true. but in my experience, most code redemption downloads don’t require info though… besides the usual collection of your data via fingerprinting and cookies.

where do you source most of your music? for music i really only pirate large artists/bands, so torrenting is pretty easy. i haven’t bothered with soulseek–a centralized network doesn’t appeal that much, and i’m not desperate. if i really need something, and can’t find it, i just use yt-dlp.

this sounds nasty… how recent? i haven’t experienced any issues using calibre to strip drm and back up books from my kobos. works for library books from overdrive/libby as well. from my cursory glance, it seems like they have been using ADE linkfiles for this for a while? But maybe I didn’t look closely enough.

I love my kobo so much, and I love being able to own my digitial books, keep back ups and not have to deal with DRM (once removed lmao).

are you only a windows user? what is keeping you there? what is keeping you from moving to linux? one thing that is wild for me, especially when it comes to technical users–is that holding onto windows, and dealing with the windows work arounds is often more complicated or tedious than dealing with linux’s quirks–which to be fair, there are a lot of quirks, but it feels different when the quirks are well documented and it’s more a process of learning. to me, windows feels like you’re fumbling around in a dark room, and someone is moving around the furniture every 3 months.

I use a flip phone as a daily driver, and do not have any banking apps–and things are just getting harder and harder. I primarily do my banking on my laptop, but I do have an old pixel phone with GrapheneOS that plug in and charge when I “need” a smart phone.

Most banking apps need the banking app installed to a smart phone because MFA is handled through the banks proprietary app. Some banking apps aren’t even possible to install on GrapheneOS due to the app requiring google play integrity API–making these banks impossible for me to use.

I use three banks, one works perfectly and supports traditional 2fa totp–which is seamless for me. My second bank supports MFA through their app, and will fallback to SMS 2fa–less good, still relatively convenient (i hate using my phone, having to find it etc), but also much less secure. The third bank (which I may drop) only supports MFA through the app, but still supports graphene. This is more secure than the second bank, but a huge pain to have to charge my smart phone, and go through the process.

Banks are not incentivized to have web/computer access be painless. It feels like soon we may not be able to bank without paying for spyware.