this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 263 points 5 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 88 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Muffins? How do you know?

[–] [email protected] 45 points 5 months ago

+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.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I used to pirate movies I owned just because of the annoying FBI warnings and ads at the start of dvds.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (4 children)

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 🤷‍♀️

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

I still keep the pirated have DRMless copies of games I bought on Steam though - just for ownership.

[–] [email protected] 172 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Piracy is a service problem.

Yes but also it is increasingly becoming a price problem

[–] [email protected] 66 points 5 months ago

That’s still service.

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 5 months ago

wow lets poison DNS, surely no one will start linking these piracy sites via ip addresses or create alternative domain names. wcgw.

[–] [email protected] 71 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Netflix did, but now online streaming is fragmented and it's worse again.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 5 months ago (3 children)

This is a dumb game of whackamole that they’ll never win.

If you’re affected just switch your dns to Quad9 or something.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Let's Play Wack-A-Mole! Select Game:

  1. Sue Hosters -> Found New Hosts
  2. Sue Domains -> Found New Domains
  3. Sue DNS -> Found New DNS
  4. ????
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[–] [email protected] 64 points 5 months ago (7 children)

Quad9 is a great thing to learn about right about now.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

Funks your brother check it out now.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 5 months ago

This is such a stupid non solution to their problem.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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..

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago (3 children)

use your powers for good and poison dns to stop russian disinformation

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

How about not poisoning anything? Not using powers is also an option.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So they'll just change their DNS server again? What will this achieve?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Nothing for people who know what DNS is. They're targeting the people who don't.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago (15 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

unbound is a validating, recursive, caching, self-hosted DNS resolver.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago (22 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (2 children)

There exists GNUNet, but not really sure how common it is used.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Yes, it's called unbound

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How about just firewall France and discover if legislators find cause to pass new laws.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

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...

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

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...

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