Wait until you find out they offer apps with ties to:

• FBI
• US military
• CIA
• NSA
• The most awful fascist ghouls on podcasts and youtube
• The “israeli” state and its war criminal institutions.

Curious then you pick on vague ties to China to fearmonger.

I mean FFS Microsoft and Google are actively abetting the most documented genocide in a century. Where is the outrage from these garbage people over that? Where’s the push to help boycott and pressure them to stop assisting the slaughter? Children are being killed right now in Gaza with the help of these American companies and where are the stories encouraging people to stop using them?

IMO focus on purchasing physical content from creators or distributors who NEED to get paid.

It’s one thing to foolishly throw money at these big companies for blurays of an already very successful series while they’re throwing their old libraries in the trash or ‘the vault’ or just shoveling most of their money towards low quality reality garbage.

It’s another to buy a Criterion or BFI or Vinegar Syndrome bluray of something out of print that they need to recoup the costs of restoring and scanning.

If someone buys a bluray of an MCU movie they are a chump, firstly for liking that stuff, secondly for giving Disney more money for it when those things already earn piles of cash in theaters and that alone would be enough to keep them paying salaries and producing that stuff.

Spend money on independent film-makers/releases, on restorations, on series you like on the verge of cancellation.

Sadly I think the conclusion is already written, physical media’s days are numbered, the big companies are going to shut down the overwhelming majority of bluray and dvd production within 5-10 years is my feeling because why sell you for $20-$30 a copy of something when they can get your rent in the form of streaming monthly payments for the rest of your natural life?

And best of all with the rent they can push ads which further increase their revenue. That bluray is a one-time payment, ads for watching the movie on streaming are a continual revenue stream. I predict that they will either have completely killed off ad-free tiers of streaming to push most of their audience into an even bigger and more valuable ad pool to sell to advertisers OR the prices of the ad-free tiers will grow dramatically away from the ad-supported tiers. Right now it’s a few bucks a month, I suspect within 10 years it will be 170-300% the cost of the ad-supported version.

Use secure erase function which is built into the SATA and other specs, it applies a voltage spike to clear the cells of all held charges thus wiping them. This happens near instantly, it’ll be a process that will signal it’s finished within a minute and takes much less time than that.

If you want to be extra paranoid I suppose you could follow that up by encrypting the entire (empty) drive and then doing it again though I’m not sure this has any benefit however it’s the closest to forcing the cells to be used again and then cleared again. However this does not guarantee that exhausted and worn out areas are flash are not potentially spared both. It’s unlikely for large amounts of data to be recovered from this unless your drive is failing or has been completely worn out but it’s also why if you ever store sensitive data on an SSD it’s preferable to do so in an encrypted form (such as encrypting the whole disk or partition).

This is going to get DV victims killed. At least on phone tracking like iPhone’s family sharing makes it clear it’s happening and often has a way of disabling it when you make your final run for it allowing you to keep your phone.

Private property isn’t a sacrifice. I don’t own any.

There’s a difference between personal property and private property. Private property is a mall, is a factory, is machinery at your workplace. Personal property is your toothbrush, your Playstation, your Television, your blender, your set of German knives, your computer, your books, etc.

Freedom of speech has never existed. The illusion of it has been allowed to be stronger or weaker in various places at various times, if your speech is no threat it’s often allowed, it’s when it’s a threat that suddenly the freedom vanishes and hides behind excuses like national security or illegal ideologies, etc.

I question how you would get rid of freedom of thought without some sort of hellish brain implants being made mandatory so it’s an odd thing to mention.

I’d be willing to sacrifice an awful lot of fascists, reactionaries, and an awful lot of enabling liberals. I’d be willing to sacrifice bourgeoisie. The expropriation of their private property is not a sacrifice but a necessity for things being held in common trust for the people.

94% of Militia members in the US are foaming at the mouth reactionaries if not open fascists, with many being active or former law enforcement or related to military or intelligence.

An equivalent system was set up after World War II with a peace anchored by the Allied Powers, decolonization, and the US-Soviet rivalry. That system has lasted for about 80 years and is showing significant strain.

