In Portland, Ore., Brittany Trahan started buying DVDs rather than paying for Netflix and Apple TV, while Lisa Shannon has been relying on public transit instead of taking an Uber. And in McDonough, Ga., Brian Seymour II has been embracing the cold to shop locally instead of buying through Amazon.
They’re among a growing number of Americans participating in a boycott this month, targeting tech companies who, they believe, are not doing enough to stand up against President Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown.
I’m know kids these days who are preferring a dumb phone, now physical media is making a comeback.
Has our surveillance economy finally backfired enough that people are starting to reclaim ownership? God I hope so.
We’re the closest we’ve been since the cloud started, but sadly, people are still addicted to the almighty algorithm.
Absolutely, and it’s about time.
lol. I was boycotting more than I thought. Seriously though its practically a fight to do things without a cell phone now.
My rapidly diminishing purchasing power due to high inflation, tariffs, higher interest rates, higher taxes, higher junk fees, and stagnant wages is forcing me to boycott as much as I can, whether I like it or not.
I feel that.
And specifically an Android or IOS phone, and bit by bit, a sanctioned, non-rooted OS.
I mean without one entirely. Like a non app option. I mean even if its a super libre free as in freedom hardware and software with stallmans personal seal of approval I still don’t want to be forced to use only that one option. I should be able to use a web portal or mail a check or come in person.
My semi-long-term goal is pocket Linux and just a cellular AP. There’s just nothing Linux-wise that’s not ancient and expensive AF.
TIL I am unintentionally boycotting
What happened to good old pirating? We used to show them middle finger for wanting single payment from us, and now we do subscriptions for stuff we barely even use?
They changed tactics.
Pirating is work. You need a little technical expertise for debrid, or to set up a media server, or even to keep a bunch of USB storage organized. And while it’s not that hard, when they couple taking care of all that for you AND running your likes through an algo and introducing you to new content regularly, your average person sees enough benefit, if the price is right.
So they introduce a service, get the price down to 10-15 a month. Get you in, get your preferences, sell them to the highest bidder and slowly crank back content to make more profit.
For the music it’s worse, they’re fucking over the artists AND selling your data.
When the cost in price or morality gets too high, they’ll all pirate.
Some never stopped.
Pirates have historically been some of the biggest DVD collectors.
I have like 5 CD books filled with burnt DVDs of pirated shit. 😃
I used to buy the screenable CD’s and had an epson that could print labels, and I had the largest netflix delivery sub.
I trashed all that media recently. All those books fit on a large thumb drive these days.
Most of them are PS2 games, and I still have a functional slim PS2 (modded, of course)…
Discs from libraries!
Participating in a boycott this month? You should be doing all that stuff period.
It’s marketing, my friend.
Just inconvenience yourself for this month for the greater good.
Ohh month’s already up… he that wasn’t that bad was it, maybe keep going?
Nah shop Amazon when it costs them money. As in, you know you are buying at or below cost.
I just bought a few things from Amazon, cheaper than any competition to begin with, but also used the last of my Amazon rewards balance.
Then put everything on a 0% interest offer and religiously pay the minimum until the last bill, and pay it all off then. Just don’t forget.
Use them when it benefits you significantly more than it benefits them.
I have been buying a hell of a lot more stuff on eBay, Newegg, B&H, etc lately. And most of the cheap consumer junk that I would buy on Amazon is even cheaper on AliExpress if I’m willing to wait a little longer.
I was kinda pissed when I bought a reasonably priced commodity on eBay and it was delivered in Amazon packaging by an Amazon truck, though.
Newegg Commerce, Inc. (NASDAQ: NEGG) is a publicly traded company. It is majority-owned by a Chinese multinational technology firm. Key ownership details include:
Majority Shareholder: Hangzhou Lianluo Interactive Information Technology Co., Ltd. (also known as Liaison Interactive) owns approximately 54.5% to 57.4% of the company.
