Absolutely diabolical. Cutting off internet access is no different than cutting of electricity in modern society. Sure, you can live without it, but everything from paying your bills to getting a job or having a social life just got a whole lot harder. Fuck anyone who thinks this is a reasonable response.
The cruelty is the point
Also, the ignorance regarding VPNs.
Internet access is absolutely a utility in every function. And like a utility, most people don’t have a realistic alternative. Not without sky-high prices and/or slower speeds and less reliability. Thanks, Donald Trump.
They would sentence you to death while demanding that you pay for your own execution.
Libertarian police
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me.
Original Credit: https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertarian-police-department>>>>>
Thank you for this. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so hard on my lunch break ever
This made me audibly sigh. They won’t put it like this but this genuinely the future some people want.
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“You wouldn’t SteAL a gUilLotINe!”
as digitized almost all societal functions are, we really should define basic internet access as a human right.
but think of the corporations!
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So you’re saying you have a choice in ISPs? Sounds pretty cool.
My area has around 3 or 4 competing ISPs. (Canada)
I think they can also catch you seeding it.
All this with a VPN?
I’m not aware of any way they can catch you with a VPN.
420,696,969% tariffs on VPNs who let you connect outside the US.
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Is this true? You actually have to seed in order to download?
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hm, if you set your seed ratio to 0, maybe not though
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I’ve never tried it either. It would be kind of an asshole thing to do. Torrenting only works because everyone contributes their fair share.
The level of short sightedness in this pursuit is laughable, even if it’s coming from corporate.
You pirated a song?
Well then, we’re going to cut off your internet so that we can never effectively market anything we make to you ever again.
We’ll gladly lose out on all the revenue you normally spend on corporate movies, tech, and content because we’d rather hyper fixate on the pennies of lost revenue that mp3 cost us, than ever worry about the macro economic conditions of the real people it comes from.
Fucking LOL.
It’s the same idea as “death penalty will scare people out from committing murder”
The hope is the threat will stop new people from getting into that
Death penalty is an ineffective deterrent mostly because people tend to commit the crimes it’s used as a punishment for while not thinking, or caring, about the consequences at all.
Now, forget cutting off the internet, if you’d get the death penalty for getting caught pirating music, it would prove to be a very effective deterrent at stopping it. I guarantee, zero piracy after a few years.
A lot smaller population left to buy the legal media too, though, but hey, no pesky pirates!Death penalty is an ineffective deterrent mostly because people tend to commit the crimes it’s used as a punishment for while not thinking, or caring, about the consequences at all.
People pirate for not caring about the consequences
Death penalty for its use cases though is getting off easy. That’s why you find people killing themselves either with murder-suicide or suicide in prison
It’s like “what if we gave you no punishment at all”
For me it’s having a kind of Streisand Effect… Is there a mass torrent of just Sony songs I can grab? Cus fuck em, I want it just out of spite
It’s cyclical. The current generation of executive assholes failed to learn the lesson of their predecessors.
Is music piracy is still a major thing these days? I’ve not even considered it for years, because every music streaming platform has all the music, it seems.
Movie and TV show piracy must be so much more rampant because of the fragmentation creating inconvenience to consumers.
Music piracy isn’t rampant at all. It’s the “immigrant crime is out of control” of the internet.
If anything, youtube is the biggest sharer of pirated music. You can listen to anything on it for free, from anyone.
And download all the music you want without an account using yt-dlp.
Hell I still sometimes find those old “lyrics” videos. Remember those? They all had that bluish teal background? Some of them survive to this day.
They’re still around for most big songs, old and new.
I mean, there was a particular format of them, I think they were made in Youtube’s old built-in editor, there’s a distinctive style that is extremely 2007.
The blue background is in fact a default for Windows Movie Maker
That would make sense for the era. The particular font scrolling effect most of them started with is likely also a built-in effect? I never once played with Windows Movie Maker.
Hell, most of the major labels post tracks themselves to sponge up that sweet ad revenue. You can just use the tool of your choice to download the audio straight out of it if you decide you want to keep it for later.
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It’s honestly easier than torrents.
It’s mostly hipsters with modded iPods, everyone else just streams music. You can stream it in lossless quality on some platforms and download most played songs to your device if your mobile bandwidth is limited.
Hell I’m a weird hipster who likes to have local copies of things and even I’ve given up.
