No, and you also don't end your commands with </. Really weird, I doubt many people in the intended target audience of the ad would know what it's supposed to mean. It's not even a random bunch of JavaScript code that looks remotely like "hacking".
They probably just opened Command Prompt and noted the first thing they saw, then in proofing someone thought the lack of it on the other side is an error as they probably saw it in HTML.
Suggesting the stream operators will hack your bank account. Reminds me ot the "pirate media will ruin your VCR/CDDVD Player fake propaganda. Ironically... the virus came from a big reputable corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk....
A lot of industries would be in for some criticism and bad PR after that. But not these guys. They don't give a shit about reputation.
Debatable at best. Art is produced out of passion, if the passion becomes overly monetized then it becomes pretty clear it stops being a reflection of the artist, and more so in the name of profit, which kills innovation.
Take for example, Wes Anderson movies. They aren't ranking in the billions after a successful weekend, but they don't have too because the folks involved recognize it's a passion project. I mean the cast alone is indicative that they're willing to take on a role that pays maybe a quarter of what they normally receive in other flicks.
Income for the publishing company. A lot of musicians don't earn a dime from recording sales until the publishing company first gets a return on investment. Hence bands focusing on live performance revenue, selling CDs on the spot, and merchandise.
It's just so obvious to me that it's a civil violation, not a criminal one.
The amount of law enforcement resources we dedicate to piracy compared to, say, death threats, illegal weapons trade, etc seems completely disproportionate.
Violating laws against attacking and robbing ships at sea is terrible. Violating laws protecting imaginary property rights is quite another. Don't get them confused.
Taking something without paying for it is morally wrong, there's no justification for it. You aren't stealing bread to feed your family, you're stealing a tv show.
The record companies can claim they compensated the artist, even if the math is bogus.
See Steve Albini’s open letter to the music industry for the full accounting…from the nineties when labels made their artists •really• dance for their shekels…
You keep using words that inherently equivocate between transfer-of-property acts and copying-of-property acts. Choose your words more carefully, and then make the same argument.
No amount of definitions will change your mind. Either you think downloading an mp3 is wrong or you don't. I think it's wrong but I do it anyway, that's intellectual honesty.
> Either you think downloading an mp3 is wrong or you don't.
No, I don't think my sense of morality inherently has anything to say about downloading an mp3, one way or the other. There's no instinct in humans that pattern-matches on the idea of copying information that someone else created being a particular "cultural touchstone" or "human right", nor of it being "disgusting" or "taboo."
But something being "not immoral" doesn't make it okay. Without a clear sense of moral value to an action, that action's worth comes down to an ethical question — a question that has to be resolved with ethical arguments, questions of utility and harm and fairness and "the curtain of ignorance" and so forth.
And my point is that you're failing to make those arguments.
Again, you're leaning on a moral intuition about theft of physical property. The problem Best Buy have, in that situation, is that they would have to themselves buy another copy of the DVD in order to then have the stock of it to sell. It's shrinkage, like stealing a TV.
This does not pertain to downloading an MP3.
Like I said: make an ethical argument, not a moral argument. Stop attempting to rely on moral intuitions; there are no good moral intuitions for this, any more than there are good moral intuitions for e.g. the ethics of someone who can "fork off" copies of their mind, forcing those copies to merge back together with them. It's just not something that ever came up in our evolution!
Watching your team live isn't really a fundamental human necessity...It's a business and they pay billions for the TV rights..I think Sky alone pays Formula 1 1B per year.
Doesn't EPL rights sell at around 5B per year?
Those are...a lot of 30$ subscriptions to sell and it excludes production costs...
> It's a business and they pay billions for the TV rights..I think Sky alone pays Formula 1 1B per year.
But that's the problem: people want to send a "this should cost less" signal, forcing broadcasters to make these deals for less, forcing the sports organizations to accept less. There's no cheaper alternative that people can legally buy to send that signal; so the only alternative that actually does signal price sensitivity, is pirating the thing.
I don't typically agree with large media companies but in this case it's at least somewhat valid. A lot of the cheap IPTV boxes you can buy off of Amazon, etc. come pre-rooted and will periodically send data and retrieve commands from known botnet command & control servers. These have historically been used for things such as advertising fraud and selling access to residential IP addresses. https://www.hackread.com/android-tv-boxes-backdoors-home-net...
