Star Wars Thread

Topic

As part of the testing process I thought I’d kick off the traditional Star Wars thread.

The Obi-Wan Kenobi series with Ewan McGregor has been confirmed for Disney+ to begin shooting next year.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/23/20830478/obi-wan-kenobi-standalone-spinoff-series-disney-plus-series-ewan-mcgregor-streaming-star-wars

There’s also been new footage previewed from Rise Of Skywalker, although it’s not online

https://io9.gizmodo.com/new-star-wars-the-rise-of-skywalker-footage-featured-r-1837449069

Sounds like it could be interesting.

Replies

The short, non-spoiler answer is: It’s all about Kylo, a hot, hot, so hot topic that not even Poyo would try and sort it out.

What’s the longer answer that tells me what’s happened?

[Ben]

The idea that Kylo goes nuts and slaughters Luke’s students may not be the case, if said students actually pursue Kylo thinking he killed Luke. Cue numerous online firestorms over whether or not this is a pulled out of LFL’s arse attempt to render Kylo more sympathetic, ahead of his possible redemption in Ep IX.

Rian Johnson had long ago, ie. 2 years back, lit these particular fires with the idea that everyone can relate to Kylo, which remains a hotly contested notion. So this comic news, via Marvel solicits, dumped several gallons of petrol on to it all and, oh it all exploded? Well, shit, who knew that’d happen?

Comic itself doesn’t come out until end of December, so there’s a good two months of pre-emptive bombing enabled for all parties.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Ben.

Oh, OK.

Personally I thought there was always more to tell there, the movies left that part of the story vague enough that you weren’t quite sure exactly what happened. I had assumed some of those holes would be filled in by the final movie.

So, I caved and bought tickets, opening night.
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I picked a very comfy cinema, with a bar.
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Will I be drinking celebratory champagne or drowning my sorrows?
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I will await your review with great interest.

Oh, I’ll watch it. Has become a Christmas tradition now to watch the new Star Wars movie with the kid.

Ben wrote:

The idea that Kylo goes nuts and slaughters Luke’s students may not be the case, if said students actually pursue Kylo thinking he killed Luke. Cue numerous online firestorms over whether or not this is a pulled out of LFL’s arse attempt to render Kylo more sympathetic, ahead of his possible redemption in Ep IX.

Oh, lord.
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I know the term gets bandied around a lot, but that sounds like horrible fan fiction from some shipper’s livejournal.
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It also sounds Disney-ish.
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I’m just glad I’ve mostly divorced myself from actually caring about Star Wars as any kind of interesting Universe after the Disney buy-out.

Kylo was always meant to be conflicted, he was Vader v2.0, lead to the dark side by Evil Mentor v2.0.
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Johnson pushed some of the blame onto Luke to make Luke into Kenobi v2.0 and on and on it goes.
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While I would prefer that they hadn’t retrod the same path so closely, I just want them to do it well now.
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Especially as I have now paid for my ticket.

lorcan_nagle wrote:

njerry wrote:

Liz, the biggest Star Wars fan I ever married,

How many other Star Wars fans have you married?

Well, Liz isn’t the biggest Star Wars fan I’ve married.

[RonnieM]

Christian wrote:

Oh, I’ll watch it. Has become a Christmas tradition now to watch the new Star Wars movie with the kid.

Same here. I’m generally back in my hometown over the holidays. We’ve made it a tradition to go out with my siblings and our spouses for dinner and to see the Star Wars film of that year while my parents watch their kids. That was one of my main complaints with Solo. I think they missed a trick by losing that slot.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by RonnieM.

I just watched TLJ for the 2nd time, it wasn’t any better than the first time. I’ll be seeing the new DSW fanfilm when it’s available for free, I have a morbid curiosity about watching trainwrecks.

‘Star Wars’ Setback: ‘Game Of Thrones’ Duo David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Exit Trilogy

Good.

I like that a lot, but the “fade the black” cuts so beloved of trailer editors have reached a point where I can barely see what’s in some of those shots. Not in an intriguing way, in a “why did they bother?” way.
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But I’m looking forward to the show.

‘Star Wars’ Setback: ‘Game Of Thrones’ Duo David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Exit Trilogy
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David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the duo who in 2011 launched the singular screen sensation known as Game of Thrones, have walked away from their much-publicized deal with Disney’s Lucasfilm to launch a feature film trilogy in 2022.
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Benioff and Weiss were supposed to usher in the post-Skywalkera era of the Star Wars brand with a 2022 new-start story that would stake out a new frontier for the era-defining cinema brand created by George Lucas. The Emmy-winning pair cited their historic deal with Netflix. They said their enthusiasm for Star Wars remains boundless but, regrettably, their schedule is full up.
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–SNIP–
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In the end, however, it appears the tandem’s deficiency was in time, not talent. In August, Deadline broke the news that the GOT duo had signed a nine-figure deal with Netflix and, on Monday, that commitment was the one that brought about the end of the Great Westeros Experiment by Disney and Lucasfilm.

