I'm making a genuine effort to keep all my entertainment above board by being a paying customer to Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube Premium, Steam and a few others, but I have to say that my patience is wearing very thin with TV/movie studios and their idiotic licensing shenanigans.
Many countries that have "Media Laws" that define when movies can be broadcasted on streaming services.
They don't, and they are tied into long term exclusivity contracts in many territories.
It's pretty well established that in the UK for example they can't launch the service until the exclusive first pay window distribution deal they have with Sky on all the Marvel titles expires, and that's pretty obviously on the 31st March 2020.
They couldn't launch the service with just that - Apple are struggling a lot and basically giving away their service and they still have more than that.
Of course the USA tries to prevent this with all its might.
Practically speaking, yes, people will pirate it if it's not easily available otherwise. But that doesn't make it morally right.
pirating something that you can't even legally purchase is about as close to a victimless crime as it gets. If anyone actually feels guilty about this they can donate the value to the against malaria foundation and have done the world a net good
honestly, I find the IP mentality of large companies like Disney immoral who hoard IP like a dragon hoards a lair of gold. I'd be in favour of 'use it or lose it'
I dunno. I’d say pirating something the owner isn’t willing to provide you at any price is at least as victimful (and a greater offense against the victim) than doing so for something that they are willing to sell you, but at an unacceptable price.
Thou as a write this I consider the implications of it was educational and only available to a nation or race and not having it would put one at a disadvantage ala scientific papers...
In the digital age, there is a perfectly reasonable case to be made for some kind of "unavailability exception" to protect the rights of readers in poorly-served markets and prevent anti-competitive hoarding of copyrighted works.
They're arguing "it's a victimless crime" (which is also true)
These are related things, but they aren't contradictory
Trademarks don’t have set expiration dates, yet 1/4 of Disney’s toys are for someone else’s original IP. Snow White, Peter Pan, etc and nobody seems to have a problem with this. In fact the oldest US trademark in use fall under the same heading with a Biblical figure Samson wrestling a lion.
And in fact Trademarks do go away without Defence. Which means they can be abandoned at which point it’s fine to use em.
I never understand this false dichotomy - especially in a forum which is named ... let me check ... "hacker news".
Just set up your own.
It costs almost nothing to run a EC2 instance in the region of your choice (or at some other provider like GCS or whatever). There are keystroke-by-keystroke instructions everywhere on setting this up.
Extra points for adding the extremely trivial and also very low cost steps of signing up under a corporate name and removing your personal identity from the account altogether.
Some more extra points for multiplying the almost-zero-cost by 3 or 4 or 5 and spinning up extra copies of your endpoint in multiple regions (or even providers) and manually (or automatically) switching between them.
You don't need to trust anyone - adjust your threat model all the way up to "near nation state" (in the case of Amazon or GCS) and assume these actors could already discern all of your Internet traffic even if you weren't doing business with them.
Christ.
Those are also botnet slaves.
This entire thread is about using a VPN to watch Disney+ outside of geo restrictions. Many many people use VPNs for this purpose and no other. You can't trivially do this on your own at all. You're making it seems simple, getting an VPS with an IP that won't automatically be banned by all sorts of services looking to protect themselves against botnets and the exact sort of geofence hopping that people want to do is extremely difficult.
Sure, the instance doesn’t cost much, but bandwidth does in the case of AWS and GCS. Streaming 4K video chews through bandwidth.
I might be wrong about EC2 pricing, but at least for me, ~$11 per region is not "almost-zero-cost". Unless we're talking about on demand instances.
I wonder if there is a community run VPN service to utilize instances more efficiently.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricin...
Throwing GDPR and `ftw' in the same sentence. Hmm. No GDPR does not work that way hah. At least not in the global context.
GDPR only applies to you _if_ you happen to be a European Union citizen.
There's nothing in GDPR that has anything to do with EU citizenship.
1. GDPR applies to the processing of personal data if the controller or processor is "in the Union", regardless of where the person whose personal data is being processed resides, and regardless of where the processing takes place.
2. It applies to any data subject that is "in the Union".
All the places in it that you might have expected it to say "Union citizen" instead say "in the Union".
Unless you're paying Amazon in bitcoin you're not removing your personal identity from the account.
joepie91 maintains a list, but it looks like it's a couple of years out of date: http://cryto.net/~joepie91/bitcoinvps.html
I'd like to pursue this, but have just little enough experience with ec2 to not be composing effective search terms.
It’s an Ansible playbook for easily setting up a VPN with good security defaults. It’s so easy and really the only knowledge you need to know is how to get api keys for the provider of choice.
