Bully everyone and pass restrictive laws yields more piracy than ever, and a good crop of mentors for future pirates.
Build quality streaming services with excellent selection of media, and the piracy community shrinks. (Sad, when it happens, because there’s evidence that wide-coverage digital media preservation is nearly impossible without the piracy community.)
It’s almost like the Movie Industry doesn’t care about any of the things they claim they care about…
Edit: I guess it’s possible they’re playing out a long con to ensure their favorite episodes of “I Love Lucy” survive…
Edit 2: No, I don’t really think they’re somehow secretly not the assholes they appear to be.
It really depends on how much people want to get around it. I grew up in Vietnam, where when I was in about year 10 of high school, the government decided to start blocking Facebook. Their block was only DNS, so word quickly spread around the school that you could still access Facebook if you changed your DNS. This was before quad 9 or even Google’s quad 8 (the latter came around shortly after, which was a big improvement to how easy this became), so the DNS we ended up using was a difficult specific number to remember and communicate, but even despite that, by the end of the month pretty much everyone in school—from students to teachers—had learnt how to change their DNS to bypass the block.
People always say that piracy is more popular when it’s easier than the legal means. And obviously adding a DNS block to pirating is going to increase its difficulty, and increase the relative convenience of legal means. But if the legal means continues getting worse and worse, at some point piracy is going to look more appealing again, and people will figure out how to bypass the DNS block.
If they are trying at great leghth to block IPs associated with piracy, it isn’t that much harder to get known VPN IPs blocked too especially when they could use the ‘why won’t someone think of the children’ card and claim VPNs are solely used for CSAM and drug markets.
The smart move would be to skip VPNs and move over to I2P. For those who don’t know I2P is kinda like if tor and torrents had a baby that was a VPN on crack. Unlike a VPN where your traffic is encrypted and sent to one centralized server, I2P encrypts and routes your data through multiple servers and unlike tor every client by default is a node that data can be routed through.
But at the same time I2P is still built upon TCP/IP so it’s still like encrypted yodeling. Finding out who’s likely yodeling down movies is rather easy. The protection instead lies in the high barrier to prove exactly which movie and when so as to pass the barrier for court admissable evidence.
Now don’t misunderstand me, I2P is great stuff and I’ve used it on and off for years, but it shouldn’t be treated as the holy grail of safe and secure communication. Nothing can truly be that if it’s built on TCP/IP for fairly obvious reasons.
It’s true, it’s not a silverbullet, but it’s probably the next step to piracy and illegal content, IF someday they find a working solution to break torrent over the clearnet.
They already found a simple elegant working solution for the common user: Block at the DNS level in the router. While this works for most non techy user, most of us already use a VPN or know how to change the default DNS server.
Maybe I’m missing something but how could finding out who’s yodeling a movie be rather easy when you would have to decrypt the traffic to determine if it was a movie and not just normal traffic? I get that because of TCP/IP you can tell someone is using I2P but wouldn’t you have to compromise the garlic encryption layer to determine what exactly they are doing?
That’s what I’m saying. It’s like everyone knows some college kids smoke pot from the smell in the dorms, but Police can’t legally search room by room to find out who it is, they need a search warrant which they need more than a general suspicion that someone in the dorms smoke to get.
Same with I2P, it’s done in a public setting so from traffic patterns we can be pretty sure someone is downloading a shit ton, and that it’s likely illegal content. Residential IPs have little reason to consistently download several GB files on a daily/weekly basis, streaming and download also look vastly different profile wise and at least no one I know of go to those lengths to try and mask their traffic patterns by trying to make streaming look like download or vice versa.
But as I said and you reiterated, you still need to crack the encryption to actually prove it in court. But given a specific target there are many ways to do that. A generic approach is likely not going to happen. Which means that I2P is secure much like having a secret chat in a crowded place like Grand Central Station in NY. You know that people are meeting there to chat about illegal stuff but you don’t know who. It becomes much easier if you know who to follow and eavesdrop on, but of course still not easy.
It is however nowhere near as safe as communication over channels that aren’t public to begin with. But such of course do not exist outside military and other special contexts.
I trust them more than my ISP (Verizon). Quad9 is, and I used it for some time as an upstream, but it is markedly slower for me than cloudflare. Those milliseconds add up for an impatient asshole like myself.
I have straight bind running on my network already for local zones, it would be easy enough to switch it to be a root resolver. The only problem is it’s a lot slower. I use DoT to cloudflare for non-local zones (using blocky); if you run a root resolver, your DNS traffic is all in the clear. Not like it truly matters but I wouldn’t put it past my ISP to do DPI on DNS traffic to try to sell my data.
A site-blocking law would let copyright owners “request, in court, that Internet service providers block access to websites dedicated to sharing illegal, stolen content,” he said. Rivkin claimed that in the US, piracy “steals hundreds of thousands of jobs from workers and tens of billions of dollars from our economy rich people’s yacht money, including more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales.”
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⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
We’ve done this dance already.
It’s almost like the Movie Industry doesn’t care about any of the things they claim they care about…
Edit: I guess it’s possible they’re playing out a long con to ensure their favorite episodes of “I Love Lucy” survive…
Edit 2: No, I don’t really think they’re somehow secretly not the assholes they appear to be.
Time to invest in some foreign VPNs.
They will just ban VPN and make the punishment for being caught ridiculously draconian. Like terrorism charges.
