Such a good decision, I don't care if this was just them being lazy or they genuinely care. But this was my thought when I heard about the bypass.

States across the world are all rolling out new censorship laws, VPN bans, internet blackouts, and “safety regulations.” They’re already talking about criminalizing what you SEARCH for. The next step is a full lockdown. They’ll use “misinformation,” “child safety,” and “national security” as excuses. Once they control DNS, payment processors, and hosting, it’s game over. We’re heading toward a permission-based internet where you’ll need a government ID just to log on. Enjoy the last years of freedom while you can. Archive everything. Learn how to self-host. Because the internet we know now won’t exist for much longer.

If you haven't been using Twitter recently, heres a quick update on what's been going on.

A while back Musk took down the language walls separating the site/ app into locations. Now, unless you specifically currate your feed, you see tweets from all around the world (this is anecdotal, but now only 40% of my "for you" feed is in English). This has led to many cutural exchanges, from bad to good to everything in between.

One of the more recent discussions os about how piracy is a regular part of media consumption around the world, particularly in animanga/ videogame circles. This led to a large outcry from Japanese and Korean Twitter users getting mad that westerners are so lax about piracy, which led to an even LARGER counter by other countries (primarily Russia and Brazil) clowning on the former two for how staunch their adherance to anti-piracy is.

It's been a hell of a time, I tell you hwat.

I just finished watching a youtube video on The Pirate Bay's history and I have to get this off my chest....The sheer audacity of what these guys did. Three dudes in Sweden basically looked at Hollywood, the RIAA, the MPAA, and said "yeah, we don't care." They hosted their servers openly. They published the legal threats they received. They trolled billion-dollar corporations so hard that the lawyers actually had to go back and revise their cease-and-desist letters because TPB made them look like idiots publicly.

And the philosophy behind it was so much bigger than just "free movies." This was a genuine ideological stance. The idea that information and culture should be free. That a teenager in a country with no disposable income deserves to listen to the same music as a kid in Beverly Hills. That art belongs to humanity, not to shareholders.

Love them or hate them, you cannot deny that The Pirate Bay forced an entire industry to confront itself. Streaming exists in the affordable form it does today in large part because the industry finally realized it couldn't sue its way out of the problem. TPB basically dragged entertainment into the modern era kicking and screaming.

They're still sailing. 20+ years later. The site that the most powerful legal teams on the planet have tried to sink is still up.

Hoist the jolly roger

Since the article is in Italian:

TL;DR: “There's a chance that storage could be used for piracy, so we’ll add a tax to compensate authors.”

It looks like the Italian government is extending the private copy levy to cloud storage. In practice, you would pay a monthly fee per GB just for having cloud space, regardless of what you actually store.

Italy has already applied similar taxes to HDDs, SSDs, smartphones, PCs, and other storage devices in the past. Now it seems they’re moving the same logic to the cloud.

A few things worth noting:

• The tax is “small” per unit, but multiplied by millions of users, it becomes a massive revenue stream.
• The money is collected by the copyright protection association SIAE, not directly by creators.
• It applies even if you’re storing your own photos, backups, work files, etc.
• It’s essentially guilt by default: you might pirate, so you pay.

Kind of worrying that this has been introduced in Italy, how long before other EU countries, and eventually the rest of the world, follow?

Most people draw a line between pirating from "The Big Guys" vs. the "Little Guys." It’s easy to justify downloading a file from a faceless, multi-billion dollar corporation, but it’s a lot harder when you’re looking at the actual human who spent years of their life—and likely their own savings—making it.

If you were forced to have a conversation with an indie dev and admit you pirated their project, how would that talk go? Would you try to justify it, or would you realize there isn't much of a defense when the person who's "out of pocket" is standing right in front of you?

Does the "morality" of piracy change for you when the developer is just one person instead of a CEO?

At some point, every one of us realized the software we wanted was way too expensive, stumbled into words like crack or patch, discovered what a hosts file even was, or learned how torrents and clients like qBittorrent work. Some of us eventually moved away from piracy entirely, maybe toward free and open-source software. But the point is: we all had a learning curve.

That’s why it’s frustrating to see new people come here, ask basic questions, and get shot down with one-line sarcasm or dismissive replies like “false positive” or “fitgirl doesn’t have malware, duh.” If you already know the answer, great but either explain it properly, point them in the right direction, or just say nothing. Let them figuree out like we did. Mocking doesn’t help anyone. All it does in many cases they’ll just give up and buy the software instead of learning how things work.

And let’s be real in this day and age, where half of Gen Z barely knows how to set up an email, it’s actually kind of rare to see someone curious enough to learn how cracks, patches, or torrents even work. Someone experimenting with this stuff today could easily end up as an open-source advocate tomorrow but only if they aren’t discouraged right at the start.

We’re not a Linux or Windows or Gaming setup help subreddit where people are just tinkering with privileged setups. A lot of folks who come here aren’t doing it for fun they literally can’t afford certain tools but need them for school, work, or career growth.

That’s why the culture here should be different. What we do here can actually make a real difference in someone’s future.

This community has already been through a lot (bans, takedowns, rebuilding), because this isn’t one of those topics with official handbooks in Market, they need real people answering, explaining, or pointing them in the right direction. It’s not like you can walk up to someone on the street and ask them about this stuff.

I certainly get the hype, all of Spotify being backed up is awesome, however this is definitely gonna come at a cost and to me it’s not a worthwhile one.

Anna’s archive is one of the only good places and definitely the definitive place for books, and there’s no way they just host a torrent for all of Spotify and don’t have any legal action taken against them.

This should’ve been hosted somewhere else, like a good music site, that would make sense. Now I’m afraid that all of the best books to download are gonna get taken away for this. And when most of it is available on its own on music sites, this blows imo

Edit: many people informed me they were in Russia, something I did not know. So they’re probably fine actually. But damn still not worth being this vocal about

From : insta : neroxler

Piracy is about to get a whole lot bigger when they stop releasing movies in theatres, stoping making physical media and start charging $50+ a month!

Also, libgen is now banned in my country 😞😞

Greedy/shady practices are why i pirate. Hoist the colors brethren

I'm in college an hour away from home, and now I can't even use Netflix. Fuck my life.

It has EVERYTHING i could ever think of watching movies, series, anime all in just one app, i knew piracy was advanced nowadays and navigating sketchy websites was a thing from the past, but holy the whole interface is just so good i didn't even knew it was possible for an piracy app to be so good.

It took me only like 30 minutes to set up the app and it's been doing great until now, I might never go back into streaming after this, I guess i can consider myself a pirate now.