What? No it hasn’t. The cold war ended by 1992 at the latest. At that point the US achieved total, unipolar hegemony over the world and began exercising it. Clinton’s “interventions” in Kosovo, Africa, etc. The Bush era Neo-Cons, those were all results of a new era of unchallenged American power and hegemony. That marked a new era.

Right now the world, led by China and Russia as well as other members of BRICS are trying to buck that total dominance and hegemony of the US and set up a multi-polar world but the US is not letting go, it is not ceding power, it has replaced international law as set out in agreement with the victorious powers of WW2 with “rules based order” which means its way or the high-way, the rule of their might and their wants and nothing else matters. Trump is flexing that built up power, the fact they control SWIFT, the fact the dollar is world reserve currency, their incredible ability to do sanctions to anyone anywhere and put a big hurt on them for defying US interests and wants. He’s unleashing the full might, threatening sanctions, tariffs, straight up invasion to take Greenland or the Panama Canal, etc. All to do what? To maintain US primacy, to prevent the emergence of a multi-polar world where the US doesn’t dominate everyone else and set the terms and rules for the entire world.

So there are movements to try and strive towards a Westphalian (multi-polar) order led by China, Russia, and followed in those steps by other BRICS nations but they are cautious, they don’t want to anger the US and even China still backs down if the threats of sanctions gets too big. So right now we’re in a struggle to determine what kind of world we have either a continuation, a hardening of US empire and unipolar hegemony, unchallenged dominance of the world and its peoples to their dictates and benefits or else a multi-polar world structured around Westphalian principles of sovereignty of individual nations and cooperation and peace born out of multiple strong powers checking each other’s ambitions against other weaker nations.

The US ended an era of struggle and some independence for nations on its own after it won the cold war, it chose to build up its power, to break international law (Yugoslavia, Iraq, war on terror, sanctions regimes galore, etc), to replace it with “rules based order” which no one can solidly define the rules of because they’re ever shifted based on the wants and needs of the US.

Yeah they include a gigabit ethernet port which is really useful for full quality 4k, amazing how many cheaper streaming devices only have 10/100 ports which I suppose is adequate if all you do is stream Netflix.

But to me it’s just cheaping out to save a dollar or two on the manufacturer’s part that with ethernet & protocol overhead could result in problems potentially even for 1080p streams. Whereas gigabit even with overhead and lackluster conditions you’re going to get 700-800mbps sustained. People think for 1080p bluray dumps for instance that oh bitrates are only around 40-50mbps average but if you fast forward, if you’re seeking around the actual bitrate being consumed jumps to double or more at times and that 100mbps port will choke on that and buffer whereas the gigabit will not flinch. And though I don’t use the playback speed option myself much Infuse does allow playing back at 1.5 and 2x speeds which consume around 1.5x and 2x the bitrate respectively.

But it’s just nice to not have to deal with wireless hiccups too.

I’m assuming you mean the first generation of the Apple TV 4k or the Apple TV HD, that is that your box is black in color? (reference: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101605)

The actual first generation Apple TV is white, originally debuted in 2007, has a hard drive as opposed to flash memory and runs a modified version of MacOS rather than modern tvOS. If you were indeed using the very first generation I’d be impressed you can do anything streaming related with it.

All generations after that have HDMI CEC support and IR remotes. How the volume is controlled can be changed via a setting in the settings app on the Apple TV but as mentioned you should make sure your TV has that setting on.

Additionally iPhones have a built in remote app and you should be able to change the volume using the buttons on the side of your phone while you have the app open and connected to your Apple TV (connection to the same WiFi network is necessary). You can access this remote by adding it to the control center from settings, typing remote in search or pulling down the control center from the top right, in the top right the music/now playing tile when clicked on has a button at the bottom that says “control other speakers and TVs” and when clicked will show a list, once one is selected there’s a button you can press to open the remote.

Here’s an Apple support page on volume control: https://support.apple.com/en-us/108789

Yes. An Apple TV will be about as private as you can get for something that supports mainstream streaming apps (running a mini-pc won’t allow better than 720p quality and you’ll struggle to get remotes to work, it’ll be a clunky experience via web browsers often). It will be a lot better than a smart TV, especially a Roku who are among the worst.

