Private companies provide equipment and software to analyse all raw data going through an ISP. All the big names, from US and EU to some countries in Asia, bought this equipment and software.
So, my guess is that a government's budget can enable sampling anything from "so much bandwidth".
Regarding encryption, if you run the numbers, to brute force common encryption algorithms it would take Google's compute 1 second. Image all Google service have an outage for 1 second. Google is just an example to imagine the sizing required. In other words, technically possible. And shouldn't be dismissed with "oh, there is encryption, so that door is closed for any threat actor".
Are you asking if I would be willing to pay more money for goods that don't irreversibly destroy ocean ecosystems and that aren't made with slave labor?
I struggle to imagine the kind of person who would say no to such a question. Someone with no money in a country with no safety net on the verge of starvation? Someone with no moral comapass?
> I kinda don't like the taste of bugs.
I don't understand what bugs have to do with ocean trawling. Is this an unusual way of referring to lobster?
Or just don't take your phone out? I always read these threads and think that the folks here probably have issues disconnecting and so they're longing for a world where social pressures forced disconnection. I still frequently don't check my socials until after work or after a long social activity. I'm upfront with my contacts about that too, and most of my friends are like me. I only monitor my phone constantly if I'm awaiting an important call or email, but then I usually have something big going on in my life at the time.
I use my phone mostly as a PDA. Quick searches, reading Hacker News and RSS, Chatting (very infrequently), calls, and utilities. No socials apps, no games. And I have an ereader and a digital audio player for books and music.
I have plenty of social apps but they're pretty much on perma-mute except for folks like my partner or my parents who have "priority access" to my attention. During work hours work gets access, but they go on mute after hours + 2 (since I generally work a bit late.) I have a work pager setup on my phone if someone really needs me for work. Works out fine for me FWIW. I'll shitpost when I have time/brain space but leave them alone for days or even weeks if I'm occupied enough.
Does it matter? Was society behaving like you in other ways back then? I'm younger than the set here but not young certainly, and I distinctly remember how lonely it was to be a nerd in the '90s. I've assumed through most of my life that the most you can do is control how you and your circle behave. My circle varies on the introversion/extroversion scale where I'm in the middle and roughly get back to comms within a day, my more introverted friends may take multiple days, and have extroverted friends who get back within hours or even minutes. My partner is on the extroverted side and is constantly monitoring her comms but before the smartphone she had a rich rolodex of contacts who she was constantly calling.
Why do people have to follow you? I also experienced the "offline first" life and while I miss the wilder, more unsanitized nature of the internet from back then, I much prefer being able to always be connected.
Not sure why people are beating around the bush;
The overwhelming majority of them are degenerates. Either they will sport some variation of the pedophile flag ("trans") or outright defend it in chat.
It has become so bad that moderators will not ban these people even if they explicitly try to justify molesting children. Some of them are moderators themselves. And even have calls to genocide in their bio. This is most prevalent in the ArchLinux community. Specifically, their Telegram channels.
That's an assertion I hear a lot, but is that true? How can you possibly prove it
If I buy a flash cart for the Switch, and put a pirated copy Mario Wonder on there, that's a loss of a potential sale. You could argue that I wouldn't have purchased it anyway, but you really have no way of knowing that.
2. Would-be consumers who are priced out or locked out
The first group is, if anything, only encouraged by attempts to stop them, and generally won't pay no matter what. The second group would pay, if it were possible and economical for them to do so.
Focusing on the second group, you can say that every pirated copy is a "lost sale" but the sale that you've "lost" would only happen on terms favorable to the consumer. In other words, supposing you sold a product for $50 in developed countries, you're not going to get the equivalent at any significant volume in developing countries. But if you were to cut the price to the local equivalent of say $10, you'll probably get lots of sales. Refusing to market-adjust your prices, or even more so, refusing to sell in a market altogether, is a great recipe for piracy. Yet estimating that piracy at top-shelf price times number of downloads is grossly unrealistic. The piracy cost you what you should have sold it for; but of course, if you had done that, you wouldn't have seen so much piracy.
There are some exceptions to this, of course. Certain categories of media are extra prone to piracy (adult/restricted content in particular) regardless of price. Piracy also happens because of factors the publisher can control besides price; for example, anti-piracy measures in some PC video games have gotten so onerous that pirates are getting a better quality product; Switch games (in)famously run a lot better on PC than the console they were actually designed for; Blu-rays are so chock full of dated advertisements and anti-piracy warnings that can't be skipped that a torrented MKV is preferable; etc.
Again though, these are just kind of assertions. I am sure what you’re suggesting is mostly right, but I would actually like data instead of just going off gut feelings.
I think there is a group 3 that people ignore: people who could absolutely afford the product but pirate it anyway because they don’t want to pay for it. I don’t know the numbers, I don’t even think it’s the majority, but I also don’t think it’s zero either.
I've followed indie devs talking about this stuff, and I've been a critical consumer of digital media for decades. That's all fairly anecdotal, to be fair, but I am not aware of any hard data that's public and transparently sourced.
The segment you talk about exists, indeed I've seen it in action, but chasing them down has rapidly diminishing returns. Their loyalty to the product is just as shallow as their loyalty to the author, and they'll just scamper to other media they can get easily if cornered. Indeed, that is actually a fairly good argument for some mitigating measures: it's like a lock on your house, it only stops you from being the lowest-hanging fruit, but that often goes a long way.
I think I pretty much agree with everything you said here. I think just taking extremely minimal precautions would deter like 90+% of piracy for people who are doing it for the "I just don't want to pay for it" crowd. Just like locking a door doesn't stop someone who really wants to get into my house, it'll still stop a vast majority of cases people trying to get in; most people aren't going to break down the door, or bust open a window, or get a bulldozer to go through my wall etc.
That's why I was more or less on board with IA doing Controlled Digital Lending. Obviously if someone really wants to break the DRM and distribute the media, they're going to do it, but I think that for most people any amount of effort will be too much, and they'll abide by the rules as a result.
I think the National Emergency Library was a huge mistake, because it basically removed those minimal restrictions, making themselves a giant target. It was certainly well-intentioned but it made a lawsuit almost inevitable.
