Hulu gets wise, blocks HotSpotShield – Internet Piracy’s many-headed Hydra not happy

was a dream come true for the world at large. A site in gorgeous flash encoding, that served up Heroes, Prison Break, The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, American Heroes, Prison Dad, and Family Break, as well as thousands of old films (and even the entire Doogie Howser back-catalogue if you’re that way inclined) for one and all to watch in streaming HD. No clogged up harddrives or waiting times. Touch my face and call me Susan, it’s an internet miracle.

And the only restriction, it seemed, was the week or so delay between Terrestrial broadcast and netcast required to make the licensing between the Big Media companies who owned the shows and Hulu, their own joint venture, hold up in the stiff breeze of desperately needed TV Ad revenue streams (come on, a mixed weather metaphor is pretty sweet.)

Hulu is configured to recognise your IP address and boot you out of the site with not so much as a flicker of Jack Bauer’s tradesmile to send you on your way back to your own shitty, unilluminated life if you’re not in the US (read either “Not from round here, boy” or even “Unamerican”.)

WHAT? Watching 24 outside the US? That's Terrorism sir...

But gladly a nice free unobtrusive IP Anonymizer application called Hotspotshield allowed you to dodge that Entertainment Bullet by making your connection seem like it was in the US via a huge free VPN circuit you can simply tag into. And the cost? Nothing, HSS automatically sends banner ads your way, so you can buy a mail-order bride whilst Wahey for free US TV again!

Well you can go fuck yourself if you think THAT wasn’t going to change. Hulu caught wise to this little trick (presumably after some complete Sweaty Park Cock ratted on the rest of teh interwebz and told a technician at Hulu, or maybe they worked it out for themselves – less exciting, that one,) and has blocked HSS IP addresses, so now all of the world that isn’t Manifest Destiny has to get its fun from this sexy little image:

Yeah baby, I could look at this for hours

Already the tech bloggers are squawking angrily about “Hulu’s decision to geoblock its content” – which is half-fair, because really it’s Fox, NBC etc who are making that rule up, and Hulu has to take the flak for being contractually obliged to enforce it and thereby NOT going to prison for eight billion years and pay infinity plus $8 in fines. And read Chaucer (a less well-known but equally gruesome pubnishment for piracy these days. Look it up. DO IT.)

Of course the internet is a big angry Hydra; cut off one path and eight new ones appear in its place. Not only is the staff of HSS running around, seven dusty servers in each arm, looking for an abandoned warehouse to plug their gadgets into (and probably ironically looking for an anonymiser program of their own), but there’s already talk of other anonymising programs that might still do the trick. You won’t find the list here because reading about it online is probably one of the reasons why the bastards found out and aren’t rotting in jail. TRAITORS.

So it’s back to torrents and other even more illegal behaviours for most of the world who simply can’t be bothered to wait the 84 inexplicable months between release dates in the US and everywhere else.

Still, we DO have the BBC iPlayer in the UK, so I’m alright Jack. Which is on tonight…

TheSixtyOne Removes Google Ads for User Experience, Relies instead on Donations

 

http://www.thesixtyone.com is a music discovery site with a points system. You log in, you rate music (“bumping” a song will lift its points, and hence its status in the charts they have.)

The service is free, so it’s a really awesome music discovery/internet radio site, and has been set up by two guys who quit their jobs in the hope of doing something new for the digital content distribution future. Their financing seems to come out of their own pocket, plus donations, plus a significant deal must come through advertising.

So it’s really amazing that when users complained that adverts were interrupting their music experience, TSO removed them – just like that. How refreshingly awesome is that?

Now it’s up to the users to finance their experience. Having studied the Radiohead and Tim McIntire models of ‘selling it for free’ I reckon they stand a damn good chance of survival.

On a separate note – how much do you reckon an artist actually gets from you? If let’s say, Jerry Cantrell broguht out 3 albums, if I bought them as per usual, how much would he get? 10 cents an album? More? So, If I download them for free , and send him ten dollars, wouldn’t he be better off?

Just food for thought. Anyone out there?