No bueno
Sounds ridiculous and just switching the fucking DNS works as a workaround…
It ““worked”” in France
It still kills most of the userbase when they do it
Normal people don’t know what a fucking dns is
You end up with 10 more new sites and a drop in quality and an endless game of cat & mouse
My home website has a permanent banner about DNS and displays a toast notification when you use a ISP DNS
It really depends on how much people want to get around it. I grew up in Vietnam, where when I was in about year 10 of high school, the government decided to start blocking Facebook. Their block was only DNS, so word quickly spread around the school that you could still access Facebook if you changed your DNS. This was before quad 9 or even Google’s quad 8 (the latter came around shortly after, which was a big improvement to how easy this became), so the DNS we ended up using was a difficult specific number to remember and communicate, but even despite that, by the end of the month pretty much everyone in school—from students to teachers—had learnt how to change their DNS to bypass the block.
People always say that piracy is more popular when it’s easier than the legal means. And obviously adding a DNS block to pirating is going to increase its difficulty, and increase the relative convenience of legal means. But if the legal means continues getting worse and worse, at some point piracy is going to look more appealing again, and people will figure out how to bypass the DNS block.
Ummm, have these numbnuts never heard of a VPN?
They didn’t even hear why this failed the first time.
why did it fail?
VPN is very available but this would probably still stop the majority. It’s like locks: it won’t keep everyone out, just enough not to try.
If they are trying at great leghth to block IPs associated with piracy, it isn’t that much harder to get known VPN IPs blocked too especially when they could use the ‘why won’t someone think of the children’ card and claim VPNs are solely used for CSAM and drug markets.
The smart move would be to skip VPNs and move over to I2P. For those who don’t know I2P is kinda like if tor and torrents had a baby that was a VPN on crack. Unlike a VPN where your traffic is encrypted and sent to one centralized server, I2P encrypts and routes your data through multiple servers and unlike tor every client by default is a node that data can be routed through.
But at the same time I2P is still built upon TCP/IP so it’s still like encrypted yodeling. Finding out who’s likely yodeling down movies is rather easy. The protection instead lies in the high barrier to prove exactly which movie and when so as to pass the barrier for court admissable evidence.
Now don’t misunderstand me, I2P is great stuff and I’ve used it on and off for years, but it shouldn’t be treated as the holy grail of safe and secure communication. Nothing can truly be that if it’s built on TCP/IP for fairly obvious reasons.
It’s true, it’s not a silverbullet, but it’s probably the next step to piracy and illegal content, IF someday they find a working solution to break torrent over the clearnet.
They already found a simple elegant working solution for the common user: Block at the DNS level in the router. While this works for most non techy user, most of us already use a VPN or know how to change the default DNS server.
Maybe I’m missing something but how could finding out who’s yodeling a movie be rather easy when you would have to decrypt the traffic to determine if it was a movie and not just normal traffic? I get that because of TCP/IP you can tell someone is using I2P but wouldn’t you have to compromise the garlic encryption layer to determine what exactly they are doing?
That’s what I’m saying. It’s like everyone knows some college kids smoke pot from the smell in the dorms, but Police can’t legally search room by room to find out who it is, they need a search warrant which they need more than a general suspicion that someone in the dorms smoke to get.
Same with I2P, it’s done in a public setting so from traffic patterns we can be pretty sure someone is downloading a shit ton, and that it’s likely illegal content. Residential IPs have little reason to consistently download several GB files on a daily/weekly basis, streaming and download also look vastly different profile wise and at least no one I know of go to those lengths to try and mask their traffic patterns by trying to make streaming look like download or vice versa.
But as I said and you reiterated, you still need to crack the encryption to actually prove it in court. But given a specific target there are many ways to do that. A generic approach is likely not going to happen. Which means that I2P is secure much like having a secret chat in a crowded place like Grand Central Station in NY. You know that people are meeting there to chat about illegal stuff but you don’t know who. It becomes much easier if you know who to follow and eavesdrop on, but of course still not easy.
It is however nowhere near as safe as communication over channels that aren’t public to begin with. But such of course do not exist outside military and other special contexts.
They want to make VPNs illegal too.
Hopefully this doesn’t affect quad9 or cloud flare DNS, or I might have to go back to running a root resolver. The horrors.
Do you know if cloudflare is privacy respecting? I know quad9 certainly is
I trust them more than my ISP (Verizon). Quad9 is, and I used it for some time as an upstream, but it is markedly slower for me than cloudflare. Those milliseconds add up for an impatient asshole like myself.
is it though? what makes it trustworthy?
Why not run unbound for a recursive resolver? Seems like a more private DNS solution
I have straight bind running on my network already for local zones, it would be easy enough to switch it to be a root resolver. The only problem is it’s a lot slower. I use DoT to cloudflare for non-local zones (using blocky); if you run a root resolver, your DNS traffic is all in the clear. Not like it truly matters but I wouldn’t put it past my ISP to do DPI on DNS traffic to try to sell my data.
If they take my piracy away I will have no choice but to become an anarchist.
The music industry adapted for the most part.
The movie industry is hanging on by fingernails.
When will they learn?
Did it, though?
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17244.jpeg
I demand I2P become the standard for filesharing. We don’t all get what we want.
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11
for everytime Movie Industry tells ISP to block pirates, there is more smart pirates who can find away around the block!
That’s fine. They don’t care about a few really good pirates, they care about many low tech pirates.
true or the low tech aol.com pirates even :) just saying!
Awww, was the abuse from the DMCA not enough for them?
Ah yes. Theatre-going. The favorite pastime of Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z since the invention of streaming.
/s
Fairly sure some of us would go if we could afford that billion dollar in theatre tickets.