Founder Stake: Fred Chang, the company’s founder and former CEO, retains a significant ownership stake of roughly 22.1%.
Significant Individual Shareholder: Vladimir Galkin owns about 22.5% of the shares.
Public Float: The remaining shares (approximately 11%) are held by the general public and institutional investors.
I didn’t see bezos or mush in that list.
In a baby steps scenario, I’d count that as a marginal win.
That’s too much work. I just don’t buy from Amazon.
>buy hard drives from Amazon to build your own AWS hosting without Amazon
Ref: I’ll allow it
I was kinda pissed when I bought a reasonably priced commodity on eBay and it was delivered in Amazon packaging by an Amazon truck, though.
I’ve noticed this too, if the same thing’s slightly more on eBay it’s probably someone ordering it for you on Amazon and pocketing the difference
If that happened to me i’d 1 star their asses so fast.
Yep. Good to know that soulless cretins who just want to make a buck off the backs of people with scruples are still out there.
Yeah, a friend of mine was recently buying markers, and a lot of companies also just… Don’t have their own stores. They either redirect to Amazon, or if they to they still fulfill it through Amazon. Etsy is also full of resellers.
Theres like 80% of the population that still actively shop at Target and Amazon Prime. People buy from Whole Foods instead of the small “mom and pop” European market on the corner.
I have not been to Target or shopped at Amazon since end of 2024. It was surprising that those 2 habits were the two easiest to correct. If people only knew how easy it is… Deleting Facebook was easy too.
DeGoogling is very hard. I’m still working on it but the progress has made a huge dent in the amount of new personal info available for them to sell, or so I hope. It’s useful to start a list of accounts with emails you need to change and just block YouTube from phone.
Blurays are better quality than streaming.
4K Bluray is the highest quality you’ll ever get in your home by like, a lot.
Streaming is a regression.
4K Bluray is the highest quality you’ll ever get in your home by like, a lot.
Not any of James Cameron’s “remasters” released in the last couple years.
Streaming is progress in terms of convenience, but the trade-off is a lower image quality and forgoing ownership of the media you buy/consume.
These days I buy Blurays and rip them to my Jellyfin server. Worth it for me, but I would hardly call that process convenient.
I stream movies using Alldebrid via Kodi or Stremio. This way I have the convenience of streaming and the quality of BluRays. I buy the BluRay if I like the movie and the disc is on sale
Me to but I skip the purchasing BluRay and ripping it part.
Do you ever use any of the Bluray “connected” features where your disc wants internet access to fulfill the function? I must say, that’s a major turnoff for me.
Now it’s expensive to even build one of those servers. I just play my discs and rip them to a hdd collection. I just do it the ghetto way by having a usb hub hooked up to an nvidia shield with some hdds.
It’s not. I have a server with dozens of TBs of storage which is a 2011 Lenovo tower I got for free out of someone’s garage. It doesn’t take a whole lot to store things.
Yeah but HDDs are going up in price now
I got started in high school, broke high school me shucked drives from used computers.
A lot of people throw away perfectly good computers. Or sell them for very cheap because they take up space.
Those reject computers, if you find the right one, could have 500gb-2gb ssds in them that are perfect for media server usage.
To a degree yes, but not nearly as bad as other components right now. You can at the very least buy a single “small” HDD like 4TB for pretty cheap that is far more than what you’d get from big tech on an average storage plan.
This is subject to change but as of today, you can get this for cheap
That’s good. Main thing stopping me from doing this is space but glad it’s still possible for others.
If you wanted something to get started for streaming and you are space limited (in your home) I would recommend this as your server:
- https://a.co/d/00MhaEgG the Beelink S13 which is under $300 and will serve your streaming needs for a very long time.
And for storage you could get this 4TB external drive and plug it into the Beelink and sit it right on top for $130:
And if you have an Nvidia shield I’m pretty sure you could also skip the S13 and just plug the drive into your shield and run Jellyfin or what have you directly on that. I know lots of people brag about their big overbuilt servers, but you don’t have to go down that road at all if all you want is to store and stream your media.
