661–670 of 786 posts
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Hypothesizing - that would be more prone to network failure, torrents are very robust against either peer temporarily losing an internet connection.
Iirc SCP supports resuming transfers. Granted torrent architecture is very robust, but I’ve never had a problem with the way scp resumes work.
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The flip side: When I was an intern I once had four people arrive at my desk (including an HR lawyer) for torrenting ubuntu server. Thankfully I shared a cube wall with someone smart enough to realize the confusion, and explain me out of being walked out. They were monitoring for torrent traffic, but weren't paying attention to what was being torrented. Apparently a company-wide warning had gone out the week before I…
I was "caught" by some monitoring system sharing Knoppix on a machine in the CS lab at university. I'd forgotten about it, and it had been running for months. One of the helpdesk staff told me that it had been noticed, since the bandwidth to that machine was very high, but he unofficially liked the idea of the university being top of the seeding table, so I should leave it running :-D [1] http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-k…
I got two urgent panicked phone calls from the same person within five minutes of each other for bulk-downloading satellite images from, if memory serves, NASA.
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The idea "exclusive monopolies" and transferable intellectual property rights for perpetuity is bullshit. The blunt fact of the matter is - A majority of the movies would gain more by giving it away to the public domain because most movies fail. Radio did not kill Art. Internet is the new radio. The same is true even for software. 80% of business fail. It would not matter if they gave their code away. GPL based busin…
> A majority of the movies would gain more by giving it away to the public domain because most movies fail. What exactly about being in the public domain would help a movie "gain more" if it hadn't had a successful box office run previously? "GPL-based businesses making billions" does not strike me as a meaningful comparison here. ("Well, 'Cats' is a fiasco, but if we give it away for free we can make a killing selli…
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What if someone pirates it after 100 people already watched/bought it, and now you got 500 more loyal fans who might also buy your next movie?
The actual likelihood of this happening in the real world approaches zero, given the intrinsic incentives of pirates ie to release as early as possible, and the fact that pirates don’t usually know (or care) if the product has recouped its investment, or not. Even if it was possible, surely the people who have invested real money should be the ones to make this decision? Indeed, lots of IP becomes free (even freedom-…
Why? They have no inherent right to limit the distribution of their content, only the special rights society has decided to give them in order to encourage the creation in the first place.
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Yup. I had the same IP address for the entire 3 years I lived in an apartment. Even telling my router to release and renew the IP would still give me the same IP. Only when I moved to a new house (and still used the same ISP) did my IP change.
https://github.com/sietseringers/MACAddressTool
And as another commenter said, this would only change my local IP (192.168.254.x) IP, not the WAN IP (50.39.x.x). I would need to change my router's MAC address, since that's the only MAC address my ISP sees. And depending on my ISP's DHCP configuration, I still might not get a different IP. I might even make it unable to get an IP at all.
An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box. We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in piracy. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it to stop. Then we got a second email (a final warning). Everyone denied…
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> as theft (it is) Are you sure digital piracy is theft? Wikipedia defines theft as: "The taking of another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it." Copies are made, sales (possibly) lost, but no property is being taken such that the owner cannot continue to sell/rent/etc it. My take: I'll pay for whatever streaming service that ha…
Just get a DVD/Blueray player. The content is there for you to legally get and pay for. Heck, you can buy pretty much any movie from Amazon digitally. There is really no excuse not to pay.
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I remember getting an abuse warning from Hetzner as one of our employees was seeding (legal) files via a p2p file sharing framework (IPFS I think?) and the client on his machine sent out broadcast and port scanning requests over the VPN into our Hetzner infrastructure. Hetzner is quite nice in that they dont' immediately block your servers, other providers are less lenient though and such stuff can quickly get your i…
I don't understand what's wrong with port scanning or broadcasting to your own infrastructure that you pay for?
An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box. We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in piracy. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it to stop. Then we got a second email (a final warning). Everyone denied…
The problem here is not recognizing that the piracy was actually the problem. In what way was it forgivable? Because everybody does it, that makes it okie dokie? Because you don't have a Netflix account? If everyone treated piracy as theft (it is) then no one would have to waste their time investigating it because the collective will would exist to prevent it.
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Plenty of 100 million dollar movies have been entirely funded by the people [0]. They pay using a thing called “tickets”, or sometimes by paying a small fee to download it to their homes. To your point, the vast majority of media and software is proprietary, though much of it is supporting in nature and not directly for sale. Nevertheless, shouldn’t publishers be free to choose how they fund their creations? If we ta…
> Nevertheless, shouldn’t publishers be free to choose how they fund their creations? Of course. The problem is when they demand that goverments take away their ciziten's natural rights to copy and share information in order to support their chosen business model. If publishers want society to make their business model possible by being given special "rights" and having public institudions enforce those "rights" then…
> copyright is an entirely artificial construct meant to benefit society by encouraging creators to produce content
The problem with this line of reasoning is that all property is an artificial construct. Just because it’s an artificial concept doesn’t, on its own, make it wrong.
> It is my and many others opinion that the current state of copyright is a very one sided affair that benefits mainly big corporations while having numerous negative effects on society.
That may be true, but last I looked we live in a democracy, which means that we have a process for changing the law, which does not include doing whatever you want.
And honestly, while there is plenty about modern copyright that I find repulsive, especially the constant extension, nevertheless the wholesale removal of copyright would have many consequences that you probably don’t want. For starters, the GPL, CC, Apache and many other free licenses rely on copyright to work.
> There will always be a demand for entertainment and people interested in filling that demand will find a way to make it worthwile
Copyright supports far more than just entertainment. The wholesale destruction of journalism, for example, has clearly damaged society. Part of the damage has been caused because Google and Facebook have subverted copyright to their own causes.
It really is not black and white.