The banning technology growing more sophisticated.

  • RandyLahey [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    in australia, piracy used to just be the default that absolutely everybody openly used to get their media content, because new stuff always came a year or two late if at all, and was marked up ridiculously when it arrived (even if it was digital and didn't have the excuse of shipping costs). there was never any of this reddit-esque moralistic shaming of people who pirated because your mum and your boss and everyone else pirated too

    that only really changed when netflix and steam and spotify etc made it more convenient and not crazily expensive to just open an app to get all your consolidated slop, and yeah everyone understood that the more dedicated folks would use a vpn to get around region restrictions to get more slop but hey they were still paying $15 a month or whatever

    with this sort of shit and the fragmentation of media into a million separate streaming services that people are expected to subscribe to, i look forward to seeing australia return to the warm loving embrace of bittorrent

    • danisth [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      During my pirating hiatus, when you could have a sufficient amount of slop for a reasonable price (well I still pirated some, but a lot less), I ended up setting up a desktop PC that can conveniently double as a home media server. It's now running a Plex server and my pirating has been taken to a whole new level. I load up tons of new and old movies onto there just so me and my partner can have the fun of scrolling through actually good options on a netflix-like interface. I've started sharing it with friends who are tired of having 5 subscriptions, and so far it's been working great.

        • wantonviolins [they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Unraid

          Doesn't this cost money? I used my last stimulus check to put together a media server and I'm just running Ubuntu with ZFS

            • wantonviolins [they/them]
              ·
              3 years ago

              It’s not Foss and that’s a bummer, but the parity function saved me when two drives came close to failing.

              ZFS can do all that, and more. You can pretty much set an arbitrary parity level when creating your zpool, though obviously this will decrease available storage capacity accordingly.

              ZFS is also more mature than btrfs (the next-gen Linux filesystem), but is less well integrated with Linux - runs great, works perfectly, but tools like gparted don't understand it and it's slightly more complex to set up. There's also stuff like XigmaNAS as a more turnkey alternative to Unraid.

      • Des [she/her, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        if i ever get free time i want to take one of my many old pcs and do a plex so bad. you make it sound so fucking awesome.

    • wantonviolins [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      i look forward to seeing australia return to the warm loving embrace of bittorrent

      kids these days don't know how to torrent and it's so sad, I can only hope this kind of shit motivates a renaissance of piracy

      • RandyLahey [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        in their defense, its taken the government many years of repeated failures but its now legitimately tricky to access decent torrent sites in australia if you dont know what youre doing

        but these young whippersnappers are good with the computers and the internets and whatnot, im sure theyll figure it out

        • wantonviolins [they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          but these young whippersnappers are good with the computers and the internets and whatnot, im sure theyll figure it out

          They're actually not. Older millennials are genuinely the most tech-savvy, younger millennials and zoomers have been conditioned by iPads and other walled garden computing experiences to expect a certain level of non-complexity and ease of use. When everything was hard to use, people had to figure it out if they wanted to do anything, now that it's easy, the stuff that's still hard seems impossible in comparison.

  • Kumikommunism [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I use a VPN with Netflix to watch shows in another language so I can get accurate subtitles, because they don't exist on English Netflix and they are hard to find elsewhere. Even with piracy these things are generally harder to find.

    Can't even make good use of modern global communications because of capitalism.

    • wantonviolins [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I'm more surprised that I had to unblock like four different domains in order to get their CSS to load

      • medium_adult_son [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        They keep getting sold to shittier companies, I used to spend a lot of time there 😥

        • wantonviolins [they/them]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I feel like hacker news has a lot of "old slashdot" energy, but it's horrible for other reasons

  • thisismyrealname [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    i don't even use a vpn and netflix only lets me watch originals; as always DRM measures end up stopping legitimate users more than pirates

  • gowanus_canal [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Interesting that Netflix originals aren't blocked. Makes me think it's the copyright holders pissing and moaning for Netflix to block VPN's or they will pull their content.

    • wantonviolins [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      that's exactly what it is and the only reason the geofence exists in the first place

  • thirstywizard [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    For about the same price of a fancy VPN subscription you can get your own VPS.

    I personally go with cheapo vpn and sing seafaring bandit songs with shots of rum if there's something on Netflix, Amazon prime, whatever, that catches me eye.

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Just have a friend in another country dead drop a pi somewhere with public internet and install wire guard on it. Then you do the same for them