‘Star Wars’ Setback: ‘Game Of Thrones’ Duo David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Exit Trilogy
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So we live in a world where people choose working at Netflix to working on Star Wars? Well done Netflix!
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And time for some re-thinking at Lucasfilm.
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Again.

[Ben]

Was always sceptical about that pair being a good fit for SW.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Ben.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a mutual decision.

It seemed a bit odd to have Rian Johnson and the GoT pair both working on these big Star Wars trilogy ideas, given that both are on kind of shaky ground with audiences lately.

It feels like there’s a pretty major rethink of Star Wars going on at the moment. Hopefully something good comes out of it, and whatever is going on doesn’t compromise episode 9 too much.

Ben wrote:

Was always sceptical about that pair being a good fit for SW.

They’d made a hit show about sword fights, magic and incest.
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They were perfect for Star Wars.

So, just watched the second trailer for The Mandalorian.
The show looks fucking excellent and proves Disney are now utter fucking idiots. This is a show they could sell globally, it has that mass appeal element, so their great idea is? Render it on Disney+ exclusively, a service that is nowhere near global. Most pirated TV show ever? Pretty damn certain to be so.

But it will also drive subscriptions in places where the service is available.
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And even those people who subscribe specifically for this show wont cancel once they’ve watched it.
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Game of Thrones was the previous “most pirated” show and HBO did fine out of that, to the point where they just greenlit the prequel.
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Disney know what they’re doing.

Disney+ will be a genuine contender to Netflix.

Like Amazon Prime. (Apple tv remains to be seen, but there’s no reason they won’t be eventually too)

Presumably WarnerMedia have something in the works.

Yeah, Disney Plus is looking at long-term. Licensing Mandalorian and the other shows to Netflix or Amazon gives them short-term profit, but will generate resistance to signing up for their service when it does launch in more territories.

It’s still bloody cynical.

It’s late-stage capitalism.

Come the revolution, when the means of TV production is in the hands of the workers…
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… we’ll all have equal access to state-controlled drivel

lorcan_nagle wrote:

Yeah, Disney Plus is looking at long-term. Licensing Mandalorian and the other shows to Netflix or Amazon gives them short-term profit, but will generate resistance to signing up for their service when it does launch in more territories.

…and everyone that doesn’t have access to Disney+ will just torrent it anyway. They might as well license it out and make a little money out of it.

They don’t need to make a little money. This is Disney. They spend a decade and billions of dollars building a theme park that wont break even for another decade and then they rebuild bits of them on a regular basis.
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What they do is control their IP rigorously and, at any given stage, they do what they think will pay off in years to come.
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Everyone had movies on VHS but they still bought the DVDs and then many bought the Blu-Rays when those came along. And how many times have classic albums been repackaged and re-purchased by fans?
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As Disney+ expands it will succeed or fail on what it offers the potential customer? Even if people have pirated the early shows when the service wasn’t available in their region, the convenience of having it bundled onto the new platform will add value and the likelihood of signing up.

The global issues will be tricky. I was just flicking through the channels on my ‘magic box’ and Sky still have a Disney dedicated movie channel. They’ll probably have to see out that contract which may be a year or more or Disney+ would be directly competing and break the agreement.

Personally while I definitely see the issues with licensing it to a direct streaming competitor I’d be tempted to sell it to free to air TV on a single season basis. Let ITV or BBC have it, if it is great then by the time you have Disney+ ready for the UK (and the same pattern could apply to any country) then you have a captive audience ready to sign up to see more.

It’s a model that works for heroin dealers and partworks publishers. Sports are now doing it more, they’ve found that putting the entire product on pay TV has been cutting off entry to new fans so they voluntarily release certain games to FTA TV.

Pirating will provide the free taste for anyone who can’t/wont subscribe.
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And then they’ll still buy the t-shirts and toys/collectables.

garjones wrote:

Let ITV or BBC have it, if it is great then by the time you have Disney+ ready for the UK (and the same pattern could apply to any country) then you have a captive audience ready to sign up to see more.

Anecdotally (i.e. a sample of only me ), when a programme I like has moved to a channel I don’t have, I have sighed and resigned myself to missing the rest of the series.
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Life’s too short and TV isn’t that important. If you make it hard for me to watch something, I’ll just find something else to do.

