Topicless thread

[Nichi]

I'd love to move to anywhere else in the world, but I'm forever trapped in a shithole town in the middle of nowhere >_<;;

Anyway, today is the last day in my hometown until next weekend...and nobody is capable of leaving me alone so I can relax and enjoy this. Mom suddenly wants me to clean her guinea pig's cage and grandma wants me to see about fixing the laptop of one of her coworkers this afternoon, all the while the only thing I care to do today is meet up with my sister for lunch. Aside from getting out for lunch, I just want to play FF7 in peace before I set out; is that so much to ask? >_<;;;

[Bella]

That's exactly why I'm always using a decent (but not really cheap) VPN service when browsing/downloading from home

Yeah, I'm probably gonna sign up for something like BTGuard when this comes into effect. I hope it works. :/

The RIAA and MPAA are massive fuckwads who pretty much deserve to be subjected to slow, painful deaths, then have their immortal souls tormented by, I don't know, his Satanic majesty or somebody. (Actually, no, they'd probably end up being good pals with Satan, we need to find a force more evil.)

They suck money out of the artists they claim to protect, but when average joes try to do the "same thing", they attempt to enact world-changing legislation. They put out absolute dreck and wonder why NOBODY WANTS TO PAY MONEY to watch/listen to that trash. Blaming it on piracy is a good way to cover their asses, since it's a lot easier to say OOOOH EVIL THIEVES ARE DOING IT! than to admit that they're churning out tired, homogenous shit on a daily basis, and that people are fed up with paying for that kind of garbage.

I'll stop myself here before I go into full-on rant mode. -___-;; I just really, really hope that the hackers can get a few steps ahead of the RIAA and ISP douchebags, and find ways around whatever roadblocks they may set up. I know the hackers have the advantage of intelligence, but the other side has an unlimited supply of money and government backing...

[NejinOniwa]

We're already ahead of the times, the guys who get arrested are the guys who don't stay with the times or refuse to give a shit about the times.

Also, I heard Sweden is a pretty good place to go if you're looking for fast and safe internets lololololol

That said, Fuck The MPAA etc.
A quote to the second comment on that article:

The part I don't get is that downloading is not a litigious offense. They literally cannot sue you for it - they always sue for wrongful distribution of copyrighted material for just that reason.

So if you're only downloading (yes, there are means of doing so without uploading), there's nothing they can really do to you in court about it.

Of course, there's always the whole proxy thing that throws the ISP monitoring off. Why? Because unless the ISP does deep-packet inspection (which will wreck your bandwidth), and correlates those packets with a known copyrighted file? Well, there's no way to tell where the file ultimately downloads to.

I think the whole thing will likely catch the stupid and the naive among the Internet set, but those with half a brain will have circumvented a what is a multi-month effort in less than two minutes (by simple dint of changing a proxy setting). If you want to be 100% sure, you just set up a cheap offshore VPN, and nothing gets to read the encrypted tunnel. What, ban VPN's? Yeah, and every telecommuter and remote worker you have among your customers will drop you faster than you can complete the sentence (most telecommuters use a VPN tunnel to hook up their company laptops to their employer's network). Oh, require the customer submit a whitelist of VPN destinations? Bzzt! It's easier and faster to swap providers in most populated areas.

Sorry, but unless the ISPs require and get a snooping application with keylogger installed in every customer's computer, they will get approximately nowhere with this initiative.

Too bad the RIAA is too stupid to realize this. Then again, maybe it will come to requiring a snooper on everyone's computer.

[Chocofreak13]

i wonder how the internet service is in stanley. the pirate police would have a hard time finding me in a canadian village with a population of 305.

that said, though this turned my guts at first, if there's one thing we know, it's that hackers and pirates will always find a way to come out on top, and even if we have to suffer for a month under the tyranny of it, we can be confident that our euro friends will help us out with info and downloads. >>;

also, if i get cited for torrenting something unlicensed, i'm going to write the longest, angriest letter that the thought police will have ever seen.

(also, why are we just discussing this now? the article was written in early march. :\ )

[NejinOniwa]

We're not with the times :|

[Nichi]

Yeah, we do seem to be a bit behind :\

Anyway, everything is 100% set for my trip. I plan on going to bed early tonight

[Chocofreak13]

BEHIND THE TIMES!
BEHIND THE TIMES!
THE PRESIDENT!
BEHIND THE TIMES!!

(god i love that show. -w-)

TELL ME OSC, ARE YOU A CHAOS OR ORDER MUPPET? (and what am i, for that matter...?)

[NejinOniwa]

ARE YOU IN RANGE OF KARTHUS ULT? OF COURSE YOU ARE!

[Nichi]

Just woke up. Everything looks good, so I'll be heading to the airport next.

I think it's time we blow this scene; get everybody and the stuff together. Ok; 3, 2, 1, let's jam!</cowboy_bebop>

[NejinOniwa]

Good luck on your travels, bro.

[stewartsage]

Good luck Pentium, remember to take everything out/leave behind that the TSA'll bug you about.

[Cockleshell]

You'd better skype me while you're there with choco. =3=

[Bella]

I wonder if he's in Boston yet? I can't imagine the trip is more than a few hours, but with security checks and stuff who the hell knows. ^^;


Also, thanks for posting more info on the unholy RIAA-ISP alliance, Nej, that set my mind at ease somewhat. I'll show that to my dad too, because when I told him that I was thinking about signing up for a VPN service, he got kind of paranoid ("If you have a VPN, won't that make you seem suspicious?").

[Bella]

That's a really good question. I wonder if they'll even be able to tell the difference between legal, legally-unclear and illegal torrents.

Tbh, I used to be vaguely against illegally downloading commercially-available media, but then my last fuck flew away the moment the MPAA and RIAA began their little crusade in the name of copyright enforcement. Maybe my moral compass is broken in that respect, though, since I don't consider illegal downloading the same thing as theft (as in, actually stealing a CD/DVD/piece of software install media) or piracy (charging people for illegally-obtained/-recorded media).

I agree that sharing and downloading abandonware and other commercially-unavailable media should never be considered unethical or illegal.

[NejinOniwa]

The thing is, they can't tell jack shit difference when it comes to torrents. They can possibly see if you've accessed torrent z on site x, but the actual data transmitting is virtually impossible to see for them because of the unique p2p nature of the torrent technology. It's like trying to catch a swarm of bees with a fishing net. Doesn't work.

And thus, they only catch the people who are still using fish...