With the proliferation of age checks, we’re only a couple steps away from “age checks aren’t sufficient to protect our children. We need ISP level whitelisting of sites that obey the law.”
And then if VPNs manage to get around that with any reliability? Well, be ready for the hardware you need to take advantage of it to double every couple of years while the component supply is strangled to death.
Also, moves now to give OPERATING SYSTEM level “age verification” to any site that asks, which will ABSOLUTELY not be done to identify individuals. No sir. Not at all.
The past 30 years have been DRM. The next 30 are gonna be “You can’t access the tools you need to even think about it anymore.”
Russia has been trying to make a whitelisted internet for over a decade. It’s still easy to get around their blocks with obfuscated VPNs etc, even my parents can do it. It’s really really difficult to implement this kind of blocks without breaking everything. It’s possible to access the outside net even from China if you know what you’re doing. Worst-case scenario, your local mesh network nerds will hook more and more people up to the network, eventually the town-local movie sharing groups will come back like in the good old days. And even if they shut all that down, movie swapping groups will pop up in big cities - piracy existed long before the internet, after all.
As for the hardware, well, yes, that’s a concern on some level. But then again you can still play DVD-quality movies on 20 year old potatoes with Linux, and DVD-quality is quite watchable if you aren’t too snobby about it. There’s a lot of old computing hardware around, even if no new computers are produced starting now we will be fine for a while just with second-hand parts and dumpster diving. Perhaps the biggest concern for video content specifically is storage, which has a more limited lifetime and is also getting very difficult to find new, but if you’re only aiming at DVD-quality, a few dozen TBs will give you something to watch for the rest of your life.
With the proliferation of age checks, we’re only a couple steps away from “age checks aren’t sufficient to protect our children. We need ISP level whitelisting of sites that obey the law.”
And then if VPNs manage to get around that with any reliability? Well, be ready for the hardware you need to take advantage of it to double every couple of years while the component supply is strangled to death.
Also, moves now to give OPERATING SYSTEM level “age verification” to any site that asks, which will ABSOLUTELY not be done to identify individuals. No sir. Not at all.
The past 30 years have been DRM. The next 30 are gonna be “You can’t access the tools you need to even think about it anymore.”
Russia has been trying to make a whitelisted internet for over a decade. It’s still easy to get around their blocks with obfuscated VPNs etc, even my parents can do it. It’s really really difficult to implement this kind of blocks without breaking everything. It’s possible to access the outside net even from China if you know what you’re doing. Worst-case scenario, your local mesh network nerds will hook more and more people up to the network, eventually the town-local movie sharing groups will come back like in the good old days. And even if they shut all that down, movie swapping groups will pop up in big cities - piracy existed long before the internet, after all.
As for the hardware, well, yes, that’s a concern on some level. But then again you can still play DVD-quality movies on 20 year old potatoes with Linux, and DVD-quality is quite watchable if you aren’t too snobby about it. There’s a lot of old computing hardware around, even if no new computers are produced starting now we will be fine for a while just with second-hand parts and dumpster diving. Perhaps the biggest concern for video content specifically is storage, which has a more limited lifetime and is also getting very difficult to find new, but if you’re only aiming at DVD-quality, a few dozen TBs will give you something to watch for the rest of your life.
We’ll be trading them drives then, yarrrr.
Piracy was a thing before the internet and it will be the thing after the internet.