I could maybe get the fee if it was a small place just passing on the presumed credit card charge that goes with ordering online IF they provided a discount for paying cash. A lot of small shops around here do that because the extra 3% or so paid to a bank makes it that much harder to keep prices anywhere near the Walmarts and such.
Open VPN has a knack for taking out a big part of the throughput. My 1gb gets knocked down to somewhere in the 300 space. Wireguard has more performance but more of a trick to set up, and if the ISP is feeling obnoxious is a lot easier to isolate and block than OVPN.
Anything that can can provide storage attached to the network is a potential NAS. It doesn’t take a lot of power to just offer and store files. If you start getting into stuff like live transcoding or heavy encrypt/decrypt that’s a bit different matter.
Fuzzy space (not that one), a lot of places it might get squished into the enabling/promoting deliqancy type rules. If you give beer/smokes to an underage kid you can be tagged for it.
On a practical level proving any of the above is near impossible, but it might get you on the local’s radar if it keeps being accused.
I do think we have it backwards in America where prime time crime drama is no problem but everyone freaks out over a butt cheek, but at the same time it’s not healthy to let little kids dig into some things unguided and before they’re ready.
Not sure specifically about Amazon but there’s always the hole between the video cord and the monitor where output is unencrypted. Do these movies not have a purchase and download or DVD option out there?
Interesting idea, a DNS filter won’t do much for traffic pointed at a specific IP though. Curious how that would set the system wide DNS without being a root level app.
Indeed it was, and there was pushback even then. I was more referencing the tacit approval of piracy rather than active distribution.
The game will always keep evolving. The labels/publishers no longer have much of their previous gatekeeper status but now a new challenge of clearing the signal to noise ratio and having anyone take note amongst the multitudes of options is out there.
The reliability/archivist aspect is a beautiful thing that helps prevent the masking of the past. I keep a number of digital artifacts just to keep them preserved myself. There are a lot of bits of culture only existing today because someone once made a tape off the TV/Radio.
That type I think blurs the line on what actually is piracy versus the guy handing out demo tapes on the corner. It’s a sort of a ‘I absolutely don’t want you to go download my stuff, particularly from this link or this link…’
During the height of the RIAA’s rampage and shortly after some groups started actively promoting the model of give away the music, buy the special package. NIN Ghosts comes to mind as one that from what I gather did pretty well.
The face of music piracy seems to have changed a lot though. It used to be that buying albums was expensive, particularly when it was one good song and a bunch of crap. The $1/song thing was clunky, disorganized, and the early efforts with DRM sucked. Now things like Spotify exist and let someone play as much as they like for the price of roughly an album a month and have taken a big lead in making stuff that never would have been on the old radio known.
Music piracy now seems to have shifted to filll in the role that the weird little record shop in the corner of the mall used to play. Finding and keeping those imports, bootlegs, live tapes, etc that you’ll never find on a standard service. Or when places like Spotify yank something that I liked because of some licence BS and say it’s not available well…
Get your multiple personalities on. Costs nothing to create a second identity for separate functions, bonus if there’s no cross contamination in the form of using one for the other’s recovery info.
Never saw it on a website but back when I just plugged things in and used it the one at the time liked to swipe bad DNS requests and use it to push an ad page rather than a name not resolved.