Audiophiles like me listen to local .flac files through external DAC’s for better sound. And I’m not a hipster. Also lots of music I like isn’t even on streaming.
it’s better if you hear this sooner than later but you are the dictionary definition of a hipster
I use Foobar and Plexamp to listen to my FLAC collection. I have a lot of magazine CD inserts not readily available on the streaming platforms. Just feels really good knowing companies like Spotify aren’t making a dime off me.
Never heard of foobar, and honestly surprised it doesn’t have a linux version. It has a windows phone version, but NOT linux.
I know I shit on linux a lot on this site for having a small userbase, but COME ON!!! You make a windows phone version but NOT a linux version??? At least linux has something like 5% of the pc market userbase. And while that may be mockingly small, windows phone probably only ever had 5 users total!
You know it’s bad when I’M the one insulting a program for not having a native linux port.
For you and anyone else curious to find something similar to Foobar2k on Linux, there’s DeaDBeeF. I used to use it way back before I switched to ncmpcpp
Well, Foobar is ancient software and barely has any developers. It’s intended to be a WinAmp clone. I’m sure there’s an equivalent piece of Linux software that does something similar.
Most personal computers run Linux.
Because most personal computers are phones.
Music piracy is just so much harder than streaming.
Yup. With shows and movies it’s the other way around. Netflix was already losing a lot of the third party content I liked and then they pulled the whole “have to live in the same house” thing. Instant cancel.
I do have Apple TV+ nowadays, but only because I have the Apple One package that gives you Music, TV+, Arcade and storage space for a bit more than any of the services separately. TV+ is also nearly all originals and there are a lot of good ones. They have much less content, but much better quality to garbage ratio. I’ve watched some shows 3 times over. Not a service I’d likely pay for separately, but the bundle deal is just an excellent value proposition for me.
Everything else I torrent. Indiscriminately. Hollywood blockbuster? Torrent. Estonian movie? If I missed it in the cinemas, torrent.
Japanese corporate culture is fucking terrible. I don’t understand how anyone can support these gaming companies.
Edit: Gaming/Entertainment
UMG and Warner Bros are Japanese? Lol
Japanese corporate culture is atrocious ≠ American corporate culture isn’t atrocious
Both need some major reforms in order to be just non-awful, let alone acceptable.
My point is more that what they wrote didn’t make sense talking about Japanese corporations when more American companies are listed. The entertainment industry is simply awful, nationalities aside.
Pretty sure sony is Japanese.
Sony Music (the company involved in this lawsuit) is an American subsidiary of Sony Entertainment, a division of Sony Corporation of America.
Read the first sentence of the article
Shut up, Sony. Stop pirating Adobe Apps then.
I may or may not have been pirating media for over 20 years and this song and dance will never end.
Sure, the well known torrent sites have marginally less content and seeds than before but my Plex server may or may not still be packed full of classics and the latest releases.
The above may or may not be purely fictional and victimless. And no, I wouldn’t “steal a handbag.” Handbags aren’t infinite digital replicas, and handbag owners don’t drive supercars.
(I draw the line at software largely due to the risks, and partly due to Mac apps and Adobe suite being locked down pretty well. I’m happy to pay for software regardless. Netflix and Amazon on the other hand…)
Shit, I didn’t just pirate all the movies and TV shows I consume, but I also stole the server that hosts my Servarr stack that I download them onto from my last corporate job.
Yo ho ho, mateys, and a bottle of VPNs!
I pay for Netflix and get other shows that interest me elsewhere, they are few and come out every two years or so.
They plan on suing all the ai companies too?
They won’t sue their intelligence providers
They could but let’s be honest, the AI companies have no capital to take. They’re just one big ponzi scheme waiting to collapse as soon as new investors stop coming in faster than they leave.
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Sony would be in the running. But i think nestle would beat them on the top spot.
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People wouldn’t pirate your shit if it was easily and cheaply available
And won’t disappear the moment someone decides they won’t pay “licenses” for it to be on the service you paid for it.
And, thinking specifically about Sony, doesn’t include rootkits or similar invasive security nightmares.
Fuck you Sony…
Signed a lifelong pirate.
It costs a holiday and a nice dinner to make the SCOTUS say “um, ackchually, the constitution doesn’t say anything about access to the internet”.
As an aside that’s one of the major things I’ve never understood about how SCOTUS developes rulings, ie: how they use ‘original intent’ to figure out current issues.
