Interesting thread. But I don’t understand why the data needs to be collected and correlated by a thirds party, can’t the ads themselves detect views and clicks? (that’s what they need right?)

Or am I missing something about the process?

Yeah I’m not paying for something and it still be illegal. I’d rather stick to piracy. I get your point and if it works for you that’s cool. But it’s not for me.

A good usenet setup with the Arr stack can automatically download basically anything you want and costs tens of dollars per year to run with very little, if any risk. (have there been any prosecutions for people downloading from usenet?)

With a little bit of work and an old computer for a server you can basically run your own automated piracy streaming service.

Disagree. In order to keep those keys secure they can’t publish them, so they’ll have to license some sort of decryption chip. That just pushes the price up as some manufacturer ends up taking a cut from every player sale.

Also means you can’t do what you want with it. You probably can’t play it on an open source device. Etc etc.

I won’t. “Copy protection” is much more about restricting and potentially even removing your access to something you’ve paid for than it is about preventing copying. I am not willing to buy something that can be revoked when alternatives are available.

I know, I modified it to make more sense for video.

I know. I changed the terms. Pray I don’t change them further.

Someone go make Steam for videos and I’ll pay for media again. My stipulations are:

• Once I buy it, it’s mine forever (otherwise piracy is better)
• The file is high quality, DRM free, and in a selection of standard formats (otherwise piracy is better)
• I can redownload it from the service at any time (otherwise piracy is better)
• I can get everything I want to watch (otherwise piracy is better)

My colleagues having a chat about their favourite tv shows in the operations channel at 7am have entered the chat.

Guaranteed they’d find a way to double dip. Price gouging, restricting content behind further paywalls, adding ads anyway… absolutely they’ve investigated all those and undoubtedly more.

Switch to Firefox, Chrome is their biggest lever to force this kind of stuff onto people. While Firefox exists and it remains uncool for them to block it they’ll have to compete against piracy and adblockers which will limit their ability to aggressively monetise.

Switch to firefox!

“Winning” is like making it to max level in a mmorpg. It’s not the end but it is the beginning of the endgame.

Best of luck with that.

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One gold upvote costs $2, the recipient might get either $0.90 or perhaps $1. But most likely they’ll get nothing.

Isn’t the “take it or leave it” approach to consent considered consent bundling? Didn’t google get fined for doing a similar thing?

If you’re making a mil a year in revenue there’s a good chance your profit margin is tiny and licensing fees could obliterate it.

Hotmail was 2mb.

Yet more evidence that aggressive adblocking is cyber security.

Surely those broadcasters will pull their streams (it’s not like they’re not already hurting), FireTV will get a reputation of having restricted access to broadcast TV, some people will live with it and some will buy a smart TV and not worry about Amazon any more…

The way it works is that there’s a symbol table entry for “foo” which has a slot for a hash, scalar, array, glob, etc.

That leads to some super weird behaviour like, for example, if I declare a scalar, hash and array as “x”:

$x = "sy";
%x = (foo => "mb");
@x = ("ol", "s!");

You can access them all independently as you’re aware:

say "x: ", $x, $x{foo}, @x; # Outputs:  x: symbols!

But what’s really going to bake your noodle is I can assign the “x” symbol to something else like this:

*z = *x;

…and then the same thing works with z:

say "z: ", $z, $z{foo}, @z; # Outputs:  z: symbols!

Oneliner if you want to try it:

perl -E '$x = "sy"; %x = (foo => "mb"); @x = ("ol", "s!"); say "x: ", $x, $x{foo}, @x; *z = *x; say "z: ", $z, $z{foo}, @z;'

Congratulations! You now know more about one of Perl’s really weird internals than I’d wager most Perl programmers (I have literally never used any of the above for anything actually productive!)

You mean the fact that you can have a hash called %foo, an array called @foo and a scalar called $foo all at the same time? I agree that’s a weird choice and there’s potential for insanity there, but it’s pretty easy to just not do that…

20+ years of Perl experience and while Perl has a load of idiosyncrasies that make it harder to work with than other languages, I don’t think that particular one has ever caused a significant problem.