If you want a bit more privacy consider running a pihole and redirecting DNS traffic at your firewall to your pihole or blocking all DNS traffic not from your pihole. I run a firewall solution that includes DNS redirection and blocking and there are a lot of measurement endpoints for streaming apps that you can block without the app breaking so that’s another little ounce. This doesn’t require a ton more effort though it is more effort it can be a set and forget type of thing. Importantly this does not block in-app ads.

For me the fact they don’t have any ads is what sells me on it. I don’t want ads on my homescreen. I don’t even want them in the apps but getting that peace and lack of clutter on the homescreen is so nice.

Apple TVs are also just so smooth. Smart TV’s feel sluggish and pathetic compared to how well everything just works on a device that’s properly powered for the task and not constantly sucking up all your data.

Apple TVs also have a lot of Apple privacy settings though obviously some of them apps may not allow like many streaming apps require a location check at least intermittently for licensing reasons to prove you’re still in the country but you can limit it as much as possible.

If you have a decent wifi network and you know you’re not going to be streaming say homemade BluRay rips the wifi entry model is excellent (currently it supports wifi 6 and has a really good wifi chip). I personally run Plex and a media server so I choose the wifi+ethernet model to have the reliability of ethernet and don’t regret it but it’s understandable if your situation precludes being able to use a wired connection or you want to save the $20 extra they charge.

Break me? No. Really depress my mood? Probably no longer having Plex and my media collection. If my hard drives and back-ups all spontaneously combusted right after a trade war drove their prices through the roof x5 or something and I couldn’t afford to replace (and/or couldn’t find any to replace because of shortages) I would be quite sad. Additionally I’ve worked quite hard to curate my collection so losing it entirely in the first place would be depressing because of the amount of work required to rebuild it, encoding, scraping hard to scrape rarities, setting the posters just the way I like them, etc.

“Foreign bad actors” Sigh. This is propaganda framing.

The fact that reddit is astroturfed by the US government, US actors like Hillary’s campaign in 2016, etc is very well known. Reddit even did an oopsie many years ago admitting that the most active reddit city was a US air force base with influence operations located there, aka psyops, aka propaganda bots.

If it has foreign “bad actors” they don’t control the narrative, they don’t control the main big subs, they don’t have an in with the admin team, they don’t run even a large minority of bots.

If these mythical creatures people like you believe in (as a result of the US policy of always accuse your enemies of what you’re doing to hide it better) to pretend that the problems are all those evil foreigners do exist they exist as grains of sand caught in a mighty torrential river of US propaganda machines and influence operations. They exist hopeless. Helpless. With no friends on the admin team unlike the US propagandists, fighting a pointless fight where they are almost certainly subject to frequent, near immediate bans after mass downvotes by controlled moderators and/or mods who just are that happy to prevent any viewpoint but the US one from existing.

Even framing your question like this is a massive pushing of US propaganda. This isn’t so much a question as a weaponized trojan horse that starts from the point of view of the people who control the most bots and the narrative totally on reddit.

The only thing approaching foreign, non-US “bad actor” astroturfing and botting would have to be the zionist bot effort which is admin and main subs moderation team backed and also backed by the US government by the way who doesn’t care to get upset about it or raise it as an issue and demand it stop because they’re supplying weapons to that genocide.

I mean the way you state it is literally the line being pushed by US government censorship proponents who are angry any foreign voices, any voices but their own are getting through.

If you just don’t like ads AppleTV works great.

That said if you’re set on something less locked down you might look into Dune-HD boxes. They have some that have a dual OS. One is Android TV (not sure how mod-able) the other is Linux that can have other kinds of apps. They’re virtualized and accessible without a reboot. They have great codec support. Just realize only some of their models have the Android TV dual system thing.

They can block specific communities.

Previously there was this whole thing over lemmy world admins banning their piracy community so I would not be surprised if they were blocking certain dbzero communities as well out of their extremely cautious and risk averse nature.

In this case it’s looking like people trying to showcase their skill and possibly get bragging rights or at least a reputation for doing these attacks which they can use to earn money from others for these types of services.

