Yeah, solid take. Even today, the vast vast majority of people don’t even realize Windows isn’t free because every single PC sold, comes with it, preinstalled.
Microsoft’s real dominance is having schools (pre and post secondary), businesses, governments and just about anyone they can force a license on to run their software. Windows, Office (a third of my first year computer course was learning MS Office ffs), etc.
That’s why they got slammed with a multi million dollar class action: www.thatsuitemoney.ca for manipulating their licensing and subsequent fees associated.
Sadly, a pittance when compared to how much they got from all those shady deals. Piracy doesn’t even touch them.
I don’t get why you’d settle for shitty quality music because it’s “just personal.” Your ears. Audacity isn’t the only way to take songs from Spotify. But removing the DRM isn’t possible, so you have to basically re-encode it and that means quality loss.
You can try: muconvert.com/how-to/remove-drm-from-spotify/ or just search for “remove DRM from Spotify”. Plenty of options. But all involve a loopback and basic re-encode to strip the DRM. That means quality loss.
macOS has an app called Loopback that can basically allow you to intercept and route any audio and then capture it. The UI helps see what’s possible. rogueamoeba.com/loopback/
Look man. A private tracker is a bunch of dudes that run a website. That’s it. It just so happens the site hosts torrent links. It’s not Google with billions at its disposal to craft sophisticated surveillance level tech.
Most of the time things like maintaining a good ratio, banning for hit and runs, etc. are automated, done by bots. No person wants to search databases for single users.
With that said, assume admins can and will see things you post, even DMs. But that’s about it. Access to torrents on the tracker are all automatic too.
99% of private trackers use it to generate money. Either they have a deal with seedboxes, VPNs, or find others ways to monetize the site by donations, etc.
That’s it. Just use a VPN to protect yourself from actual legal threats. Don’t worry about the tracker as a vector.
The entire “pOePle wIlL CAncEl if itS Ez tho” mentality is the same as “if you don’t keep people in the office at their desk and monitor them, they won’t get work done.”
All it did was force others to adopt the same practice and now no one can’t get out of anything smoothly. Maybe 1 out of 10 as a delete button. And even then, that’s just account deletion on the front end. Nothing about all the data they have stored.
Just another douche trying to capitalize on misspellings or close enough URLs to shill their ads, or javascript mouse clicks, etc. There are tons of imposter sites for the bigger public trackers.