richmondez

Yes but that is still one company which I doubt is a massive contributor to GDP. However upon reading more about it it seems it’s linked to Berlusconi so I’m guessing that its a case of corruption with these laws serving to protect personal profits?

I don’t get it, most of the streaming providers they are protecting are foreign companies, if anything piracy is keeping more money in the local economy so why go so hard on IP laws above and beyond any treaty requirements?

You are talking about the boot loader, but even that is pretty standard. There could be hardware exploits in place, sure, but we are mostly talking about a very low margin product and the volume of data that you’d need to retrieve and process to sift out anything useful would be massive and obvious so in general I think this is mostly conspiracy level thinking. Any shenanigans is going to be done in small targeted batches if it’s done at all to try to infiltrate specific targets and reduce risk of some curious researcher or enthusiast accidentally stumbling across it and ruining it.

That is a fair point though honestly I don’t think the end user should be on the hook at all, it should be the people providing the service as they are the ones effectively running counterfeit streaming services.

Depending how long they had used the service they probably saved more than €150 just by not paying subscriptions to all the services they would need for the same content. Cost of doing business?

You might be right and in any case the new boss is better than the old boss right? Then again maybe this is just the honeymoon period which bluesky soaks up as many users as it can before the enshittification begins to start wringing profit out of the enterprise? Time will te if the hate is justified or just sour grapes.

Converting from one lossless to another is still transcoding as you are changing the encoding format of the data. The conversion being lossy or not is related to the choice of formats, not the process itself.

I disagree with the “don’t ask stupid questions” any question you ask might be viewed as stupid by someone who knows the answer. Better to say “don’t ask questions you know are stupid”.