There’s a part of me that has become annoyed that i’m forced to pay for a vpn to now access the entirety of the internet. I don’t blame the vpn provider, though. --Nope, they are not the ones I blame…
Who pays for vpns anymore. Isn’t proton VPN free?
kinda, but you have to pay for access to more than 3 servers. protonvpn has a paid tier (faster speeds, more servers, p2p support) – which people do pay for – putting them in the ‘okay’ category.
also, it’s a general rule that all ‘completely free!’ vpns sell your data, keep and sell logs(thats why they can afford to be free), have really slow speeds due to user overloads etc.
I only use vpns for porn hub lol so I guess I didn’t realize people need vpns for more than that haha
How does proton cover that expense?
Aren’t most torrent sites not based in the US to begin with?
Has never stopped the world bully from bullying others: https://legalnewsfeed.com/2024/07/09/z-library-administrators-flee-house-arrest-in-argentina-ahead-of-u-s-extradition/
True, but I think the world bully is about to find out that it isn’t the world bully anymore now that it’s bullying itself.
This is about foreign websites
It’s going after ISPs, Google, Cloudflare that allow access to them
Also it’s great to see the Democrats prioritizing this atm
Sounds like their strategy is to force US companies to block access to piracy sites.
I already run my torrent client through a non-US VPN so this can literally be bypassed by adding this to my prowlarr docker compose:
network_mode: service:gluetun
Thank you, I’ve been using my own docker image that adds in the PIA scripts and creates a Dante SOCKS5 server which works decently but I’d like something a bit more provider agnostic in case I want to change.
What VPN do you recommend?
gluetun works with any openvpn provider. i prefer proton as ive already got a ton of mail services through them… the vpn is basically a freebie.
I don’t really have a recommendation atm, I used to use mullvad but for torrenting I feel like the lack of port forwarding (once they removed that feature) was hurting my ability to seed so I switched to proton. I also recently added Usenet into my mix and since many providers bundle a VPN subscription - and mine in particular supposedly also supports port forwarding (usenetdirect bundles a ghost path VPN subscription), I’m gonna try to get it to work with that so I don’t have to pay for a VPN separately but I haven’t tried it yet.
Do they not know the concept of piracy? That’s like Walmart and Target backing a new bill to stop shoplifting.
They could just make a better service. Between the password sharing, and everything being scattered everywhere, what did they expect? I’m going to pay for half a dozen services and still not get to watch what I want? Or I may be able to watch it and pay for the privilege to see ubskippable ads? You can only beat us with so many sticks before we stop feeling it. Come back with a carrot.
It’s much harder when all your ISPs and the world’s largest DNS resolvers block the IPs or resolving the DNS, which is what this dystopian bill proposes. Make no mistake, this is Orwellian censorship masquerading as piracy protection.
Then we have to build a community DNS 🤷🏻♀️ you can’t really block free internet
It’s hard and complex, but they can. And they aim to.
We’ve been able to chat with people inside failed/repressive states forever even though their governments very much want to block it. Blocking communication between people who want to talk is incredibly difficult. They can make it hard but I’m not sure they can stop it completely.
North Korea was able to stop it. Granted, they literally just don’t allow any of the tech in the hands of the average person with threat of torture or death. But dystopian is as dystopian does.
I see your point, though, and it’ll likely always be possible to bypass those controls, at least for people with the know-how. But that’s not the average citizen. Let’s do what we can to ensure it doesn’t come to this in the first place.
I mean, why not onion routing and tor?
Tor can be blocked.
Corporate legislation, making America Great as always.
Not in this particular case, not yet, you can view it’s status HERE and it’s still at 0 cosponsors.
Hard to discuss this bill since the text isn’t even on there yet. But apparently companies expressing approval have seen it.
Difficulty aside, it’s currently a non-bill as far as anybody should be concerned. There is a lot going on and this isn’t really something until it gets more representatives behind it.
I mean ffs the new admin struck down Net Neutrality already, where are the people concerned by that?
They weren’t worried about it last time and they’re not worried about it now.
My only faith in the system is that they will screw over such a wide number of people that it’ll piss people off enough to care.
Best laws money can buy!
Oh no!
Anyway.
It is impossible to ban piracy. The whole concept is that it’s not legal to begin with.
I bet Lars Ulrich is so proud that he killed music piracy back when he killed napster.
