UK to block Kodi pirates in real-time: Saturday kick-off Last week in the High Court, Justice Arnold agreed to a request from the Football Association and the Premier League, and supported by the BBC, amongst others, that broke new ground, technically and legally. The order, which has the support of the major UK ISPs, is unusual in several ways. It permits the ISPs to block access …
I'm not sure there is anything to defend. I'd be very surprised if the providers of these "infringing streams" haven't already put measures in place to circumvent, either by design or as a workaround.
Ultimately I have a feeling that this mass rush to spend as much as possible on sporting rights will end up eating itself anyway as more and more people realise that they are just not worth the money.
"How is something that encourages people to use ISPs other than the big 5 that don't have these blocks in their interest"
I'd imagine the smaller ISPs might have a change in stance on this when they find non trivial % of their users all streaming the same content from a foreign server at the same time bringing the network to a grinding halt.
"I'd imagine the smaller ISPs might have a change in stance on this when they find non trivial % of their users all streaming the same content from a foreign server at the same time bringing the network to a grinding halt."
Like Netflix, Apple Play and Amazon Video you mean?
@TheVogon
"Like Netflix, Apple Play and Amazon Video you mean?"
No not at all, bandwidth being sucked up by netflix etc will be fairly constant and predictable, what we are talking about here is streamed live football which has a massive following who will all want to watch it live.
So if (say) plusnet usually have 25% of their bandwidth being sucked up by streaming services and then suddenly find that Saturday afternoon for 90 minutes that % jumps into the high 90s do you not think that will have a knock on effect?
"streamed live football which has a massive following who will all want to watch it live."
Sounds like the ideal motivation for ISPs and others (router vendors?) to finally get IP multicast working right then, surely, rather than letting it gather dust because "no one wants it"?
"Sounds like the ideal motivation for ISPs and others (router vendors?) to finally get IP multicast working right then, surely, rather than letting it gather dust because "no one wants it"?"
Yeah I agree that would be a great solution. But then you're back to running a paid subscription service that people wont pay for while theres a free stream available too...
Unless you are suggesting multicasting the pirated/unlicenced streams that fixes nothing.
"cartel"
Correct. Real competition is a wonderful thing. BT vs Sky vs Virgin is not competition. They consume themselves, get fatter, and continue to consume each other. Ditto Power providers, rail franchises. If the competition isn't real, there's no point in having these endeavors in the free market at all. All of the above need real aggressive regulation. Which as of today, doesn't exist.
"Correct - The good ol' U.K.and U.S.A. They love the free market, they hate competition"
We are not talking about competition though are we - If this was competition we would be talking about licencing rights for the games.
What is happening is someone, somewhere is re-broadcasting a subscription only service to people without a subscription. Thats not competition.
If you were in the business of developing software and relied third party components that you needed to licence (for a fee) and I came along with my software which does exactly the same thing but is cheaper because Im using a hooky copy of the third party components you'd be pissed off wouldnt you? regardless of how much money you were making I would be taking *some* of your sales.
Most streams still worked just fine here last 2 Saturdays in a row....
I found that "Hotspot VPN" is a handy free way of unlocking anything else and works for Kodi on both Windows and Android. (The Windows Store version doesn't work - download it from their website).
The free version is limited to USA servers only, and pops up occasional ads on web browsing. Works just fine for video back to the EU though. A quick speed test showed 30Mb/S back to the UK - not bad for free...
"If the only thing this prohibits is feetsball then (at least in my case) i can carry on regardless!"
As opposed to hand egg that they play in the colonies you mean? Good luck using say Twitch on a Saturday afternoon then as some streams use that now!
imo the streamers will just switch to CDNs and other mixed services if they don't already use them, which a) have hundreds of servers, and b) carry so much varied content that blocking them would have way too wide an impact...
imo the streamers will just switch to CDNs and other mixed services if they don't already use them, which a) have hundreds of servers, and b) carry so much varied content that blocking them would have way too wide an impact...
Yes, that was my first thought. How soon before someone starts bouncing it through AWS or Azure (if they aren't already), and we see over-blocking of unrelated services. They say overblocking is a "low risk", but it's an arms race - they've been able to run exposed servers so far, now the ISPs are running short-term, transitory blocks they'll run and hide behind Cloudflare/Akamai/<CDN>.
"feetsball" - i like it
lump this and all the other sports in a barrel and shove it into the sea.
i could not possibly care any less about if any sport is on any form of television, provided i am neither obliged to watch it, nor pay for it. if Sky/Virgin/BT/et al want to gouge the people that want to watch it, that's their issue. I don't think the BBC should be squandering out license fee and trying to outbid any of them.
Yep personally I don't care it they block feetsball either.
