Meanwhile, VPN use is skyrocketing as is use of Tor and the dark web.
Ban vpn use. It's on the cards.
Good luck enforcing that. VPN protocols have already been honed in the process of evading Chinese, Russian, and Iranian blocks. V2Ray, Trojan etc.
U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
201–210 of 268 posts
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#202I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been a…
The Roku app is actually really good at determining where everything ever is currently streaming (or purchasable). It's not 100% perfect, but it's generally correct. I go there first for basically everything. For example, it tells me Wake Up Ron Burgundy (which isn't even a "real" movie) can be purchases on Prime, Fandango, or iTunes. Actually, iTunes and Prime have mostly everything for rent, what movies were you ac…
IMDB does something similar (it at least lists Wake Up Ron Burgandy as available for rent on Prime, doesn't mention iTunes or Fandango but I'm not logged in to IMDB so I'm not sure what's enabled/disabled as "preferred services" by default)
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is precisely the problem, and the whole reason why we still pirate TV/movies. I would have no problem paying $XX to a unified service that has basically everything; I have no interest in paying a dozen different streaming platforms for effectively "cable packages" that often add/remove/shift content around. The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the U…
> The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the UX is good enough. I have no reason to pirate music anymore. > Why is this so hard for the film industry? My theory is that the United States has compulsory licensing for music, but not movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#United_Stat... To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming ser…
> Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.
Even worse, a lot of the big studios have their own streaming service (Disney, Paramount, Peacock, Canal+ in France, etc) and have no incentive to have lease the rights to competing services.
That's ultimately what pushed Netflix to focus so much on creating their content, they knew that at some point the original content owners will realise streaming can be lucrative, and just build their own services.
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's down from it's heyday for the mainstream, but for the dedicated few, it's better than ever before. Gone are the days of manually searching for a movie on tracker sites, downloading them, organizing your library and watching stuff on your laptop. There are now open-source, self-hosted applications that automate that entire process, so it's as simple as requesting a movie on your phone and having it show up on you…
I know a guy who knows a guy that says that you don’t even need that, you just browse the movies and press “play” as there is direct torrent streaming now. But I don’t know anything about all this i just use my VCR with the clock flashing 12:00.
Yes, for $30 a year you can instantly stream any torrent with no real setup or install. The most used client is a PWA that calls out to VLC or whatever.
Bluray 4K 100+GB copy of Dune Part 2 at >70Mbps with maybe 5 seconds of buffering at the start. Literally can’t replicate it with legal streaming.
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#205I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been a…
> Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever
Try the library, I've found lots of things not on streaming in mine's DVD collection.
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#206This bill is different than the domain seizures of the past; it seems to be the start of a framework where the government is using its power to tell ISPs to block access to IP addresses - in this case, those identified as foreign piracy sites. Honestly I don't know what's already happening in this space, though. I haven't heard of many instances where U.S. judges are ordering ISPs to block traffic to sites like in other countries, but maybe I haven't been paying attention.
There's a number of precautions and exceptions in the bill, and they're good ones, but I don't think we've seen anything like this before.
I feel like this bill is the beginning of a type of thinking that could grow past piracy by riding the current isolationist wave in U.S. politics. I think once this passes, it's probably going to be easier to justify ordering ISP blocks of non-U.S. IPs/ASNs on other criteria.
It will also further cement social media as the primary thing that is "Internet," instead of websites or other applications based on network protocols. After all that's probably what most people think of as the Internet - social media, a few apps, and streaming. Big social media will always have an international reach as its owners are very rich, they cooperate with governments, their users are individually accountable, and those users will likely become more so over time. I bet soon, that's all that will be left to the masses - social media and streaming.
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#207This kind of crap will only grow the MAGA base. Everyone knows our politicians work to serve the corporations and are sick of it. Democrats won’t allow a real candidate that will be anti-corporate. So we end up with Trump who pays lip service to it. For reasons beyond me, people seem to believe him.
Meanwhile Altman & Co. continue to steal data at large scale. Trump himself encourages it by removing any potential for regulation the LLM industry. I guess his followers can’t be bothered to read the actual news and get angry about it.
Most politicians that stand up against this stuff aren’t allowed to succeed. Unless someone does, this pro-corporate downward spiral will continue.
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's down from it's heyday for the mainstream, but for the dedicated few, it's better than ever before. Gone are the days of manually searching for a movie on tracker sites, downloading them, organizing your library and watching stuff on your laptop. There are now open-source, self-hosted applications that automate that entire process, so it's as simple as requesting a movie on your phone and having it show up on you…
What are the names of these immoral piracy applications, so that I can know to avoid them if I happen to stumble upon one?
:D I'm glad you're protected from these terrible services now
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#209I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been a…
The Roku app is actually really good at determining where everything ever is currently streaming (or purchasable). It's not 100% perfect, but it's generally correct. I go there first for basically everything. For example, it tells me Wake Up Ron Burgundy (which isn't even a "real" movie) can be purchases on Prime, Fandango, or iTunes. Actually, iTunes and Prime have mostly everything for rent, what movies were you ac…
My spouse loves watching old direct to home video movies and I'd say about 75% of them have no accessible copies outside maybe eBay. Most of the remainder are only available via piracy. A vanishingly small percentage are available from streaming platforms.
One that I wanted to watch recently was Disney's 2000 animation short John Henry. It's now part of the American Legends compilation, which is only available for purchase on Amazon, not rent. It's not even on Disney+.
Re: U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD"
#210I've recently switched to privacy respecting computing options, so of course lost access to everything I've bought from Apple and Amazon for the last 20 years. If I never paid for content again they'd still be in my debt. You wouldn't steal a car would you? No, but I'd repossess one from some delinquent son of a bitch in a suit.
I see no strong moral argument against ripping DVDs (from the library or similar) of content you paid for on Apple or Amazon.
In my country it is not illegal to download or share copyright content for non-profit and personal use. It's the IPTVs, torrent and streaming pirate sites with Ads or asking for money the ones that should die (that's why I don't agree with Anna's Archive profiting from sharing copyrighted content).
As I said before: it's 2025, we shouldn't need an ad infested "website" to share, discover and download content in a p2p fashion. Kademilla and similar DHT truly decentralized tech has existed for more than 15 years...
The problem is that new generations want to profit from everything and have stopped "sharing is caring"