Not really, Jellyfin will run just fine on old hardware. You don’t need a lot of power to do it. That said, if a USB HDD works for you, that’s fine too.
I assumed that they didn’t have old hardware lying around, in which case they are not incorrect as they will need at the very least 8gb to run the server effectively which by itself is approx $100 unless your looking at the second hand market.
The cool thing about USB HDDs - when one dies, you just plug in another one - no issues with funky formatting, windows/linux compatibility or whatever. I had the power supply die on a QNAP NAS once… only once because even though the HDDs inside the NAS were fine, QNAP basically made the data on them inaccessible from any other system - no more proprietary NAS systems for me, thanks.
your also foregoing the special commentary and otber BTS content.
Doesn’t blue ray suck at archiving because their data is more prone to corruption? The only advantage they have is larger storage space.
They, like DVDs, have a lifespan of ~20 years but can last a lot longer if kept in a cool and dry spot.
But also you can rip the discs and store them digitally on hard drives or whatever :)
Odd choice just pirate and teach others how to aswell. Hurts in this case Netflix way more
Pirating can be legally cut off. DVDs can’t
let them keep trying, then
I’d say it is the opposite. DVDs can stop being made.
They’ve been trying for how long now? The pirates always win in the end.
With streaming companies owning the content, buying DVDs is just another way of financially supporting the same companies for worse quality.
Even when one piracy platform is taken down, there are new ones launched in their place. Nothing guarantees that DVDs will continue to be produced in perpetuity, just as digital copies of video games are progressively becoming less and less prevalent.
Matt Damon argued that the loss of DVD sales is why such garbage comes out of hollywood these days.
He also recently mentioned about his new Netflix movie that Netflix said “it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.”
Buy second hand, rip, sell again.
Yard sales, pawn shops, thrift stores, and the humble library system can help mitigate that money working it’s way up to the coked up pedos that run the film studios.
Theres a way to combine the best of both of them :)
Yes but after a while you may start to yearn for some rarer things as well. There’s still lots of pre-lost media out there on rotting dvds waiting for custodianship that I haven’t been able to find online. There’s also some newer HD rereleases having single channel and lower quality or something, so finding the original dvds is better sometimes.
Around here the used DVD market (thrift stores, used book stores) has been collapsing - prices down below $1 per disc, and everybody trying to get rid of their old stock. Selections are getting thin.
How does one keep their system secure with pirating? A large mkv of a new movie seems like an effective container to deliver a payload.
What is the mkv going to do? It is not a executable format.
So long as you are careful about file formats you shouldn’t have any issues, but there are a decent amount of measures you can take.
- Do all your downloads inside a VM that is sandboxed away from your main system, and then monitor the system processes when you run the file. 1.1 if you really want to isolate it watch things on that VM, but that’s a bit of a pain
- Have your download system on a vlan that isolates it from the rest of your network.
- Only download from well trusted communities and make sure to verify checksums.
- With a little bit of time to kill you can learn how to run a sandboxed video player on Linux or could go the extra mile and run a system like nixos which is isolated by design
It doesn’t have to do with device security, but you should only do downloads over a VPN with a kill switch enabled to stop your ISP from sending you a cease and desist letter. Keep in mind that you are just trading your ISP for your VPN server when you do that though, so you may want to pick one that has been proven to not record logs, I use PIA for that reason, but I have also heard that mullvad also got subpoenad and demonstrated that they didn’t hold logs.
Is TOR a practical alternative for VPN? never tried it, but it seems tempting…
I wouldn’t consider it so. Imo it has a different intended use case.
Similar to a a VPN’s server, if a TOR exit node is compromised, so is your traffic.
However, TOR is significantly slower than just torrenting over a VPN. It speed loss could make a 15min download take 6-8hours. For a movie that could be a few gbs in size it would take even longer.
