And even the die-hards will lose convenience, reverse engineering a custom WASM VM every time it's updated is massive work.

And TPM checks are really hard to bypass.

All that to watch a few videos without a 20 second ads?

Not sure it's event worth it.

That's why you don't do it, but the die-hards do.

The die-hards aren't really doing it for any practical purpose, they're just doing it to show it can be done. Mainstream media have been ignoring. them for decades now and continue to make boatloads of money.

Depends on how highly you value your privacy. Ads aren't just annoying visually, they contain little tracker bits spying on you.

Long before I had an adblocker, I developed "banner blindness", the real benefit my adblocker gives me is less info leaking out to the platforms. (and since ublock/umatrix is so great, also more security and better loading times, but these are cherries)

If that counts as a "practical purpose" is up to you.

Netflix killed Torrents. Spotify killed Napster.

By providing a better service. Not by combatting the pirates in a technological arms race. Incidentally, movie/TV piracy is on the rise again as streaming has become more fragmented and more expensive.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/25/streaming-video-piracy/#:~:te...

Netflix with account sharing has perhaps killed Torrents, which to me doesn't seem that different. People I know went from free torrents to free Netflix (or a "ok I'll pay your beer for letting me use your Netflix"). Now account sharing is out, Torrents will increase again.

Torrenting is on the rise again since the golden era of streaming where Netflix gave you access to everything has ended.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/digital-cont...

Torrenting isn't dead and Spotify came years after the various lawsuits that killed Napster.

Netflix had the chance to become the Steam of Movies, effectively killing piracy in the field, however between every company creating their own streaming service and hiking prices, my (admittedly anecdotal) impression is that some people are going back to pirating at least some of the time.

> Netflix killed Torrents.

Not really.

There is like a decade between Napster ending and Spotify launching. No, it's iTunes that killed mp3 pirating, Spotify killed what was left of it plus optical media.

Netflix may have dampened torrents at some point, but boy are those making a comeback with the splintered enshittifcation prone streaming world we live in.

Torrents are back big-time because Netflix became too annoying and video streaming too fragmented.

https://torrentfreak.com/online-piracy-continues-to-rise-wit...

https://torrentfreak.com/sharp-rise-in-piracy-rates-across-s...

Torrents never left. I've had no issue over the last 15 years with either torrents or newsgroups, everything's just as accessible and quickly released as it was then.

The landscape is not the same as it was.

Previously Google was not a monopoly in so many areas. Now the Internet goes through Google. It caters to investors, not to users. It controls search engine, and a browser, and phones. It can decide what is happening on client side, and on search server side.

The wild west of the Internet has ended. We have the corporate Internet now, that is surveilled and scanned, and they became quite efficient with that.

Previously you could find pirate links through Google, this has ended. You could run pirate software, but software more and more ask OS for approval to be executed. Android will scan sideloaded apps for example.

While environment becomes safer, it also becomes more controlled by corporations. Piracy eventually will be very hard to do. All blockades can be broken, but there more and more of them.