As the Motion Picture Association’s site-blocking drive lands back on home turf, countries that have already implemented their own site-blocking programs are evaluating their effectiveness. A new survey carried out by French anti-piracy agency Arcom reveals how internet users circumvent blocking and their preferred tools. More importantly from a piracy mitigation perspective, the survey reveals why users feel the need to circumvent blocking in the first place.
The MPAA should give themselves a great big pat on the back. They, and the studios they represent have done much to not only enable piracy, but also to increase the sophistication of piracy tactics and – somewhat by extension – the quality of the material being pirated. Turns out, fucking over your customers at every possible turn has consequences.
Like the Bible thumpers banning all the escort sites. When the FBI told them not to because it would make catching the traffickers harder, and now it’s harder.
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The name the website is giving them is weird, it’s officially the “Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication”, their mission is the same (fighting piracy) so it doesn’t really matter but it’s still weird to call them by one of their tasks.
Anyway this is an interesting study because of the data, but the reading is obviously biased, they imply that the use of VPNs and what they call “alternative DNS” (yeah guess what, if my ISP blocks websites I’m still going to access them) is suspicious, they do mention security/privacy as one of the usages (it’s the two main motivations for the majority of users in their results).
Something interesting : NordVPN is the most used by the panel, I think it’s reasonable to explain it by the heavy marketing NordVPN did on french youtube (almost every big youtuber had an ad segment with them), but their results say otherwise, 35% of the panel says it’s based on recommendations from closed ones.
I don’t know why some in the panel of 3000 people would self report as pirating, it sounds dumb to admit to an infraction to the law.
Edit : Their conclusions are absolutely busted, an example: 26% people using a VPN reported data privacy was their main reason (for 49% it was one of the motivations), next is securing their data against breaches for 23% (44%), piracy fall down as the 6th motivation with 7% (17%) ; their conclusion? “The choice of a VPN is rather simple, to not be tracked and access illegal content” what kind of botched logic is that
On the bright side, Firefox has a 21% market share in France on desktops, yay!
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next is securing their data against breaches for 23% (44%)
This particular motivation is extremely confusing for me. Who do they worry will get breached, and what data are they worried about protecting?
If they’re worried about the ISP getting breached and their browsing history being leaked (via ISP DNS logs), I guess I understand it although displays a very low risk tolerance in my opinion. Not only would the ISP have to be compromised, but the attacker would need to dump both DNS logs and a database(s) to correlate the assigned public IP (or RFC 1918 address depending on ISP topology) to the customer. This is all predicated on the customer actually using the ISP DNS servers, which you don’t even need a VPN to do. The actual data you send to a website would be unaffected in this situation.
If they’re worried about a website they use being breached and their data compromised that way, how do they think a VPN will help? If they’re sending data to a website it doesn’t matter whether it’s over the ISP lines or tunneled to a VPN through the ISP then sent to the website, the website still receives the data. If I have friends coming to stay the night it doesn’t matter if they walk, bike, drive, train, fly, or launch themselves by trebuchet over to my house, I’ll still need a bed made up with fresh sheets for them.
I’m all for more people using VPNs, I’m a huge proponent of piracy, and I’m a huge proponent of personal data sovereignty, but I just don’t understand this particular reason for using a VPN at all. It’s kind of disconcerting to see it as the second highest reason given for using a VPN, setting as a VPN doesn’t really solve that issue. Either VPN providers are lying to their customers or the users fundamentally misunderstand what the product they’re buying can and cannot do.
their conclusion? “The choice of a VPN is rather simple, to not be tracked and access illegal content” what kind of botched logic is that
While France/the EU has passed data privacy and data sovereignty laws, the EU is also the leading source of pressure on tech companies to remove or backdoor end-to-end encryption of user data and communications. The EU doesn’t want companies tracking EU citizens, which is good, but also wants to preserve their ability to track EU citizens, which is bad. If data privacy means privacy from ISPs and not being tracked by the authorities within the EU, then the conclusion makes sense when looking at it through their eyes.
I used to be hopeful that as legislator demographics shifted to be more digitally savvy they would pass legislation that encouraged a free, open, secure, and decentralized Internet. I’m starting to think that was naive as fuck, and that the Internet as we knew it, with that original ethos, will get forcefully snuffed out and people 200-300 years from now will read about and romanticize the Golden Age of Digital Piracy in the same way we look at the Golden Age of Piracy today.
Using a VPN makes it a bit harder for your ISP and the French espionage apparatus to siphon your data as much as anyone not using one (ISPs have to keep a history for up to a year as well, it is a legal requirement to make it easier to spy on people). Of course with the laws in Five Eyes countries it won’t actually protect your privacy 100% if you get your VPN service from there but I don’t think France has the budget or capabilities to keep track of every foreign VPN company even with cooperation from other spy agencies.
Lol, people simple forget sites are even blocked because they use VPNs. Friggin’ amazing. The only site I know was blocked is SciHub, but it has so many mirrors, all it took was finding one.
