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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!
Yup, if I used Youtube a lot, I’d pay. I don’t though. I follow a dozen or so channels, and I stream maybe an hour a day from Youtube. So I use an ad blocker and donate to various channels. Youtube is worth e maybe $5/month to me, and I’d rather just nor use it than pay more than that.
I used to pirate movies I owned just because of the annoying FBI warnings and ads at the start of dvds.
You could just rip them instead.
Torrent was even faster
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 🤷♀️
what? why would that be a law? that sounds so pointless
It’s an anti-seizure measure. Which makes sense for TV where kids might come across it by accident, but it doesn’t make sense for streaming services where we could easily opt in/out of those versions.
Edit: This is what it looks like, compared to Blu-ray. They dim the whole screen and blend multiple frames together, which makes it hard to decipher what’s going on and mutes the colors. (Another):
is the opacity of the characters lowered as well? I feel like I can see the background through the characters
Sort of, but no. They’re transparent because of the frame blending. Since moving objects/characters occupy different parts of the foreground across multiple frames, the background ends up getting blended into them. They call that “ghosting” because it effectively makes them transparent.
So they do lose opacity, but it’s not like they’re lowering an opacity value or anything.
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.
I wanted to watch World Cup, so I got Peacock for a month for $5. I considered piraxy, but the cost was less than the hassle to figure out how to do it. It was in Spanish, but that was fine by me.
I didn’t keep that subscription though because the value wasn’t there. But Peacock got $5 from me that they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten.
I’m currently in the process of ripping my DVDs and am planning to get a Blu-ray player to rip even more, because I’m fed up with paying more and getting less from various streaming services. I hadn’t bought a DVD or Blu-Ray for years until Netflix started dropping shows and raising prices.
I make a good salary, but I’m not going to throw it away on low value services. I spend a ton at Steam and have spent a lot at Netflix and Disney+ in the past, but that’s changing now that prices are going up, ads are increasing, and content is shrinking.
wow lets poison DNS, surely no one will start linking these piracy sites via ip addresses or create alternative domain names. wcgw.
It isn’t like I’m not willing to pay. My NAS setup wasn’t exactly cheap. But the user experience is just incredible. I had Netflix for ten years, and several others for some time. The experience is just better. Watching whatever I want synchronized with my wife across devices of any type is superb. Who else offers that?
Netflix did, but now online streaming is fragmented and it’s worse again.
I can download a torrent faster than I can even figure out which service the content is on… assuming it’s even available on one of them.
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:
- Sue Hosters -> Found New Hosts
- Sue Domains -> Found New Domains
- Sue DNS -> Found New DNS
- ???
- Sue website admins -> Users find/ create a new site
- Sue the entire Internet -> Get laughed at
Or run your own DNS with Unbound. Just takes a raspberry pi and/or other cheap low power PC.
Yep. Only reason I recommend not to is if you’re concerned about your ISP seeing your DNS queries. I use internally hosted DNS with forwarders to Quad9 using secure DNS so that my DNS queries are segregated and hidden from my ISP.
Quad9 is a great thing to learn about right about now.
Funks your brother check it out now.
And OpenDNS.
Try afraid.org instead of a cisco product.
They’re great too. I used to use their free DNS hosting, but now I just use my registrar’s since I don’t need dyndns anymore.
They’re fantastic and I honestly forgot about them. Thanks for the reminder!
OpenDNS was bought over by Cisco quite some years ago.
Dang, that sucks.
I’ve been on Quad9 and Cloudflare for a while now, and I was thinking of going back to OpenDNS as my backup, but I guess I’ll use afraid.org or one of the others instead.
And NextDNS too!!
This is such a stupid non solution to their problem.
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.
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.
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Eh, Americans got that 24 hour news cycle brain. You can just admit to all the war crimes and not have to hide them for 50 years.
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.
Tbh it seems to me like the only thing they’re targeting with this are media company lawyers that could try to argue that they’re “enabling piracy” by resolving domains to known piracy resources.
They already got the ISP DNS resolvers.
This particular step, that this article is about, is targeting people who knew enough to switch from their ISP’s DNS resolver to one of these ISP-agnostic DNS providers. So they’re targeting the people who do, and probably not going to be particularly effective at it.
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.
I believe you can use DNSSEC directly with root servers.
Would pihole work if all the major DNS that gets pulled resolved the same? I would imagine the change would only work for a while.
While others suggested adding the DNS records manually the far more secure and easier in the long term solution is to run pihole with unbound. Going this route completely eliminates third party upstream DNS servers as unbound will query the top level domain for their authoritative name server and direct the IP address from the source. Pihole has a great explanation on their website. I like crosstalk solutions on setting it up as it’s has everything you need just to copy paste your way into it working.
