Want to know what I used to pirate, but don't anymore? Video games. Steam makes tons of money off of me and everybody else and has reasonable DRM with an easy to use store.
Piracy is a delivery problem. Make content easier to get for reasonable prices and you'll make money. Don't do that? OK. Piracy it is.
Worse, the harder they try to stop it, the shittier the experience gets for their paying customers, but not for the pirates really. At that point, why would anyone want to pay for a crappy experience being treated like a thief when you can save your money and actually be a "thief" (at least in their eyes) while being treated like a paying customer?
This guy eats muff.
Muffins? How do you know?
+1 for steam
I used to pirate my games on linux, but it's harder than on Windows. Steam's gaming on linux experience is perfect, just download the game and hit Play.
I agree, but most games also have a higher ratio of value to cost. If I buy a game for 50 bucks, I'll play it for many hours, let's say 50. So that will be 1 per hour, pretty good. If I buy a new movie, that isn't available for subscription streaming, that ratio is easily double. If I have a subscription and need another now, that also lowers it's value. It also comes with lower comfort and ease of consumption, as you mentioned.
Another great example is YouTube premium. I'll gladly pay 5 or 7 bucks for adfree content, not 14 though. I don't need YouTube music. So I block ads where I can and donate to creators, if I can afford it. They could have had my money, but they are, simply, greedy.
I also hate it, when deals are altered without my consent. It makes me feel like a sucker, and therefore makes it less likely for me to keep investing.
I agree with your analysis, and only differ in that I do pay for YouTube Premium because I get a TON of use out of YouTube music - you really can't beat their library of obscure and live music!
My story but with anime. Japan has some really annoying laws requiring their shows to be blurred and dimmed during fast-paced scenes and it absolutely butchers the height of good animations.
The Blu-ray releases don't have this issue, but guess what releases aren't available for purchase/streaming for English audiences. 🫠 I want to give them money so bad, but 🤷♀️
I still keep the pirated have DRMless copies of games I bought on Steam though - just for ownership.
Oh no! The poor multi-billion dollar football leagues are losing out on pennies from people who cant afford extortionate subscription services! Quick, take legal action!
Piracy is a service problem.
Piracy is a service problem.
Yes but also it is increasingly becoming a price problem
That’s still service.
wow lets poison DNS, surely no one will start linking these piracy sites via ip addresses or create alternative domain names. wcgw.
This is a dumb game of whackamole that they’ll never win.
If you’re affected just switch your dns to Quad9 or something.
Let's Play Wack-A-Mole! Select Game:
Quad9 is a great thing to learn about right about now.
Funks your brother check it out now.
This is such a stupid non solution to their problem.
use your powers for good and poison dns to stop russian disinformation
How about not poisoning anything? Not using powers is also an option.
standing by and letting russia continue to spread disinformation isn't a good thing.
They're going to spread disinformation regardless, and they can block any DNS provider they want regardless. So I guess it could help non-Russians, but it won't do anything for Russians.
I feel like anyone who already had a know-how to change their DNS will just change to one of the other hundreds of free servers and the people who couldn't be bothered to switch to google DNS will already have been "blocked". Or they are using a VPN already..
Or run your own recursive DNS which can be done in a docker container. Most people I know sailing the seven seas are quite adept at technology. Well most people I know are in IT in the first place so that likely doesn’t mean much.
So they'll just change their DNS server again? What will this achieve?
Nothing for people who know what DNS is. They're targeting the people who don't.
In order to be using any of these DNS providers you would have already needed to switch away from your ISP’s default DNS. This must be targeting the people who knew how to change their DNS servers but somehow forgot.
Starting with a pool of all users who use alternative DNS for any reason, users of pirate sites – especially sites broadcasting the matches in question – were isolated from the rest. Users of both VPNs and third-party DNS were further excluded from the group since DNS blocking is ineffective against VPNs.
Proust found that the number of users likely to be affected by DNS blocking at Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco, amounts to 0.084% of the total population of French Internet users. Citing a recent survey, which found that only 2% of those who face blocks simply give up and don’t find other means of circumvention, he reached an interesting conclusion.
“2% of 0.084% is 0.00168% of Internet users! In absolute terms, that would represent a small group of around 800 people across France!”
I wonder how much the court case cost, and if those costs are in anyway likely to be recouped even if all 800 of those convert to a subscription.
Is there such a thing as federated dns servers, self hosted or otherwise? I don't particularly care about piracy but I can see this dominoing into abortion, lgtq+ ect...ect...
As long as you’re not using DNSSEC, you can easily run your own. I’ve been running a PiHole for years now, it can pull in block lists and such from various sources, it’d be fairly easy to add a list to pull in automatically that include extra records. Those could be served from anywhere. Torrents, git repos, http calls, etc.
Note that with just pihole you would still be affected by this, since pihole needs an upstream dns server to get it's data from.
But if you set up pihole with unbound you will be OK, since unbound then will do the job of getting data from the root servers without another upstream dns.
I my experience it is also faster.
There's the completely decentralized ENS name system that would bypass this censorship entirely.
But unfortunately it's got the scarlet letters "NFT" hanging around its neck, and so good luck trying to discuss its actual merits or try to implement support for it anywhere.
NFT is scary because people don't know what it means. It is not supposed to be a means of selling jpegs; it is supposed to be a digital untamperable proof of ownership for various uses.
It's not.
It's very tamperable. It lacks common safety features like 2FA. Hacks are common and stolen NFTs can not be recovered.
It doesn't provide any evidence of ownership, much less proof. Anyone can mint NFTs without providing any evidence of ownership or anything. There is no legal requirement that ownership of anything is transferred along with an NFT.
I can’t believe in 2024 we still see NFT advocates. It was and continues to be a colossal waste of time and resources.
Yes, it's called unbound
I don't think this question really makes sense.
DNS is centralized in that there is a root zone that determines who is the canonical authority for each top level domain like .com or .world (and the registrar for each top level domain controls who controls each domain under them). But it's also decentralized in the sense that everyone who controls a domain can assign any subdomains below that, and that anyone can choose to override the name resolving with their own local DNS server (or even a hosts file saved on the device).
The court case here is trying to override the official domain ownership records at specific DNS providers. The problem is that the intermediaries are being ordered by the courts not to follow the central authority.
Federation wouldn't fit this model: we still want DNS to be canonical where everyone in the world agrees which domain resolves to which IP addresses.
How about just firewall France and discover if legislators find cause to pass new laws.
How is that even legal?
It is legal just only because they can restrict the access to any of the services they want, in fact they don't oblige you to use their DNS...
Around 800 Frenchies affected. Imagine the money both companies wasted on lawyers on this and how many of those 800 will be forced to pay now instead of finding another dns server...
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