Well it’s believed it entices users to click the malware to run by disguising itself as the last accessed folder with the same name and folder icon.

In that case having the option to always show extensions enabled would be helpful for trained users who care to be careful.

It’s not that interesting sounding given we know the NSA and eyes countries have developed compromised firmware for certain hard drives to enable true spread without interaction or hope of prevention. Whenever I see one of these I wonder if it’ll be a case of compromising the device itself but it’s this old stuff instead which can be defeated with a good security posture.

I use the pro in comparison because the non-pro version is even more dated on lesser hardware and going to be sluggish, lesser in capabilities than other alternatives in the android space.

For one it can’t (reliably) run a plex server or other services so there’s really no advantage other than brand loyalty to NVIDIA to buy the non-pro shield over say a Walmart Onn 4k for half that price. (And that’s the truth, you can’t reliably run other services on the non-pro shield without incurring a noticeable performance penalty and degradation if it’s even possible in the first place)

I compare apples to apples here or tried to be honest. ATV4K has 4GB RAM, Shield Pro has 3, there are various other reasons to compare them, they’re both the top of the line. Though as I mentioned if you want to compare the non-pro shield then there’s the smaller ATV4k which still has without buying an SD card 64GB of storage for $129.

As to “offers”. I used retail prices you use this which I consider dishonest and desperate. Not a credit to your side. Apple TVs regularly go on sale multiple times a year via official dealers like Amazon, Target, Costco. Shield’s rarely go on sale, if you’re talking about used or shady third party dealers then you’re not doing an honest apples to apples comparison.

Shield promoters are strange people to me in 2024. I don’t think you’ve taken a proper inventory of the landscape. People call apple users shills and so some of them are, but I see shills for various brands and people unfortunately taken in by them.

Yes it was revolutionary when it came out, now it’s not. That’s life when a company decides to abandon a product line for all intents and purposes and yes no hardware updates, not even a revision in 5 years signals stagnation. They don’t need a major processor upgrade but not bumping a few minor aspects of the hardware like the HDMI ports version or the WiFi for instance just shows they don’t consider it an important part of their brand and I’m not sure why you’d buy into something that could be sunsetted without any surprise come January.

And not dropping the price which is rather hefty and high considering costs should have gone down over time is also a not so nice sign of greed and inattention. Apple dropped their prices. No reason NVIDIA with its scale and buying power doesn’t have the ability to drop the price if they’re not going to at least actively develop it to justify it.

VLC is awful for network playback. It’s fine for local fines (though mpv is better) but playing network files you’re going to have pixelation, stuttering, all kinds of problems I can say from experience trying it on both wired and wireless connections. I strongly recommend Kodi, Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, etc over VLC for non-local playback that’s smoother and better.

Ad-free youtube is likely soon to go the way of the dodo given the aggressive moves by youtube to stop it and most people don’t need or want that on their TV because they’re interested in paid or FAST streaming services. You have eclectic tastes and needs and that’s fine but recommending that to your average person isn’t doing them a service. And it’s nice to think of others, not your own biases and unusual needs.

And most people don’t need an FTP server (an FTP server, serving what exactly given you’re talking about the non-pro and SD cards, that’s not a great experience compared to an ext hard drive, if you’re going to do that, go for the pro and connect an external spinning disk HDD or SSD via USB).

Most people don’t need a torrent client (and again on the non-pro you’re talking about downloading onto an SD card, major yikes don’t do that, again if you want to do that please recommend people the pro for USB drives and use that in your honest comparisons here).

Both the above also require investing in an SD card (or an external drive via USB for the pro which is the better way to go). Reliable non-trash (good brand, good speed) SD cards are going to drive up that cost you stated another $15+ dollars which puts even your non-pro “on sale” (good luck finding it) shield within $5 spitting distance of the ATV4K higher end 128GB model (to get that much storage on the non-pro shield via SD card of a decent brand and speed would absolutely put your costs in line with the ATV4k 128GB model).

You mention alternative launchers, most people don’t want to do that. Apple TV is ad free out of the box without mucking about with ADB and other things. Again consider the average user and how they’re not going to do that.

