Ummm, have these numbnuts never heard of a VPN?
If they are trying at great leghth to block IPs associated with piracy, it isn’t that much harder to get known VPN IPs blocked too especially when they could use the ‘why won’t someone think of the children’ card and claim VPNs are solely used for CSAM and drug markets.
The smart move would be to skip VPNs and move over to I2P. For those who don’t know I2P is kinda like if tor and torrents had a baby that was a VPN on crack. Unlike a VPN where your traffic is encrypted and sent to one centralized server, I2P encrypts and routes your data through multiple servers and unlike tor every client by default is a node that data can be routed through.
But at the same time I2P is still built upon TCP/IP so it’s still like encrypted yodeling. Finding out who’s likely yodeling down movies is rather easy. The protection instead lies in the high barrier to prove exactly which movie and when so as to pass the barrier for court admissable evidence.
Now don’t misunderstand me, I2P is great stuff and I’ve used it on and off for years, but it shouldn’t be treated as the holy grail of safe and secure communication. Nothing can truly be that if it’s built on TCP/IP for fairly obvious reasons.
Maybe I’m missing something but how could finding out who’s yodeling a movie be rather easy when you would have to decrypt the traffic to determine if it was a movie and not just normal traffic? I get that because of TCP/IP you can tell someone is using I2P but wouldn’t you have to compromise the garlic encryption layer to determine what exactly they are doing?
It’s true, it’s not a silverbullet, but it’s probably the next step to piracy and illegal content, IF someday they find a working solution to break torrent over the clearnet.
They already found a simple elegant working solution for the common user: Block at the DNS level in the router. While this works for most non techy user, most of us already use a VPN or know how to change the default DNS server.
We’ve done this dance already.
- Bully everyone and pass restrictive laws yields more piracy than ever, and a good crop of mentors for future pirates.
- Build quality streaming services with excellent selection of media, and the piracy community shrinks. (Sad, when it happens, because there’s evidence that wide-coverage digital media preservation is nearly impossible without the piracy community.)
It’s almost like the Movie Industry doesn’t care about any of the things they claim they care about…
Edit: I guess it’s possible they’re playing out a long con to ensure their favorite episodes of “I Love Lucy” survive…
Edit 2: No, I don’t really think they’re somehow secretly not the assholes they appear to be.
They will just ban VPN and make the punishment for being caught ridiculously draconian. Like terrorism charges.
It ““worked”” in France
It still kills most of the userbase when they do it
Normal people don’t know what a fucking dns is
You end up with 10 more new sites and a drop in quality and an endless game of cat & mouse
It really depends on how much people want to get around it. I grew up in Vietnam, where when I was in about year 10 of high school, the government decided to start blocking Facebook. Their block was only DNS, so word quickly spread around the school that you could still access Facebook if you changed your DNS. This was before quad 9 or even Google’s quad 8 (the latter came around shortly after, which was a big improvement to how easy this became), so the DNS we ended up using was a difficult specific number to remember and communicate, but even despite that, by the end of the month pretty much everyone in school—from students to teachers—had learnt how to change their DNS to bypass the block.
People always say that piracy is more popular when it’s easier than the legal means. And obviously adding a DNS block to pirating is going to increase its difficulty, and increase the relative convenience of legal means. But if the legal means continues getting worse and worse, at some point piracy is going to look more appealing again, and people will figure out how to bypass the DNS block.
If they take my piracy away I will have no choice but to become an anarchist.
A site-blocking law would let copyright owners “request, in court, that Internet service providers block access to websites dedicated to sharing illegal, stolen content,” he said. Rivkin claimed that in the US, piracy “steals hundreds of thousands of jobs from workers and tens of billions of dollars from
our economyrich people’s yacht money, including more than one billion in theatrical ticket sales.”
Ah yes. Theatre-going. The favorite pastime of Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z since the invention of streaming.
/s