I’m not too well versed in it, but just based upon how it works I would imagine you would be at greater risk without taking at least as many precautions as the normal internet.
In theory, sure. In practice, we don’t see much of that.
Don’t run the video player with administration credentials, and keep the video player up to date and it’s likely to be fine.
Carefully.
Seriously, I don’t know of any/many issues caused by downloading and playing a legitimate video file (MP4/MKV/AVI).
I feel like, if there are, those are being saved for a nation state level attack and not Fred downloading Shrek 2 questionably.
Dang it, I’m already boycotting them because i want to actually own my media and support local businesses and a bunch of other reasons, how am I supposed to boycott them harder to include capitulation to Trump?!
Help your friends
The last two years I started going to garage sales for DVDs/Blu Rays.
It’s been great. You can get like 5-10 movies for the price of a month of Netflix. Then you can sell them next spring for $5-10 and buy $5-10 worth from someone else of stuff you haven’t seen.
although I doubt this will get much of any mainstream coverage, as someone who has been setting up/administering a number of plex servers for the last ~20 years, I have noticed a rather remarkable uptick in not only setting up new servers, but a flood of interest in membership for the handful that I administer.
This has had the interesting side-effect of renewing interest in the fact that you can borrow DVDs/BRDs for free from your local library for the purposes of ripping them. Believe me-- you may think that, in 2026, everything is available for download very easily… no, it isn’t Yes, much more is widely available at (generally) much higher quality than it used to be, but it all relies on how popular a show/film/album is (and continues to be). If you’re looking to dl something new/current, you’ll very likely have a 2 week - 3 month window it will very reliably be available to download. after that, whether it’s available (and for how long) depends entirely on how popular it remains.
Example: The “New Trek” that most old-school Trekkies hate is less-available than, say, a mega download of all 7 seasons of DS9. DS9 is probably available (as a single download and as single seasons/episodes) much more easily than any episode of STD. Or, even, the JJ Abrahms films. Shit, even the Rifftrax commentary version of ST II has more seeders on more torrent sites than any of the 3 JJ Treks. And, to put a pin in this… Star Trek Lower Decks is even more available now than it was when it was airing.
The cool flip-side of this: I never got to see the iconic Fritz Lang film M in the pre-torrent era because I could never find a Blockbuster’s that carried it in stock. But, as soon as that barrier to see it was removed (availability), I got to see the prototypical murder mystery thriller film which, still today, holds up as pretty awesome.
Dusted off the mp3s too. Long live VLC
If you have Plex, Plexamp does a great job of streaming music outside the home and having a host of other features (playing similar songs / keeping the playing going / music by mood / etc).
Just missed Bandcamp Friday. Also, get u some flac.
With how much storage costs these days? I’ll stick with MP3.
convert them to vorbis. much better quality at mp3 sizes
Not that familiar with that format, ill look into it. Thanks!
This. If you want to be sure that the flacs are worth it, go do one of those 128kbps mp3 vs 320 mp3 vs flac tests and see if you can hear the difference. I can’t, so I just do 128 mp3s and save the storage. Almost 2k songs in 10gb of space :D
I ripped to flacs not because I can hear a difference but I can reencode to any format I want and never have to rip again.
The website would be better if there was also links or resources to alternate.
But also that’s hard depending on where you are.
targeting tech companies who, they believe, are not doing enough to stand up against President Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown
Oh ffs, they’re not doing enough because they’ve submitted to him! They literally went to his inauguration to kiss the ring!
But better to wake up late then never I suppose
And before that, where did people think money-grubbing, morally-bankrupt billionaires vacuuming up all their data was going to lead? This was all but inevitable, especially when, without outrage-based engagement algorithms there is no President Trump. These scumbags prop each other up. Don’t give them a dime or let them profit off your attention.
No, we don’t “Believe they are not doing enough to stand up against”, that’s slimy spineless wording.
We “KNOW that they are ACTIVELY HELPING”