Apple TV 4K:

• no ads on homescreen
• updated near annually, last hw refresh 2023
• HDMI 2.1
• WiFi 6 / gigabit Ethernet
• 128GB internal storage
• $149 retail price ($129 for 64GB model that loses Ethernet for WiFi only)

Nvidia Shield Pro:

• ads on homescreen via google tv
• last hardware refresh 2019 (5 years)
• HDMI 2.0b
• WiFi 5 / gigabit Ethernet
• 16GB internal storage (USB 3 port for ext hard drive if desired)
• $199 retail price

Both support 4K, Dolby vision, atmos, etc. Apple’s dynamic frame rate switching actually works whereas NViDIA’s has bugs and been in beta hell for years.

For your average person without very specific needs like running a Plex server off the same hardware the Apple TV4K is as or more private than the shield at a cheaper price and under active development.

Which is so weird, because office is crapware. It’s terrible software.

If so then all the other offerings are even worse crapware.

In my experience Microsoft Office opens twice as fast reliably than LibreOffice (when I terminate the process responsible for keeping it ready it takes about the same amount of time but it’s no slower importantly).

Microsoft office is simply the best. It’s a fact. It can do tons of things that Libreoffice and OpenOffice cannot. It has tons of advanced features, it’s just a superior office suite.

Comparing LibreOffice to Microsoft Office is like comparing a Lexus SUV with the full package of options installed compared to a basic fleet Ford sedan. Yes both can do very basic things and if you just need to type some things or do very basic spreadsheets then they’re interchangeable.

But ask some slightly advanced things like sortable tables (Excel does easily) and suddenly only MS office can do that and the LibreOffice people tell you to pound sand and use a database which doesn’t make sense for a lot of tasks when you may just be preparing some data for example for a presentation or some quick financial work (I’m talking about stuff for myself, not a professional accountant), etc. Take a look at design options in MS Word compared to LibreOffice writer. Both have title and header styling options but the MS office ones simply look more professional, cleaner, and they have more options you can easily tweak. If I’m presenting a report I absolutely want to do it in MS office because I can make it look neater and nicer with less effort.

Businesses use it because 1) they’re used to using it, it’s a standard among businesses and the public, and it’s maximally compatible with files created by it so interoperability isn’t an issue as long as you too use it, 2) it’s the best. It has more options than others, it can do more things. It has more depth. It has extensive support and documentation and it has good integration between the different pieces of software.

It’s like comparing GIMP to Photoshop. Sorry. I think FOSS is a great philosophy and I hate Microsoft and Adobe as much as anyone but in practice Photoshop is miles and miles beyond GIMP in capabilities. And this is coming from someone who has GIMP installed and not Photoshop (because PS is expensive).

The extended suite of MS office has always been meh. But it doesn’t matter. Word, Excel, PowerPoint all work great and are exceptional tools at the top of their class. Could they be better? Yes. But they don’t have to be the best possible, they just have to be the best compared to other offerings by a country mile and they are if your needs are any more complex than the occasional letter to grandma.

Does that mean I think people should pay for MS Office? Not when there are ways to get it free with no cracking or risk.

If you block ALL traffic from it? Sure. It’s possible but more involved and requires the right hardware to block their tracking domains while leaving streaming apps working.

It’s best not to use smart TVs as well smart TVs. The apps they have are almost always slower or inferior in some way to the versions you get on streaming devices, updated less often, etc. I recommend pairing a TV with a quality streaming device like an Nvidia shield (or shield pro) or an AppleTV*. Alternatively if you want something a little cheaper in Androidtv space there is the Walmart brand Onn 4k pro.

*warning with Apple is while they’re pretty good on privacy (meh, there are no excellent choices that support streaming apps in 1080p quality) and don’t have ads their app-store is a bit more locked down. They have all the major streaming services but if you do high seas type stuff it will be more involved and difficult. Though if you have a local media collection (source your own discs or high seas) and run Plex or Jellyfin they have apps for both of those that work great as well as Infuse which usually requires a subscription unless you don’t need 4k or any proprietary audio codecs like dolby for any of your media. I personally can say I enjoy my AppleTV 4K and I think it’s a great device but I run my own media-server and have some common streaming services I pay for.