Their tutorials will hold your hand all the way to the end.
Waiting for https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand/pull/1668 to be fixed though.
Obviously this only applies if you don't plan on destroying/recreating your Streisand server after the newer PR gets merged (EDIT--just got merged). But just in case, the steps are pretty easy (it's in the PR here too: https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand/pull/1688):
[root@streisand]# cat > /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy/01-reload-nginx.sh << EOF
#!/bin/sh
systemctl reload nginx
EOF
[root@streisand]# chmod u+x /etc/letsencrypt/renewal-hooks/deploy/01-reload-nginx.sh
You also won't have any anonymity since you're billing details and instances are all logged permanently. It's not really a viable alternative.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
You may enjoy Tom Scott's video:
> I tried to write a more honest VPN commercial. The sponsor wasn't happy about it. • Get ■■■ days of ■■■ VPN free at ■■■■.com/honest
(This said, obviously no agency is going to come after you for the occasional lootin’ of moving pictures, and if you are doing anything more serious, then you should have your own VPN infrastructure.)
https://www.newamerica.org/oti/blog/scope-standards-and-prot...
So if they did not know you were an American through your identifiers, they could intercept foreign traffic. However, once they identified you they would need to stop unless the above exceptions were met. IN THEORY. Exceptions have occurred, the most egregious that I can think of is that the FBI has NO ACCOUNTING WHATSOEVER of how many agents accessed the 702 database:
https://www.justsecurity.org/66622/how-to-address-newly-reve...
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/german-intelligen...
Their in-Canada peering is so terrible, it's common for local Toronto traffic to have round-trip through Chicago or NYC.
Woah. Hold your bong son! ;)
Any reference to documentation or any information of what you mean by `sold' on the open market?
If you wanted to prove a point by saying that internet is an insecure medium then yes I agree but `tapped' and `sold' is a whole different ball game that I am not aware of. At least in the internet I know of.
Plus, whatever VPN provider you're using. Unsurprisingly, most seem to be based in countries with very lax telecommunication laws and that make it very easy to start shell companies.
The Lithuanian government has no interest in me, and even if they did, they have no jurisdiction here. One should always be more interested in privacy from the government that has authority to no-knock raid your home than the one that does not.
May I suggest hosting youe own VPN using Streisand (https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand)? It's an absolutely fantastic VPN that runs on just about any cloud system out of the box (or your own hardware of course).
Right now I use Linode for hosting ($5/month) but there are lots and lots of other ways to set it up.
Importantly, setup is easy for all kinds of clients, including mobile devices.
That's a big IF. Not all of us share the luxury of being able to get internet service from companies like Sonic.net.
So yes, I do think there is quite a difference, although you should still be critical of your VPN provider.
Last time I checked Tor's technical paper (probably been 10 or so years), it stated the fact that a relay? node in between can only decrypt the information required to route to next hop and not the actual packet's payload. Is that correct or am I dreaming?
Also, I recall that if someone malicious flooded the tor network with malicious exit nodes, then all traffic details can be `inferred' right? i.e., the assumption was that exit nodes need to route the packet to destination thus it needed to look at every packet but couldn't infer the originating IP address (based on my dated knowledge :))
If a malicious person now floods the tor network with bazillion exit + relay nodes - then essentially all contents (payload + IP src/dst) can be aggregated. Is this still problem in tor network?
Effort and RFCs are underway to establish what would become part of TLS protocol stack. One of which is eSNI (encrypted SNI).
Not that advertising mobile games or g-fuel is great, but you’re at least not pushing (dangerously) false claims on people and imperiling their privacy and security.
This is just not true. You cannot sign up for an ISP without disclosing at least your name and address. Many VPNs support complete anonymity.
It's a different middle man that--if you choose the right one--will absolutely know less about you.
If your traffic is interesting enough, the money trail will eventually lead back to you.
I think it was part of his Qubes OS talk: https://youtu.be/f4U8YbXKwog
It’s just using a different middleman. One middleman might be better than another, but if you have a good ISP already, there’s no privacy/security benefits to be had by using a VPN when surfing from home.
It might be worth getting a VPN if you use sketchy WiFi often, or want to bypass geo-blocking or restrictive firewalls. But remember that you’re trusting the VPN provider with all your traffic. DNS is still not encrypted in most browsers, so this traffic is still a goldmine of marketable info. Sure, they can’t see what you post on snapstagram.com or what pages you visit on news.ycombinator.com, but they can infer a lot about your browsing habits from DNS queries.