Now if they are smart instead of blocking from the start they will monitor the streams carefully then block them 5 minutes into the second half just to piss off the people enjoying the pirated content and make them want to cough up for a subscription next time.
Not new, the goal is to try and stop most people from doing it forgetting that they're forcing the proles to learn. Lessons from history, when banning prostitution everywhere but in a swamp, the local folk set about draining the swamp and building a town there. People are far more industrious than the authorities give them credit for.
"forgetting that they're forcing the proles to learn."
The proles didn't learn to find and stream questionable content or to by-pass blocking mechanisms. They learned how to buy a device that lets them click menu items that does it for them, in some cases without even realising they are doing something that may be illegal. It would actually be nice if they were learning about this sort of stuff because then they'd be more concious of security on t'internet and be more aware of the state sponsored data slurping, spying and monitoring that RIPA and Snoopers Charter 2.0 allows for people like GCHQ and your local traffic wardens.
"I learnt that the authorities are totally unaware that vpns and alternative dns servers circumvent all the above."
I think the authorities are aware that Joe Public neither knows nor cares about "techy stuff" but can easily buy a "fully loaded Kodi device", plug it in and use it, as was reported in the article. If and when these devices are available cheaply, are plug'n'play and come pre-set with alternative DNS and/or VPN clients pre-configured, then something new may have to happen, but for now, Joe Public will likely be stymied for at least the start of the season. It all depends on if patches/fixes/workarounds are pushed to affected device from the iffy repos, assuming the sellers bothered to set things up properly in the first place.
This decision was going to happen at some time, but it isn't foolproof by any means or suggestion, no matter how 'under wraps' they want to keep their methodology, it most likely will form around a mixture of packet matching, deep packet inspections and tcp/udp connections.
For those that have setup the systems themselves, the great game of cat and mouse begins. For those that bought a pre-packaged one, they will either adapt and learn enough to change source, or use an alternative 'service'.
Easiest circumvention though is to just get your service provided by an ISP that isn't listed, failing that set up a VPN tunnel to circumvent interference.
Where there is a will, there is a way. Of course by far the most appropriate methodology would be to charge a reasonable amount for subscription services, time and time again it has been demonstrated that when given an easy to use, appropriately priced, legal service, most people will switch to it rather than suffer the hassle.
Agree about keep it simple and affordable and they will pay up not pirate. Actually have some competition, so consumers have a choice which broadcaster to select for a game too.
Also a kick in the teeth that you pay the subscription, to see football, can't see all your teams games and also get adverts stuffed in your face at every available moment despite paying the bloody sub!
"most likely will form around a mixture of packet matching, deep packet inspections "
That's very very unlikely. It would require enormous processing power and would impact performance at a large ISP, and streams could simply use HTTPS to stop it. The article also says that no new hardware would be required and that the block is per server. It will likely be DNS lookup blocking and maybe IP filtering too. Using Google DNS stops a lot of the current filtering of TPB, Kickass, etc...
> It will likely be DNS lookup blocking and maybe IP filtering too.
More likely the latter (though DNS filtering is already in place), primarily because TFA says
permits the ISPs to block access to servers (such as those accessed by third-party software addons), rather than a website.
Which I suspect means they mean blackholing the dest IP.
Though, if I were a pirate provider, I'd switch from RTMP to HLS (or Smooth Streaming, or Mpeg-DASH, so long as it's HTTP Adaptive doesn't matter) and use cloudflare with HTTPS to avoid this.
You'd still have the DNS lookup blocking to work around, but that's clearly not working given that the media companies seem to be trying to move on from that.
> Using Google DNS stops a lot of the current filtering of TPB, Kickass
Which ISP are you with? A certain large (used to be a monopoly) used to (dunno if they still do, I'm VPN'd nowadays) intercept queries destined for 8.8.8.8 and answer them themselves.
Also one of the add-on rules"The add-on must not violate any known copyright laws - if in doubt, let us know and we'll look into it for you"
It is (currently) possible to use "unofficial" repositories for add-ons. Though as always with unofficial software, especially where people are potentially doing dodgy things to get around stupidly exorbitant subscription fees"copyright restrictions", use at your own risk.
I don't disagree with you, but I think it's to essentially anthropomorphise the issue by giving the "villain" a name.
Napster was pretty much the same with music sharing (although they got shut down by virtue of hosting the files rather than being peer-to-peer) and The Pirate Bay for torrenting
"This is a test for real-time censorship. I don't like where this is going."
Well spotted.
We've had all the "think of the children" blacklist/whitelist stuff and it's not yet provided the desired capabilities.
So Mr Farr and friends in high places in the UK and elsewhere are moving on to the next stage.
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