A PiHole functions has a full DNS server. You can configure it to serve any arbitrary records you like - which is basically how it overrides ad domains to prevent them from loading.
So, if you know the IP address that a particular domain is supposed to route to, you configure the PiHole to respond with that IP address for that domain. So, it doesn’t matter that the major DNS servers return junk because your PiHole never asks them.
Pihole is great. Easy to setup. Runs on $80 worth of hardware on a raspberry…
$80? I run mine on a Pi Zero that I got for $9 with a $6 wired network adapter for a grand total of $15. No problems for a household of five with one of us (me) being an extremely heavy user.
Or if you have a NAS, just use that. There’s nothing special about the Raspberry Pi hardware here.
I used to do that, but it comes with the problem of your DNS going down any time you want to restart or do a hardware swap on your NAS. Or since it was running in docker something as simple as reloading docker would knock out the internet for a few minutes. It’s worth the $15 to have them operate separately.
Definitely. Though I’ll add that I ran PiHole + PiVPN on a Zero W ($10) for years. I upgraded it to a Pi Zero W 2 ($15 with extra cores) but I found that it had terrible packet drops, so I had to add a $15 usb wired adapter to it. I can max my upload speeds over vpn and dns is super low latency.
Any good lists? Because pihole defaults to the aforementioned servers.
Pretty decent article here
https://avoidthehack.com/best-pihole-blocklists
And there is https://filterlists.com/ which is a searchable index of lists. If you use uBlockOrigin you can add lists directly from fliterlists.com otherwise it provides links to Github etc.
unbound is a validating, recursive, caching, self-hosted DNS resolver.
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.
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It was a waste of time and resources for a particular application, yes. But the basic technology is useful for many applications.
Those “bored ape” NFTs were for jpeg images, do you also think that the jpeg algorithm was a colossal waste of time and resources?
There isn’t just one single way of coding an NFT, you’re talking about an entire class of application here. You can indeed add all sorts of safety features if you want to.
Saying “anyone can mint NFTs” shows a misunderstanding of the specific application we’re discussing here. Not just anyone can mint an ENS name, specifically, which is what we’re talking about. ENS names are minted by the ENS contract, so they can be guaranteed unique. An ENS name isn’t “representing” anything other than the information contained within it, so there are no legal issues whatsoever. If you own the ENS name NFT then that’s all that you need to worry about, it has no other effect or implication other than that.
This is what I was talking about when I mentioned the “scarlet letters NFT”. People have an enormous prejudice about the technology and leap to incorrect assumptions about its uses based on those prejudices.
I had really hoped that the video game industry would use its royalty function to give developers a cut of the secondary market. It would naturally incentivize them to slow down their development cycle, and make games that stand the test of time. Selling games with this technology could have been a virtuous cycle of developers having a vested interest in their work beyond simply selling DLC.
Well, hominids made hand axes for countless aeons without ever really using them. I guess I shouldn’t act too shocked.
No competent engineer would use NFTs for the purpose. It’s inconvenient, slow and ridiculously expensive. No one uses the “technology” because it’s rubbish.
Implementing such a feature is trivial. Steam has a marketplace. They don’t let you sell used games because the developers don’t want it.
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I am describing a usage that is explicitly not like that. A usage that has nothing to do with art. The concept of “NFT” is not somehow inextricably tied to spending ridiculous amounts of money on pictures of apes, it’s a general technology.
This is a perfect illustration of the problem here. People are lamenting about difficult it is to come up with a truly decentralized method of owning domain names that can’t be commandeered by authorities or big business, a system to do exactly that already exists, but it’s based on a technology that people have such an extreme prejudice about that they’d rather downvote anyone who tries to explain it and go back to helplessly lamenting.
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I just did. The ENS system, a decentralized replacement for DNS. That’s what started this subthread.
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There exists GNUNet, but not really sure how common it is used.
I keep hearing about people being aware of it’s existence, but I have yet to see a single person say they use it.
I tried to use gnunet multiple times over the years. It always had wierd routing problems, the worst was their filesharing, it literally never worked. You cant find files that are definitely on the network, and if by some miracle you do find something, it fails to download it. 20 years of development and its an unfinished buggy mess. I hope they finally fix it sometime, cause its a really great idea, just executed horribly.
Yes, it’s called
unboundI 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
.comor.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.
DNS is to a degree, by design federated to begin with. What you need to participate is a recursive DNS server, like Unbound as some of your other replies have mentioned. You can run it on the same machine as something like Pihole if you’re already running that.
How about just firewall France and discover if legislators find cause to pass new laws.
Win win! No more France, new legislation!
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…
How would it be illegal? It’s their service, they can set whatever rules they want on it. If you don’t like it, pick another DNS provider.
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…
Talk about an impotent response. Pretty simple way around that.
