The difference between 20 years ago and now is companies have been slowly setting up all the dominoes to make piracy nearly impossible in the near future. I don’t think people are aware of how screwed we really are.
With the proliferation of age checks, we’re only a couple steps away from “age checks aren’t sufficient to protect our children. We need ISP level whitelisting of sites that obey the law.”
And then if VPNs manage to get around that with any reliability? Well, be ready for the hardware you need to take advantage of it to double every couple of years while the component supply is strangled to death.
Also, moves now to give OPERATING SYSTEM level “age verification” to any site that asks, which will ABSOLUTELY not be done to identify individuals. No sir. Not at all.
The past 30 years have been DRM. The next 30 are gonna be “You can’t access the tools you need to even think about it anymore.”
Is that a thing an ISP can do? Sure DNS query’s to the ISPs DNS can be (and already are) filtered. But an IP level whitelist of every website in existence is a huge endeavor (with dynamic DNS), needing to check every IP in existence for compliance
Russia has been trying to make a whitelisted internet for over a decade. It’s still easy to get around their blocks with obfuscated VPNs etc, even my parents can do it. It’s really really difficult to implement this kind of blocks without breaking everything. It’s possible to access the outside net even from China if you know what you’re doing. Worst-case scenario, your local mesh network nerds will hook more and more people up to the network, eventually the town-local movie sharing groups will come back like in the good old days. And even if they shut all that down, movie swapping groups will pop up in big cities - piracy existed long before the internet, after all.
As for the hardware, well, yes, that’s a concern on some level. But then again you can still play DVD-quality movies on 20 year old potatoes with Linux, and DVD-quality is quite watchable if you aren’t too snobby about it. There’s a lot of old computing hardware around, even if no new computers are produced starting now we will be fine for a while just with second-hand parts and dumpster diving. Perhaps the biggest concern for video content specifically is storage, which has a more limited lifetime and is also getting very difficult to find new, but if you’re only aiming at DVD-quality, a few dozen TBs will give you something to watch for the rest of your life.
@balsoft@mycodesucks the biggest issue is that only mega nerds care about this. Your average google using, Netflix subscribing, smart TV using person has zero clue how to do anything else.
Again, if internet censorship in Russia has taught me anything is that people can learn this stuff pretty quickly. My 80+ grandma knows how to set up and use a VPN on her android phone.
of course technofascist bloatligarchs want, above all else, a) to control/surveil everyone that isn’t themselves; and b) to exploit them to the maximum extent possible for profit
the graph of progress they’ve made in those areas since the WWW was invented is all line go up. the internet we grew up with is dying. being killed actually, step by step. it was fun while it lasted
“protect the children” LOL what a fucking joke. more like “how can we make it so these future consumers just can’t live without instatwittokbookcord?”
For as long as video is distributed (digital or physical) there will be someone that will pirate it. Kids used to sell bootleg movies on VHS, later on VCD’s, and finally DVD’s, where I lived.
There is no possible way that digital piracy can be stopped. This slippery slope, leading all the way to only being able to access whitelisted websites, is not based in reality. The fascists will try anything they can to control speech at that level, but the people are crafty. We’ll find ways around everything they try to throw at us. Attempting to lock the internet down to that extent will unite all sorts of very smart people.
Impossible how?! There are easy free streaming sites out there, granted do not enter without Adblock on full. Shit, there’s a site that aggregates the free streaming sites and keeps an active list. And then the ever more concise solutions that programmatically download in the background, many of them end in ‘arr’, all from torrents and newsgroups.
The difference between 20 years ago and now is companies have been slowly setting up all the dominoes to make piracy nearly impossible in the near future. I don’t think people are aware of how screwed we really are.
In Australia, a company can only sue an Australian for piracy for the value of buying or renting the media they pirated.
Company: “We’re suing you to piracy!”
Aussie: “Here’s $20, now fuck off.”
It’s just not worth it for these big companies to peruse us.
Make it impossible how? I’ve been hearing similar claims for about three decades but have yet to see anything definitive happen.
With the proliferation of age checks, we’re only a couple steps away from “age checks aren’t sufficient to protect our children. We need ISP level whitelisting of sites that obey the law.”
And then if VPNs manage to get around that with any reliability? Well, be ready for the hardware you need to take advantage of it to double every couple of years while the component supply is strangled to death.
Also, moves now to give OPERATING SYSTEM level “age verification” to any site that asks, which will ABSOLUTELY not be done to identify individuals. No sir. Not at all.
The past 30 years have been DRM. The next 30 are gonna be “You can’t access the tools you need to even think about it anymore.”
Is that a thing an ISP can do? Sure DNS query’s to the ISPs DNS can be (and already are) filtered. But an IP level whitelist of every website in existence is a huge endeavor (with dynamic DNS), needing to check every IP in existence for compliance
We’ll be trading them drives then, yarrrr.
Piracy was a thing before the internet and it will be the thing after the internet.
Russia has been trying to make a whitelisted internet for over a decade. It’s still easy to get around their blocks with obfuscated VPNs etc, even my parents can do it. It’s really really difficult to implement this kind of blocks without breaking everything. It’s possible to access the outside net even from China if you know what you’re doing. Worst-case scenario, your local mesh network nerds will hook more and more people up to the network, eventually the town-local movie sharing groups will come back like in the good old days. And even if they shut all that down, movie swapping groups will pop up in big cities - piracy existed long before the internet, after all.
As for the hardware, well, yes, that’s a concern on some level. But then again you can still play DVD-quality movies on 20 year old potatoes with Linux, and DVD-quality is quite watchable if you aren’t too snobby about it. There’s a lot of old computing hardware around, even if no new computers are produced starting now we will be fine for a while just with second-hand parts and dumpster diving. Perhaps the biggest concern for video content specifically is storage, which has a more limited lifetime and is also getting very difficult to find new, but if you’re only aiming at DVD-quality, a few dozen TBs will give you something to watch for the rest of your life.
@balsoft @mycodesucks the biggest issue is that only mega nerds care about this. Your average google using, Netflix subscribing, smart TV using person has zero clue how to do anything else.
Again, if internet censorship in Russia has taught me anything is that people can learn this stuff pretty quickly. My 80+ grandma knows how to set up and use a VPN on her android phone.
of course technofascist bloatligarchs want, above all else, a) to control/surveil everyone that isn’t themselves; and b) to exploit them to the maximum extent possible for profit
the graph of progress they’ve made in those areas since the WWW was invented is all line go up. the internet we grew up with is dying. being killed actually, step by step. it was fun while it lasted
“protect the children” LOL what a fucking joke. more like “how can we make it so these future consumers just can’t live without instatwittokbookcord?”
For as long as video is distributed (digital or physical) there will be someone that will pirate it. Kids used to sell bootleg movies on VHS, later on VCD’s, and finally DVD’s, where I lived.
There is no possible way that digital piracy can be stopped. This slippery slope, leading all the way to only being able to access whitelisted websites, is not based in reality. The fascists will try anything they can to control speech at that level, but the people are crafty. We’ll find ways around everything they try to throw at us. Attempting to lock the internet down to that extent will unite all sorts of very smart people.
What? It’s easier than ever!
Impossible how?! There are easy free streaming sites out there, granted do not enter without Adblock on full. Shit, there’s a site that aggregates the free streaming sites and keeps an active list. And then the ever more concise solutions that programmatically download in the background, many of them end in ‘arr’, all from torrents and newsgroups.
Never underestimate motivated humans.