Except wait…no he didn’t he killed A service. Meaning singular. The concept of piracy moved on. We got limewire and torrents.
The ONLY thing that has slowed (if not stopped) music piracy is making the content readily and easily available in a convienent consumption method at a reasonable price.
Shocking, I know.
The invention of iTunes CHARGING money for music in a (at the time) new more convienent method of music consumption at a reasonable price did leaps and bounds more to destroy piracy than Napsters downfall ever could.
Now if only video services would learn this lession. Because it’s the same lession. I don’t know how they missed the memo on this.
Put your video in one centralized place. Make it hassle free to watch. Charge a reasonable price. Piracy dies overnight.
And just to prove it, show of hands. Who here would go through the effort and risk of pirating, if Netflix had everything you wanted to watch, for $5 a month? Who here would say no, and still pirate? Reply below and tell me if you would still pirate with those conditions?
But instead, netflix is pushing $20 a month, and the video hosting is fractured among multiple hosts, all of which overcharge, AND want to serve ads.
Oh hey, right on cue. It’s a skull and bones flag approaching.
Word… this is why I used spotify for a long time, when it used to be a good service… pirating wasn’t worth the hassle.
now almost everything is worth the hassle
Yep exactly.
They’ve pushed 6+ services now so it cost that cable used to so people are unsubbing and “cutting the cord” again
About 10 years ago, I signed up for a seedbox for torrenting purposes. USD 15/month, which was roughly the same as Netflix at the time. Since then, Netflix has repeatedly raised prices, dropped content, and added ads. On the other hand, I’m still paying $15/month for that seedbox, and they’ve upgraded my storage capacity and bandwidth allotment multiple times.
Video services involve bigger files, subtitles availability, streaming load less evenly spread over hours.
But I personally think there are ways involving chunk encryption (one key for many users for the same chunk, but not the same key for everyone ; obviously in the end it’s decrypted and decoded at user’s machine, so opportunity for piracy is not avoidable) and something like bittorrent to make commercial video streaming both convenient for users and not such a technical challenge for distributors.
I gind it kind of ironic that if the streaming services were federated and your subscription applied proportionally to the services where you watched different shows this problem would solve itself
I would still pirate. I like to have the files instead of proprietary apps
What if they gave you the files, with an easy download button ( with rate limits on downloads per user to avoid mass abuse )? Then, Netflix is basically providing a debrid service, which many people who pirate already pay more than 5$ for. Your VPN for torrenting is likely more than 5$. It’s already trivially easy to rip a movie off a website ( even with DRM ), so this is not a real content control loss for them.
If they offered a service like GOG for movies I think it would be worth it. I don’t have much time for movies though so I actually will buy several films a year on UHD Blu-ray. I only really pirate films that are either out of print or not available in my country on disc.
Funilly enough as somebody who has been using the Internet since being a working class teen in a poor European nation in the early 90s and thus knowing all about pirating, GoG is what made me stop pirating games (and even after they came up with GoG Galaxy I still kept downloading offline installers, plus my purchases in Steam have always been pretty limited in comparison to those in GoG exactly because in Steam my access to install a game can be removed at any time) whilst things like Netflix never stopped my pirating of Movies and TV-Series exactly because it was a streaming service which I would have to pay forever to maintain access to the Films and Series I liked rather than a Film and Series store were I could buy to keep (and, adding to this, during the peak period of VHS tapes and DVDs I actually did buy a lot of physical media).
Anecdotal, I know, but it’s funny that my behaviour over the years almost perfect matches what you describe.
I want to like GoG but their Linux support can be pretty awful at times. It took over a week for X4 to update the Linux version on GoG compared to steam that in the end I refunded it and bought on steam. Also proton is pretty nice to have.
Yeah, GoGo need to improve their Linux support since at the moment they seem to just “go along with it” without putting any effort into it
That said, with stuff like Lutris (can only speak of that since I never used Heroic) which can use GoG’s API to access your account and download games and has GoG-specific install scripts, it’s also a reasonably seamless experience to game in Linux from GoG and none of it is tied to a proprietary vendor solution like Steam + Proton, so it’s a lot more flexible and friendly for those who want to do their own tweaking - for example all my games in Lutris run sandboxed using firejail for extra security and blocking network access, but I can’t do that for Steam.