So just run an IPTV app on an Apple TV. (There are dozens of them; amusingly, they occupy all of the top 20-or-so "top paid" slots on the Apple TV App Store charts.) Then you can trust not only that the app is sandboxed, but that it went through Apple's same paranoid App Store verification that everything else does.
You buy IPTV stream passwords (or whatever is used to log in) from some guy and once he knows your card details he can use them for anything else, yes. That's how it works.
Not really. Most places use crypto now and those that still also accept cash use PayPal or Kofi – they’re not getting card details. That’s how it works
I very very rarely use streams but what Sky fails to understand is that I wouldn’t buy their service even if there wasn’t any stream available. It is simply too expensive.
I am talking about Sky Sports here for example. Also in Germany for example. Last I checked, they wanted 30 euros per month and a yearly subscription when I want to see a Bundesliga match every x months. I have a season ticket for my team so I see all matches live and away games sometimes on TV. Even if I were to justify the price (it’s exactly the same price as my season pass), it’s not guaranteed that they show the match, it may be shown by DAZN, who also want 30 euros per month, but at least don’t ask for a year’s commitment. Neither service sells pay per view - I would gladly pay 5 - 10 euros per match seen
In the UK at least Sky offer this. You can buy a 'day pass' and get full access to all their sports channels for a day. It's about £12. Or you can pay £34.99 for the monthly plan. In reality they constantly offer deals and when you try to cancel they offer huge discounts. I think I've been paying about £20 per month for the full sports package for the last couple of years. It's wildly more accessible now than it was when you had to buy their satellite package etc. and commit for multiple years.
They offer it in Germany too under the WOW brand (previously Sky Ticket). I don't think they offer the day pass but they certainly offer the single month for the sports channels.
Oops yeah forgot to mention it's through NowTV. It might have improved since you last used it. Previously you had to find what you wanted to watch on their website and then it would open and play in a desktop app. Recently they deprecated that and you can play directly in the browser - maybe that'll solve the linux issue.
Paying extra for HD/surround sound is annoying but tbh it has no impact on me watching sport. Unless I'm watching hockey, I can see everything just fine in 720p.
Also, Sky has horrible software/infra. If you buy it thinking you can stream their stuff, you are in for a bad time. I never had a live event without a stream connection loss or extreme quality drop, worse then youtube 360p.
Oh and when (not if) your stream connection drops, you will have to watch their ads again.
That’s how SportsNet is in Canada for the NHL. It isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty bad and they’re obviously taking advantage of their monopoly (for broadcast rights) to foist a low quality, premium priced service onto the public.
ESPN+ in the US costs half of what we pay for SportsNet in Canada and it’s better quality. I can’t coax a 60fps stream out of SportsNet while a 720p60 ESPN+ with upscaling on an Nvidia Shield looks very good.
So, in Canada you don’t have any good options. You either pay for the legit service that’s terrible quality or you get something that’s grey market (ESPN+ via VPN) or flat out piracy.
Over the last 3 years I’ve spent more on piracy than what a SportsNet subscription would cost. My money is there for them to take if they can ever deliver a product that’s not absolute trash.
Same for F1. In other countries you can get a monthly subscription to watch all of the Grand Prix for around £10/month. In the UK it doesn't show them live, only highlights, and so you need to pay for Sky with the sports package - something like £45/month.
>>> Even if I were to justify the price (it’s exactly the same price as my season pass), it’s not guaranteed that they show the match.
This drove me away from their service. It seemed insane to me. I also ran into this issue with some foreign channels where they would show infomercials instead of the actual, early AM game. That drove me nuts.
So now we use an alternative, and very happy with the result.
I suspect the unit would be funded directly by Sky - the advantage to doing it that way is that they have access to the CPS and police intelligence, as well as all the powers the police have which they wouldn't if it was done in house.
Insurance fraud is run along the same lines, all insurers contribute towards IFED which is a part of the City of London police tasked with tackling insurance fraud. If this relied on public funding I doubt anything but the most extreme cases of insurance fraud would be investigated.
Well, I imagine it's about ROI and cost effectiveness: sometimes it's cheaper to buy the politicians already in-place, sometimes it's cheaper to buy the elections for newly-elected ones, and sometimes it's cheaper to just go straight to the executive branch and buy a small part of it instead.
The day they understand that for sports events there is definitely a big enough audience willing to pay single matches instead of being forced to buy the entire season...