The decades of success by Pay TV services, cable, satellite, Netflix and others suggests that you may not be a representative sample there.
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And piracy, as we keep mentioning.

Fucking Werner Herzog! Giancarlo Esposito! Mandalorian looks fucking excellent!
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Man, my kid will so force me to somehow subscribe to a service that’ll get us this, wherever it may come out in Germany.

Jason wrote:

lorcan_nagle wrote:

Yeah, Disney Plus is looking at long-term. Licensing Mandalorian and the other shows to Netflix or Amazon gives them short-term profit, but will generate resistance to signing up for their service when it does launch in more territories.

…and everyone that doesn’t have access to Disney+ will just torrent it anyway. They might as well license it out and make a little money out of it.

By the time Mandalorian Season 2 rolls around most of its audience will be subscribers.

I’ll eat my words if Disney+ crashes and burns because people pirate it’s shows.

What I don’t get is Disney abandoning an income stream that will make them more money in addition to streaming, without hurting that income stream one iota. They could easily rake it in far more and no one would mind.

The other element of this is streaming doesn’t always work, it requires decent home and local net infrastructure which isn’t guaranteed – for those areas physical copy is pretty attractive and could even be sold at a premium price.

Ben wrote:

What I don’t get is Disney abandoning an income stream that will make them more money in addition to streaming, without hurting that income stream one iota.

I don’t think this is really true though. The exclusivity of the show helps to sell the service. If it’s not exclusive then its value is lessened.

As for a physical release, I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens at some point but it doesn’t make sense to do that for a while, for the same reason. Just like the physical releases of the Netflix Marvel series came long after their streaming release.

Which would be perfectly fine and understandable but the indication so far is that Disney will go much further. Evidence being that the S1 of Resistance received only a R1 DVD release.

There’s no shortage of fans who’ll pay to stream the eps as they come out and then buy the BR for the eps and making of extras. This’ll also be even more true of next year’s Clone Wars finale.

Ben wrote:

What I don’t get is Disney abandoning an income stream that will make them more money in addition to streaming, without hurting that income stream one iota. They could easily rake it in far more and no one would mind.

An easy answer to this is it’s highly unlikely for any Network to accept a one season deal to air the show until Disney+ rolls out in that terrirory

Well, yeah, there is that.

But the business as usual approach would be to release the BR/DVD a year or two later anyway.

Just confirm it’ll happen a long time away, that sells the service, but also gets a load of instant future sales too. Fairly certain this happens with a good few of the Sky Atlantic shows.

I think you have to accept this is what is happening. When does the UK get Disney+?

Just to run it in to you filthy colonials, we get it in 2 days.

Oh, I’m not ruling out waiting for the all the eps to be available then a quick 1-month blitz watch entry and exit!

I’m saying I would be quite willing to do that and, later, pay for a physical copy too.

As to UK availability – fuck knows.

They’ll probably rip you off due to puny Aussie dollars.

It’s $9 a month here, which is more or less commensurate with our other streaming rates.

So that’s about 5 pound.

I think there are quite a few issues in the UK with licensing deals (with the likes of Netflix) for stuff like the Marvel content running well into next year. So I think that’s why we’re seeing a delay with the UK launch.

Forget it, Ben. It’s Mos Eisley.

Dave wrote:

I think there are quite a few issues in the UK with licensing deals (with the likes of Netflix) for stuff like the Marvel content running well into next year. So I think that’s why we’re seeing a delay with the UK launch.

It’s the same with us but we’re clearly a testing territory.

I expect it will launch with minimal content – probably only exclusives and some other shows that were never licensed here.

That’s the norm for streaming services in Australia. Amazon Prime probably took 3 or 4 years before we had access to all it’s content, and there’s still things on Netflix that we don’t get because of long term licenses to Foxtel.

Changing tack Jedi: Fallen Order has been getting some serious attention and might well be the best SW game in years.
I’m on the fence as to whether it’s a good for me, but that’s what reviews and YouTube is for.
Titanfall 2 was a very smart little game and a lot of its influence can be seen in this, which is no bad thing. Not sure about Souls-style combat, although the recent Assassin’s Creed games are also supposed to feature a fair bit of that, so with a suitable difficulty level might work out.
One criticism is that it may not be a particularly innovative game but I’m not sure anyone really cares about that.

Yeah it looks good.

Anonymous wrote:

It’s the same with us but we’re clearly a testing territory.

Very probably, when I was working with global tech upgrades we’d usually select one country in each section of the world (Americas, EMEA, Asia Pacific) to test launch and Australia was usually the one for Asia Pacific because it’s English speaking.

