Netflix has stepped up its efforts to ban VPN and proxy users from bypassing geographical restrictions. The streaming service is now blocking residential IP addresses too, since some unblocking tools use these to bypass restrictions. This isn't without collateral damage as many regular Internet user...

The banning technology growing more sophisticated.

  • RandyLahey [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    in australia, piracy used to just be the default that absolutely everybody openly used to get their media content, because new stuff always came a year or two late if at all, and was marked up ridiculously when it arrived (even if it was digital and didn't have the excuse of shipping costs). there was never any of this reddit-esque moralistic shaming of people who pirated because your mum and your boss and everyone else pirated too

    that only really changed when netflix and steam and spotify etc made it more convenient and not crazily expensive to just open an app to get all your consolidated slop, and yeah everyone understood that the more dedicated folks would use a vpn to get around region restrictions to get more slop but hey they were still paying $15 a month or whatever

    with this sort of shit and the fragmentation of media into a million separate streaming services that people are expected to subscribe to, i look forward to seeing australia return to the warm loving embrace of bittorrent

    • danisth [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      During my pirating hiatus, when you could have a sufficient amount of slop for a reasonable price (well I still pirated some, but a lot less), I ended up setting up a desktop PC that can conveniently double as a home media server. It's now running a Plex server and my pirating has been taken to a whole new level. I load up tons of new and old movies onto there just so me and my partner can have the fun of scrolling through actually good options on a netflix-like interface. I've started sharing it with friends who are tired of having 5 subscriptions, and so far it's been working great.

      • RandyLahey [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        in their defense, its taken the government many years of repeated failures but its now legitimately tricky to access decent torrent sites in australia if you dont know what youre doing

        but these young whippersnappers are good with the computers and the internets and whatnot, im sure theyll figure it out