Also, decoupling it from telecom connection packages (that, at least, in Spain)
I don't think its that mind boggling. Everyone pays -in some way- for value.
Pirated streams may not cost $$, but they cost time, labor, and its risky to set up (virii, installing bloatware, etc). So there's a cost to them.
A hybrid model that is low cost and low labor, simply approximates the real value to the consumer.
If someone is not paying Sky 30 EUR per month, but is paying a random reseller the equivalent of 3 EUR/mo, then the question is, why doesn't the content provider sell that value to the end user?
Right, but this is copyright brained "lost sale" logic. Sky costs 30 EUR/mo because everyone involved in the value chain can only produce their creative works if they can charge that much. The resellers are charging 3 EUR specifically because they cut the publishers and creators of that work out of the profit. Of course you can charge 3 EUR for something you didn't have to pay for.
But you could also charge nothing - you don't really have costs because you aren't paying anyone. I distinctly remember the days of P2P and BitTorrent where pirated content actually was being provided for free[0]. So in my mind, charging any amount of money for pirated content feels like a grift.
[0] Or at the very least, using an internal scrip denominated in bytes transferred to encourage people to host the content
I'm paying £15/month to rent a seedbox on which I have a media centre application and a torrent client installed.
If I could get the same user experience for the same price legally then I would, but the legal experience is both too expensive and too shit. There was a golden year or two where it really was easier to do it legally. Now you need ten different subscriptions, and half the things you want to watch cost extra money on top of that.
Seedbox providers seem like a pretty bad idea if you are based in a jurisdiction with strong copyright infringement laws or precedent of prosecuting piracy.
Many of the servers are operated in locations which have cooperation agreements with law enforcement and authorities in other countries.
Go after a bigger provider, obtain records of their customers and you have “caught many people in the act” — you get access logs with IPs to control panels, any other logs in infrastructure (all those things they may do to make it easier to use a seedbox are also potential evidence of crimes committed), payment instruments to trace you.
You’re paying £15 and gambling a bit that this won’t happen, or that the Crown Prosecution Service and Police don’t care. But the UK keeps revising the Digital Economy Act, and changing/increasing the penalties for copyright infringement, so they’re spending valuable legislative time on this (somewhat indicating it may become a prosecution priority). There’s always the specter of a coordinated, multinational operation to disrupt piracy because it’s a great headline that authorities care about intellectual property.
If you are caught and they do make an example of you, the penalties (a criminal record; a significant fine like £50,000; or even a short jail stint) seem to dramatically “cost more” than the savings.
It might be worth understanding what logs your seedbox provider keeps external to the system they’re renting you, what’s on the box itself, what duration all these logs are kept for, how long do they keep records of your payments (the authorities will inevitably argue this is a criminal enterprise and you’re supporting organised crime).
But perhaps you’re paying through cryptocurrency from wallets the clean side of a tumbler/mixer and you only ever access this all via VPN and have perfect OpSec!
I recently paid about $30 for license codes for office/project/visio/visual studio enterprise. I spend 99% of my time on Linux, but on my windows machine I wanted these titles and didn't want to pay for a subscription or risk unknown binaries from torrent sites (although I generally do trust them). $30, 1-time, was acceptable, products work great, and if MSFT offered the same deal I'd have bought from them.
I think sports suffers from fragmentation in the same way as other content.
To watch all the televised football games in the UK you need Sky Sports, TNT and Amazon Prime.
Even then you can only see half the games whereas in other countries almost all Premier League matches are televised meaning that geographical licensing restrictions are also in play.
I would happily pay a fairly significant fee to watch all matches conveniently, but it’s simply not available to buy.
Yeah, same for American Football. If you really want to watch everything you need Sunday Ticket, some TV sub that includes ESPN, Amazon Prime and NFL+. This is definitely on purpose.
I just get Sunday ticket and head to the pub on the occasion that my team is playing a game not covered by that or antenna TV.
The NFL is good about letting local fans see their team. The monetary pain comes if you want to see out of market games.
The resellers I’m aware of, who advertise a “Scandinavian” set of channels that include Sky UK/Ireland, are based in the Philippines and the Stalker server is/was in Russia.
To even get the system to work, you have to VPN out of the UK or Ireland to start with.
78 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadI had a relative contact me a couple of years ago to ask if the little black box her grandson had helpfully connected to the TV was "dodgy".