GoG is pretty much a totally open solution (you need not use their API and can just download an offline installer and install it however you see fit) whilst Steam is tracking and controlling your installs, game launching and in some cases game playing, so that means gaming with Steam is much more tightly coupled to both their code and their servers and thus Steam is always going to be more ill-fitted to the traditional hacker ethos in Linux than GoG.
Finally, keep in mind that Steam’s enhanced Linux support is just a natural consequence of their strategy of trying to protect themselves from any Microsoft funny business with Windows by creating their own Windows-independent ecosystem, with Linux being a natural shortcut to do so cheaply.
Same tbh. I like having a hard data copy of the things I enjoy, and have pride in my offline music library, which has been neatly filed with all the proper metadata tagged on. Now I can boot up Audacious (Linux) or MusicBee (Windows) and pick the genre I’m feeling that day. Or I can go out for a walk with one of the iPods I’ve restored and leave my phone at home.
I would pay for the sub, but still seed for my friends in poorer countries where $5 USD is a hell of a lot of money.
Just a subscription that had most of the things and wasn’t a straight up abusive experience would be worth a hell of a lot more than $5. Too bad it will never happen.
You mean it won’t happen again. Netflix’s goal was never to be good. It was to disrupt the industry. And they’ve succeeded; which is why everything sucks and piracy is a better option once again.
I would still pirate — but most normie pirates wouldn’t.
…but why?
Why would I spend money on proprietary software that tracks me and sells my data when it’s trivially easy for me to set up a FOSS alternative and actually own the video files myself.
I’m not rich, in fact I’m under the poverty line, even 5$ a month adds up for me. I see no reason to pay to be tracked.
I remember as kids we shared music by Bluetooth or copying files on a memory stick. You are not stopping that.
But wouldn’t that go against freedom of expression and the internet?
Removed by mod
The current administration is seemingly trying to kill the very concept of free speech and expression.
It might. If it causes undue burden on ISPs or services like Cloudflare, for example, the law will probably be scrapped by some part of Congress or a judge.
And even if it somehow survives all of that, a VPN with a server in another country will make this bill pointless.
I checked it again and its STILL at 0 Cosponsors and sitting in the committees inbox if it wasn’t already rejected.
Even if it passed making piracy super extra illegal+ it’s targeting google and cloud flare to block access to sites within 15 days that could still easily be reached outside their boundaries. It’s political theater for mpaa riaa etc industry association lobbyists to show they got something for their bribes.
Make something people want to buy. That will help more.
EDIT On the anime and manga. Quite a few Japanese companies don’t or refuse to officially release stuff in the west. Most of the ones who do, get fucked with by bad localizers.
It’s crazy that Netflix originally knew this back in the 2010s. Somehow, over the years, they managed to forget this little nugget of wisdom.
They didn’t forget, they simply became big enough they can act like every other corporation.
Anyone offhandedly know how this would affect Usenet
I imagine it’s possible but it sounds like they’re going after low hanging fruit like streaming sites and it also states that they can’t prevent people from using VPNs to get around the blocking.
Usenet is perfectly controllable for this kind of thing.
Also it’s not intended for sharing binaries, that’s bad behavior.
I can see something new, distributed (no servers), but with Usenet’s feel and paradigm, being the pinnacle of piracy. But there is no such thing.
Good luck, especially if they try to ban people from ripping their CDs to FLAC as well, like, how would you even find out if someone is doing that, for instance?
Unless you somehow force a backdoor into rippers like Exact Audio Copy, CUERipper, or Whipper, the latter two being OSS, you can’t.
Even SCMS never phoned home to anyone simply because the capability to do that didn’t exist yet when that copy protection scheme was first implemented, and it only applied to dubbing a CD over to DAT, MD, or DCC over S/PDIF on consumer gear.
Sony decided to put rootkits on their CDs to stop people from ripping them. They got sued for that.
fre:ac is an open source alternative to EAC and is actually way better, in my opinion.
Whipper is pretty much a text-based clone of EAC.
That sounds cool as hell. I might try it out but I don’t see myself switching software. I love cli tools.
It’s only on Linux though, for Windows, CUETools and CUERipper are some of the most powerful OSS tools for ripping CDs you can get.
Yeah because pirates are notorious for giving up immediately when you make their jobs a little harder.
Brilliant. Make murder illegal now.
I don’t currently sail the high seas, but clamping down on access and making it harder to enjoy content, increasing prices, blocking account sharing, and adding unskippable ads and promos make me want to pirate, just out of spite!
