MudMan

Well, you know, Europe can’t just take every refugee from an underdeveloped country that just wants to migrate for economic reasons. There needs to be some border control for these people, otherwise it won’t be sustainable.

Nah, I’m kidding, it’s all racism, if you’re an American it’s probably fine.

Well, I’m kinda kidding there, too, it’s still a ton of work and paperwork to get a proper visa that allows work and permanent residency, but it IS much, much easier if you’re a relatively affluent American.

No, the bans stem from the EULA. I am not breaching the EULA. Whether Plex can verify that or not is not much of a concern for me.

But to be clear, I have zero to lose here. The outcome of Plex banning me for not breaking their EULA (for some reason, which is technically possible but unlikely) is the exact same as the outcome of me dropping Plex in case they ban me. In both cases the only thing that happens is I’m not using Plex anymore.

Also, in your hypothetical Plex already knows the stuff you are worried about. The SSO has nothing to do with it. Plex doesn’t need data from Google to know, they already have your personal information.

I guess adding to the list of reasons to use Plex “being berated by online randos wanting to be performatively tech savvy”. Which, again, changes nothing practical, but hey.

You might not care about it, but a lot of us do. Nobody is trying to convince you to stop using Plex, we’re just trying to explain why we really do not want to use it ourselves

No you are not. This thread straight up opens on “why would anybody use Plex” and this whole branch is about how people don’t want anybody using Google for login.

You are presenting a lot of great hypotheticals and I’ll be happy to stop using Plex if and when they stop being hypotheticals. They are, though, so I don’t particularly mind.

Especially because we’ve moved from “oh, maybe get your family to not use Google to log in” to “actually, get them to move to F-droid or install from source and do so under proper DNS filtering to stop telemetry gathering”.

Friend, if people’s relatives were willing to install their Plex client from source they wouldn’t need anybody to host a Plex server for them. What the hell are you going on about and how detached are you from how people use software?

I swear, online… man, “posers” is so harsh, but I can’t find a better word. They always pretend they are running some top secret off-the-grid operation like big corpo is coming after them specifically. Your data is probably not that tightly kept (mostly because a bunch of it probably doesn’t depend on you) and it’s not that much of a priority.

Oh, and while I get that you get a kick of repeating what your understanding of US law is at me, over here backing up to additional media is explicitly supported by the right to private copy. As is, implicitly breaking DRM.

Not that it matters because nobody is enforcing these at individuals for private use anyway because the rules being sought are absurd and holders know it and they just want scary tools to wave in front of individual users and to actually deploy against major sharers. You are playing out this weird scenario where a company goes to Plex to get your name as if Plex doesn’t have a business built on helping you do the thing you think they’re chasing you for and has a ton more money they could be sued for. It’s nonsense. The reality of it is it makes you feel cool and savvy to secure your home computer as if it held state secrets.

And that’s fine, but don’t act like anything else is insanity. It’s kind of obnoxious.

Well, if you have an issue with people knowing you use Plex at all, then… tough luck, because I hate to tell you this, but a media server needs a client and it’s a vanishingly small group of people that will use either Plex or Jellyfin clients and not let Apple, Google, LG, Samsung or whatever other device is running the client software that this is happening.

I give zero craps about whether Google knows I or anybody else uses Plex via their login because they already know this form the Google Play Store, along with the manufacturer of every TV we collectively own.

And for the record I do not live in the US and the way their absolutely idiotic copyright loopholes apply here is very much in question. It doesn’t get tested in court much because the times it has been it didn’t go particularly great for copyright holders. Private copying owned media is a right regulated by law here and I will continue to do so. If a corporation wants to deliberate with our local courts whether my owning a drive that happens to not be super picky about on-disc DRM I don’t have anything particularly intense going on this week.

Ironically, in our own dumb legal implementation we are allowed to back up movies but there is a carved exception for software, so making a copy of a game you own is a bigger deal. Go figure.

Yeah, you kinda got to the breakdown in this conversation. Google sure knows that you’re using Plex.

That is not a concern, though. Plex is a perfectly legal piece of software.

I think people are taking me saying “Google doesn’t know what you’re streaming with Plex, but Plex does, so that’d be a bigger issue” as irrelevant because they assume Plex is itself a liability, which it isn’t.

It’s weird how corporate copyright assumptions have seeped to the mainstream and people assume that anything you do with your owned media is illegal unless you’re paying somebody.

I don’t know that Google gets to log your access in that scenario, Plex is just using their login system.

Plex sure does know, though, whether you log in via Google or not, so “I don’t share videos using google to log in” is still a bit of a weird statement and not the reason you’d be worried about your piracy habits.

Incidentally, if a friend or family member is hosting a service and “tells me these are the options to sign in to the service I’m hosting” I’d tell them to go away, which is something my own relatives have done to me a bunch when my proposed self-hosted alternative isn’t perfectly smooth and just as convenient as the corpo alternative.

Not surprisingly, the only two selfhosted things my family has ever used are Plex and Home Assistant.

Fully agreed. Everybody is betting it’ll get there eventually and trying to jockey for position being ahead of the pack, but at the moment there isn’t any guarantee that it’ll get to where the corpos are assuming it already is.

Which is not the same as not having better autocomplete/spellcheck/“hey, how do I format this specific thing” tools.

Yeah, the AI corpos are putting a lot of effort into parsing big contexts right now. I suspect because they think (probably correctly) that coding is one of the few areas where they could get paid if their AIs didn’t have the memory of a goldfish.

And absolutely agreed that making sure the FOSS alternatives keep pace is going to be important. I’m less concerned about hating the entire concept than I am about making sure they don’t figure out a way to keep every marginally useful application behind a corporate ecosystem walled garden exclusively.

We’ve been relatively lucky in that the combination of PR brownie points and general crappiness of the commercial products has kept an incentive to provide a degree of access, but I have zero question that the moment one of these things actually makes money they’ll enshittify the freely available alternatives they control and clamp down as much as possible.

It’s pretty random in terms of what is or isn’t doable.

For me it’s a big performance booster because I genuinely suck at coding and don’t do too much complex stuff. As a “clean up my syntax” and a “what am I missing here” tool it helps, or at least helps in figuring out what I’m doing wrong so I can look in the right place for the correct answer on something that seemed inscrutable at a glance. I certainly can do some things with a local LLM I couldn’t do without one (or at least without getting berated by some online dick who doesn’t think he has time to give you an answer but sure has time to set you on a path towards self-discovery).

How much of a benefit it is for a professional I couldn’t tell. I mean, definitely not a replacement. Maybe helping read something old or poorly commented fast? Redundant tasks on very commonplace mainstream languages and tasks?

I don’t think it’s useless, but if you ask it to do something by itself you can’t trust that it’ll work without singificant additional effort.