mostly direct-play without transcode? Integrated GPU on the CPU die should be good enough unless you have an awful lot of streams going at once or some other pressing need.

You can run whatever distro you want. There are extremely specialized distros like OSMC (https://osmc.tv/) which is basically kind of like Kodi running on Debian but without a desktop environment (extremely media center focused).

Actually the shutdown bug was part of a security patch and I can confirm it affects Windows 10 machines with ESU.

False slander (ironic considering what we’re discussing).

Only slurs are auto removed including a very common one against women pertaining as well to female dogs. You can say fuck, shit, asshole, etc.

If the drive previously wasn’t making this noise (as in it had been filled with data, been in use for days-weeks and wasn’t ever making this noise) and it doesn’t happen in response to data writes (even hours after the fact) then it might be a cause for concern that the drive could be dying.

In general it’s a good idea to have back-ups of any important data but I’d really ensure that’s the case here and assume it could imminently fail. In general the sound of hard drives changing (that is sounding different in either idle noises or active writing/reading noises) is a cause for concern for potential drive failure though it could be other things and as drives age they can sometimes change sound signatures as mechanical components age without necessarily failing (could go on working fine for years).

That said there are normal processes in drives that can make noise:

• Some sort of operation driven by your OS itself, I won’t begin to get into all of them but there could be something accessing things in the background, doing file table or journaling operations, writes, checks, etc on the file system itself, just low level maintenance stuff.

• SMR drives may continue to write and shuffle data for quite some time after being written to, especially if it was a large amount of data. Though this should still even in the case of multiple terabytes probably be resolved within 12 hours.

• Many drives, especially high capacity enterprise drives do make a -soft- clicking sound as a result of the arms sweeping the surface when idle but not off to if I recall correctly spread around lubricant or some sort of basic mechanical maintenance. It’s part of the normal drive operations. It’s possible it occurs more frequently in response to a massive amount of writes previously like filling a drive or may not be activated until a certain amount of data is written, I’m not really sure how that works as that would probably be proprietary information to the manufacturer.

Should I be worried about this? To my paranoid mind it feels like something is slowly reading my files with some exploit to bypass the indicator light to fly under the radar.

How would it do this? Is it installing hacked firmware to your enclosure too? I doubt you’re that valuable of a target.

If you’re worried about malware then back up your stuff, nuke the install and reinstall from scratch. I wouldn’t worry about it if this is the only thing you’re seeing and find it unlikely.

I would say there are not any worth recommending and that best practices are avoiding running random scripts you don’t understand, keeping software up to date with package managers, and using virtualization tools. Also look into Portmaster perhaps which is an interactive firewall.