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PSA: Twitch's 'Activity Sharing' Feature Exposes Your Activity By Default (betanews.com)
The 'Activity Sharing' feature that Twitch announced on Thursday aims to notify your entire Friends list if you're doing something interesting. The video games streaming platform hopes that it would bolster the engagement level, as people will want to know what their friends are doing. The problem is that this feature is on by default. An anonymous reader writes: While the feature is fairly harmless, it is understandable that some people won't want others to easily spy on their behaviors. As an example, maybe you are watching a Hello Kitty game stream -- some folks might be embarrassed to have that displayed under their name. To turn it off, simply deselect the box as seen in this image.
On your default what?
Spying on you? From Amazon? Why I never!
You mean the one with essentially no context and with no accompanying instructions of how to find this setting?
Hint: it's not in 'Settings'
Twitch caters to the demographic that have panic attacks if there is a single nano-second in their lives that the rest of the world can't witness. They are just giving their customers what they want.
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The problem is that this feature is on my default
That's funny because it's not on my default.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I hope this doesn't happen with my Grindr account.
I mean, hey, I love metal-working and welding just as much as the next guy, but I don't need to have the world know what tools are in my shed.
That pretty much eliminates everything I've ever done on Twitch.
I think one would be more embarrassed to watch a Sakura * (not Wars) or Senran Kagura stream.
Use livestreamer.
Livestreamer works at least with VLC and MPV (personally I choose the latter). If your player supports the video compression formats used, and supports reading from stdin, your player should work as well.
Livestreamer supports a number of streaming sites, such as youtube, twitch, hitbox, etc. Some more streaming services (livecoding.tv for example) are available if you go through the effort of grabbing a development version.
In a similar vein, for grabbing pre-recorded video, use youtube-dl. Youtube-dl supports a wide range of sites (mostly ones catered to pornography, as there are so many), again including twitch, youtube, probably hitbox, etc.
If you use Arch Linux, both of these are available directly from the Arch package repository.