It starts off as a prompt and becomes an html tag. It's like how my father-in-law begins a joke that ends as a riddle.
Suggesting the stream operators will hack your bank account. Reminds me ot the "pirate media will ruin your VCR/CDDVD Player fake propaganda. Ironically... the virus came from a big reputable corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk....
A lot of industries would be in for some criticism and bad PR after that. But not these guys. They don't give a shit about reputation.
This has so much opportunity for improvement. ex: Blatant Lies Let Stupidity In
Bizarre that so many at the top will label ordinary people who don't like the idea of being gouged to watch their favorite team play as criminals.
It's pretty ridiculous
Take for example, Wes Anderson movies. They aren't ranking in the billions after a successful weekend, but they don't have too because the folks involved recognize it's a passion project. I mean the cast alone is indicative that they're willing to take on a role that pays maybe a quarter of what they normally receive in other flicks.
The amount of law enforcement resources we dedicate to piracy compared to, say, death threats, illegal weapons trade, etc seems completely disproportionate.
Is this a good position?
Why or why not?
See Steve Albini’s open letter to the music industry for the full accounting…from the nineties when labels made their artists •really• dance for their shekels…
Best example I know of Lawful Evil…
You keep using words that inherently equivocate between transfer-of-property acts and copying-of-property acts. Choose your words more carefully, and then make the same argument.
No, I don't think my sense of morality inherently has anything to say about downloading an mp3, one way or the other. There's no instinct in humans that pattern-matches on the idea of copying information that someone else created being a particular "cultural touchstone" or "human right", nor of it being "disgusting" or "taboo."
But something being "not immoral" doesn't make it okay. Without a clear sense of moral value to an action, that action's worth comes down to an ethical question — a question that has to be resolved with ethical arguments, questions of utility and harm and fairness and "the curtain of ignorance" and so forth.
And my point is that you're failing to make those arguments.
This does not pertain to downloading an MP3.
Like I said: make an ethical argument, not a moral argument. Stop attempting to rely on moral intuitions; there are no good moral intuitions for this, any more than there are good moral intuitions for e.g. the ethics of someone who can "fork off" copies of their mind, forcing those copies to merge back together with them. It's just not something that ever came up in our evolution!
What, exactly?
Doesn't EPL rights sell at around 5B per year?
Those are...a lot of 30$ subscriptions to sell and it excludes production costs...
Regardless, there have been an absorbent amount of studies on this subject, with various inconclusive results.
More reading here: https://techpolicyinstitute.org/publications/intellectual-pr...
Also here: https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/asi....
But that's the problem: people want to send a "this should cost less" signal, forcing broadcasters to make these deals for less, forcing the sports organizations to accept less. There's no cheaper alternative that people can legally buy to send that signal; so the only alternative that actually does signal price sensitivity, is pirating the thing.
I am talking about Sky Sports here for example. Also in Germany for example. Last I checked, they wanted 30 euros per month and a yearly subscription when I want to see a Bundesliga match every x months. I have a season ticket for my team so I see all matches live and away games sometimes on TV. Even if I were to justify the price (it’s exactly the same price as my season pass), it’s not guaranteed that they show the match, it may be shown by DAZN, who also want 30 euros per month, but at least don’t ask for a year’s commitment. Neither service sells pay per view - I would gladly pay 5 - 10 euros per match seen
In the UK at least Sky offer this. You can buy a 'day pass' and get full access to all their sports channels for a day. It's about £12. Or you can pay £34.99 for the monthly plan. In reality they constantly offer deals and when you try to cancel they offer huge discounts. I think I've been paying about £20 per month for the full sports package for the last couple of years. It's wildly more accessible now than it was when you had to buy their satellite package etc. and commit for multiple years.
It is an absoultely brutal experience, and drove me back to streaming.
I bought a game last year, first i couldn't watch it on my computer (linux) next i realised that i had to pay extra for HD.
Paying extra to have sport in HD? Fuck, and i cannot stress this enough, That.
Paying extra for HD/surround sound is annoying but tbh it has no impact on me watching sport. Unless I'm watching hockey, I can see everything just fine in 720p.
Oh and when (not if) your stream connection drops, you will have to watch their ads again.
That’s how SportsNet is in Canada for the NHL. It isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty bad and they’re obviously taking advantage of their monopoly (for broadcast rights) to foist a low quality, premium priced service onto the public.
