A new survey reveals how internet users circumvent pirate site-blocking measures and their preferred tools for the job.

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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 original study: https://www.arcom.fr/sites/default/files/2024-04/Arcom-Usage-des-outils-de-securisation-Internet-a-des-fins-acces-illicites-aux-biens-dematerialises-Rapport-etude-qualitative-et-quantitative-avril-2024.pdf

  • Mikufan@ani.socialEnglish
    5·
    6 months ago

    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.

    All of their tasks together would be: “department of censorship” so even more DDOS reason. Fuck em.

    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).

    I mean the obvious reason for this is framing they hate people circumventing their censorship. And changing the DNS doesn’t even require a vpn lol…

    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.

    Nord heavily advertised all over Europe, this has two reasons firstly, they suck and make too much money, probably selling your data and being a security risk in general and Secondly because they are likely paid by these censorship departments to be exactly that, its a honeypot.

    Proton all the way.

    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.

    Depends, if its anonymous I’d do that as well, because i would love to rub it in their faces, even if not anonymous I’d probably do it cause they can’t prove it.