Oh we know were a testing ground.

It’s great!

And what’s bloody better is that there’s no blooming weirdo side affects on the population either too bloody right mate get a dog up ya!

Why hasn’t anyone done Fallout: Oz?

They have! In 1984!

It was called Mad Max

Ladies and gentlemen, colonialism is a bad, bad thing;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maralinga

Yeah that was a disaster and the British did not deal with that well. The joke probably ends here because people died because of even Vixen B and they’ve never really been compensated.

Anyway, we should discuss more positive tgings, like The Empire

Cheo Coker, former showrunner for “Luke Cage” made a Mace Windu pitch:

I find myself thinking about Mace Windu. He told Yoda from the very beginning that Anakin was dangerous, with too much power, anger, and little restraint. Losing his limbs and that fall shouldn't have killed him. What would he be doing? Would he be an original architect …

— Cheo Hodari Coker (@cheo_coker) October 31, 2019

So, there is now a German Mandalorian trailer apparently that spells out that is’s going to be only on Disney+ here. And nobody knows when Disney+ will start.

I am tempted to go illegal in my TV-watching again for the first time in years. Motherfuckers.

Maybe Ben is right and this will be the most pirated show of all time

Christian will only download it once per episode.

Germans are pretty savvy.

I’m pretty sure Christian intends to be the pirate king of Europe slinging bootleg copies throughout the Northern Hemisphere

Anonymous wrote:

Germans are pretty savvy.

I’m pretty sure Christian intends to be the pirate king of Europe slinging bootleg copies throughout the Northern Hemisphere

It is, it is, a glorious thing, to be a pirate king!

‘Star Wars’ Gets the Parsec Wrong Again in ‘The Mandalorian’

Todd wrote:

‘Star Wars’ Gets the Parsec Wrong Again in ‘The Mandalorian’

A scientific inaccuracy? In Star Wars?

Christian wrote:

So, there is now a German Mandalorian trailer apparently that spells out that is’s going to be only on Disney+ here. And nobody knows when Disney+ will start.

I am tempted to go illegal in my TV-watching again for the first time in years. Motherfuckers.

Doesn’t Germany fine people for pirating these days?

I really want to watch Mandalorian but not so willing to get a Disney subscription.

Anonymous wrote:

Doesn’t Germany fine people for pirating these days?

Today’s episode is brought to you by the letters V, P and N.

Do people actually get fined for downloading a show?? ’cause I severly doubt it… We would’ve heard something with GoT…

Jon wrote:

Do people actually get fined for downloading a show?? ’cause I severly doubt it… We would’ve heard something with GoT…

Oh yeah in Germany they have been giving fines for downloading. But as Gar says with VPN you could be safe. Dunno.

Disney+ launch in UK and EU for 31 March. Will anyone give a damn about The Mandalorian 6 months on? We’ll find out.

Millions will.
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Piracy isn’t universal.
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It will help launch the service.

Piracy also requires a certain level of tech skills – I don’t have those.

If they’re smart, they’ll go with the usual one month trial / sign up / sign out flexibly model.

Sure, loads will do the trial, swoop in, watch the stuff they want and then end the sub, but Disney will have got enough goodwill out of it that all those people will pay for Mandalorian S2, ObiWan and Cassian series later plus the Marvel stuff.

The one big temptation for Disney, given their DVD/BR tendencies, will be to make certain content available for finite spans in a bid to boost interest. That one they really should resist, especially if Disney+ is intended as the sole access point for the material.

I’d be very surprised if they did that. So far the streaming model is to retain original material permanently and to be honest I think the crossover may be smaller than you think. Nowadays people that want to buy a physical copy are a specific group that really want to consume that way and maybe build a collection while others are happy to keep their shelf space clear.

Yeah, I don’t see them pulling that kind of stuff off the service.

If they pull it off the service I’ll buy you a VB

garjones wrote:

I’d be very surprised if they did that. So far the streaming model is to retain original material permanently and to be honest I think the crossover may be smaller than you think. Nowadays people that want to buy a physical copy are a specific group that really want to consume that way and maybe build a collection while others are happy to keep their shelf space clear.clear

Oh the double dip buyers are a niche audience, that’s a certainty.
I’d be amazed if Disney tried putting their own content on and off, but if anyone was going to try it, it’D be Disney.
Their bigger challenge looks to be keeping interest in the channel because the cycle moves so fast now.

There’s a good freakanomics podcast about Disney recently about how they’re ahead of the curve, economically, with audience needs.

It’s probaby a plant though. That Steven Dubner is a known shill.

