It's nice to see the US Congress finally trying to address the real issues that have serious impact on the daily lives of the average citizen. Oh wait, this matters to almost no one except big business interests. Never mind.
Wonder if having your own DNS resolver will work around the issue... I mean, the caching from cloudflare/google-dns is nice, but I'm fine if 1/8 of my dns lookups has to make the full cycle through domain resolvers.
I've recently switched to privacy respecting computing options, so of course lost access to everything I've bought from Apple and Amazon for the last 20 years.
If I never paid for content again they'd still be in my debt.
You wouldn't steal a car would you? No, but I'd repossess one from some delinquent son of a bitch in a suit.
Isn't torrenting way down from its heyday? Streaming companies are not perfect, but I always thought they were at least moderately successful such that in 2025, average, casual, non-techies no longer bother to jump through the VPN and private tracker hoops just to download a movie.
I've been trying to watch old 80s-90s movies recently. I'm happy to pay $5 or whatever, and they just aren't available anywhere. Rental stores are dead, so I can't go rent them from blockbuster or whatever, and streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore. Trying to even find availability of what films exist on which streaming sites has been an absolute pain. There are theoretical catalogue sites, but they are all randomly out of date to the point that its not very useful.
I'm literally at the point where its looking like pirating the movies is the only way to watch them...
Same here. I have 4 streaming service subscriptions and it really frustrates me when I can't find classic films that I want to show my kids or just watch myself.
> streaming sites have splintered to the point I'm not even sure what is a scam and what is a legitimate business anymore
They're all scams, of varying levels of scammyness ;P
No but seriously, the pricing is intentional deceptive and a lot of werives won't offer ad free viewing, no matter how much you pay. They'll also weasel around it with "most media won't have ads, but some will". Thanks, how helpful. Paramount plus apparently doesn't consider ads for itself to be ads - so on the ad free plan, you still get ads for Paramount.
But the worst part is that every app is different and some are really, really poor quality. You'd think we would just invent an API for this and then have one viewer, like we had for TV. But then again, maybe nobody wants to reinvent TV.
Also, blocking VPNs: if I'm logged in and you know my real country and I'm paying, you don't need to block VPNs. It doesn't do anything but annoy customers
> The granted orders would stay in place for a year with the option to extend if necessary. If blocked sites switch to new locations, the court can also amend blocking orders to include new IP addresses and domain names.
What if the "pirate site" uses foreign cloud provider, and regularly changes IP addresses? Will I lose access to all websites hosted by the foreign cloud provider once their whole ASN will be blocked?
> Block BEARD does not mention VPNs, but its broad definition of “service provider” could be interpreted to include them.
This seems easy to circumvent - you can just use foreign VPN provider, who don't advertise themselves for piracy use, for... piracy. IP/DNS blocking proven to be a good censorship tool though.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 83.4 ms ] threadIf I never paid for content again they'd still be in my debt.
You wouldn't steal a car would you? No, but I'd repossess one from some delinquent son of a bitch in a suit.
Oppose this bill.
I'm literally at the point where its looking like pirating the movies is the only way to watch them...
They're all scams, of varying levels of scammyness ;P
No but seriously, the pricing is intentional deceptive and a lot of werives won't offer ad free viewing, no matter how much you pay. They'll also weasel around it with "most media won't have ads, but some will". Thanks, how helpful. Paramount plus apparently doesn't consider ads for itself to be ads - so on the ad free plan, you still get ads for Paramount.
But the worst part is that every app is different and some are really, really poor quality. You'd think we would just invent an API for this and then have one viewer, like we had for TV. But then again, maybe nobody wants to reinvent TV.
Also, blocking VPNs: if I'm logged in and you know my real country and I'm paying, you don't need to block VPNs. It doesn't do anything but annoy customers
What if the "pirate site" uses foreign cloud provider, and regularly changes IP addresses? Will I lose access to all websites hosted by the foreign cloud provider once their whole ASN will be blocked?
> Block BEARD does not mention VPNs, but its broad definition of “service provider” could be interpreted to include them.
This seems easy to circumvent - you can just use foreign VPN provider, who don't advertise themselves for piracy use, for... piracy. IP/DNS blocking proven to be a good censorship tool though.
I really wish destitutely uncreative people would stop pretending to be clever.
So looks like this will be at the ISP level, so should be able to be circumvented easily with VPNs.
The scary part is it's likely to lead to a lockdown on VPNs in the future.
The prospect of all VPN providers being required to block pirate sites, or being unable to operate in the US, is very scary indeed