wow lets poison DNS, surely no one will start linking these piracy sites via ip addresses or create alternative domain names. wcgw.
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?
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.
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 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
+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.
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.
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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.
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.
Quad9 is a great thing to learn about right about now.
Funks your brother check it out now.
And NextDNS too!!
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.
How about just firewall France and discover if legislators find cause to pass new laws.
Win win! No more France, new legislation!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even the most casual of internet users will see the guide on how to change their DNS server bruh.
Next they’ll do DNS injection even though DoT and DNS over HTTPS is a thing.
How is that even legal?
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.
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…
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…
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
.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.
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.
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.
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.
unbound is a validating, recursive, caching, self-hosted DNS resolver.