ESPN+ in the US costs half of what we pay for SportsNet in Canada and it’s better quality. I can’t coax a 60fps stream out of SportsNet while a 720p60 ESPN+ with upscaling on an Nvidia Shield looks very good.
So, in Canada you don’t have any good options. You either pay for the legit service that’s terrible quality or you get something that’s grey market (ESPN+ via VPN) or flat out piracy.
Over the last 3 years I’ve spent more on piracy than what a SportsNet subscription would cost. My money is there for them to take if they can ever deliver a product that’s not absolute trash.
This drove me away from their service. It seemed insane to me. I also ran into this issue with some foreign channels where they would show infomercials instead of the actual, early AM game. That drove me nuts.
So now we use an alternative, and very happy with the result.
For a Champions League match from time to time, Amazon Prime may be worth it: https://www.amazon.de/salp/championsleague/
Insurance fraud is run along the same lines, all insurers contribute towards IFED which is a part of the City of London police tasked with tackling insurance fraud. If this relied on public funding I doubt anything but the most extreme cases of insurance fraud would be investigated.
So if politicians won't sell a corp the LEO they want, the corp can just purchase them directly.
This would entirely fall on the Irish taxpayer (me) to foot the bill.
Might write to my TD to specifically tell them to oppose the idea for the craic.
Also, decoupling it from telecom connection packages (that, at least, in Spain)
Pirated streams may not cost $$, but they cost time, labor, and its risky to set up (virii, installing bloatware, etc). So there's a cost to them.
A hybrid model that is low cost and low labor, simply approximates the real value to the consumer.
If someone is not paying Sky 30 EUR per month, but is paying a random reseller the equivalent of 3 EUR/mo, then the question is, why doesn't the content provider sell that value to the end user?
But you could also charge nothing - you don't really have costs because you aren't paying anyone. I distinctly remember the days of P2P and BitTorrent where pirated content actually was being provided for free[0]. So in my mind, charging any amount of money for pirated content feels like a grift.
[0] Or at the very least, using an internal scrip denominated in bytes transferred to encourage people to host the content
If I could get the same user experience for the same price legally then I would, but the legal experience is both too expensive and too shit. There was a golden year or two where it really was easier to do it legally. Now you need ten different subscriptions, and half the things you want to watch cost extra money on top of that.
Many of the servers are operated in locations which have cooperation agreements with law enforcement and authorities in other countries.
Go after a bigger provider, obtain records of their customers and you have “caught many people in the act” — you get access logs with IPs to control panels, any other logs in infrastructure (all those things they may do to make it easier to use a seedbox are also potential evidence of crimes committed), payment instruments to trace you.
You’re paying £15 and gambling a bit that this won’t happen, or that the Crown Prosecution Service and Police don’t care. But the UK keeps revising the Digital Economy Act, and changing/increasing the penalties for copyright infringement, so they’re spending valuable legislative time on this (somewhat indicating it may become a prosecution priority). There’s always the specter of a coordinated, multinational operation to disrupt piracy because it’s a great headline that authorities care about intellectual property.
If you are caught and they do make an example of you, the penalties (a criminal record; a significant fine like £50,000; or even a short jail stint) seem to dramatically “cost more” than the savings.
It might be worth understanding what logs your seedbox provider keeps external to the system they’re renting you, what’s on the box itself, what duration all these logs are kept for, how long do they keep records of your payments (the authorities will inevitably argue this is a criminal enterprise and you’re supporting organised crime).
But perhaps you’re paying through cryptocurrency from wallets the clean side of a tumbler/mixer and you only ever access this all via VPN and have perfect OpSec!
To watch all the televised football games in the UK you need Sky Sports, TNT and Amazon Prime.
Even then you can only see half the games whereas in other countries almost all Premier League matches are televised meaning that geographical licensing restrictions are also in play.
I would happily pay a fairly significant fee to watch all matches conveniently, but it’s simply not available to buy.
I just get Sunday ticket and head to the pub on the occasion that my team is playing a game not covered by that or antenna TV.
The NFL is good about letting local fans see their team. The monetary pain comes if you want to see out of market games.
Seems absurd that the police need to be involved at all.
To even get the system to work, you have to VPN out of the UK or Ireland to start with.
I think the police might have some difficulty.