I know it’s frustrating for fans who wont get the Disney+ service when it launches and can’t or wont pirate the shows they’re interested in but Disney is just not interested in the short term benefits of diluting the long term strategy.
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Disney IP will be carried on Disney owned platforms exclusively.

Todd wrote:

‘Star Wars’ Gets the Parsec Wrong Again in ‘The Mandalorian’

I’m sure they did it quite deliberately.

Anonymous wrote:

If they pull it off the service I’ll buy you a VB

Shit, I’m really hoping it stays on then.

Since the choice is:
1. Complain about for the next 6 months, very internet but not really me.
2. Take the more positive outlook that in 6 months time there will be more cool stuff than at launch.
Yeah, will go with option 2.

I’ll go with The Pirate Bay.

The mousetroopers will drop by shortly.

Turns out Mandalorian S1 is only 8 eps but that length can work well.

Ben wrote:

The mousetroopers will drop by shortly.

Good luck to them, I live in bandit country. Video shops here are market stalls with knocked off DVDs being sold 3 for a pound.

You rebel scum.

Gar lives in Mos Eisley?

Yup and I definitely shot first.

Dave wrote:

Tim wrote:

If they pull it off the service I’ll buy you a VB

Shit, I’m really hoping it stays on then.

Andy was a really good PM

garjones wrote:

Yup and I definitely shot first.

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Jon wrote:

Do people actually get fined for downloading a show?? ’cause I severly doubt it… We would’ve heard something with GoT…

Oh, they do. It’s become quite a business. Technically, though, it’s not the downloading you get fined for, but the uploading part that automatically happens with torrents – with that act, you are distributing someone else’s property and that’s what you get sued for. Basically, you get a cease-and-desist letter by a lawyer and have to pay the owners of the product something in the range of 500€.
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Everybody still does it, though. VPN, like Gar says. And the uploading part also means that you can stream movies from some platform and not get in trouble for it. It’s just torrenting that’s dangerous.

What does a VPN do exactly, does it change how your IP adress appears?

Anonymous wrote:

What does a VPN do exactly, does it change how your IP adress appears?

Virtual Proxy Network.

In layman’s terms, when you use a VPN (an app or program you download and run, usually a service you pay a monthly or annual fee for) all of your internet traffic — both uploading and downloading — is sent through the VPN, which hides your unique and identifying IP address.
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Aside from hiding your identity when using torrents, you can also use a VPN to make your internet location appear to come from a different country to bypass region restricitons on sites like youtube. Or to hide your internet activity from a repressive regime like China or North Korea if you’re in one of those countries.
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They are also good to use when you’re on public wifi, like at a coffeeshop or restaurant, to add another level of security from malicious actors who might try to hack into your internet viewing.

Anonymous wrote:

What does a VPN do exactly, does it change how your IP adress appears?

To add to what Jason says it’s basically a tunnel that uses your ISP to connect to it but after that they can’t see what you are doing. Only the VPN server can.
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Their initial purpose was for connecting large businesses securely. Say you work for a bank and need to connect remotely they don’t want that access to very sensitive data on the general internet, so the VPN would connect you to their servers securely. So I have a few ex work colleagues in China as friends on Facebook, even though it’s banned there once they connect to work via the VPN they were accessing the internet from a server in Texas and effectively based there.
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Personal VPNs are usually set up so you can pick your location in pretty much any country but while they can be used for anonymity or to get around geographic/government controls they can’t really ban them because they are vital for businesses to function.

Especially the porn business.

garjones wrote:

Personal VPNs are usually set up so you can pick your location in pretty much any country but while they can be used for anonymity or to get around geographic/government controls they can’t really ban them because they are vital for businesses to function.

However, it’s not really anonymous if the VPN server still sees who’s accessing it, and they are still vulnerable to hacking. Basically, should you trust your VPN provider any more than your ISP because they give their word that they don’t track your private data or the sites you acces?

Anonymous wrote:

should you trust your VPN provider any more than your ISP because they give their word that they don’t track your private data or the sites you acces

I wouldn’t.
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I especially wouldn’t if it was a free service. The business that provides the VPN has to make money somehow, and if they are not getting it from you directly then you have to wonder if they’re getting it by selling your data.

How does it work if people do something illegal while using the VPN? If their data wasn’t secure or was being sold, wouldn’t there be cases that we would have heard of?

Which is a key difference. The free VPN providers like HOLA do things like share your bandwidth etc. In the end people need to make money from a service, nothing is truly free.
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For the paid services, yes there’s potential there for abuse of the data they hold but on the other hand that would pretty much instantly kill their business. So it’s usual in their terms of service that user activity logs are wiped at regular intervals. Should you trust them more than your ISP? Yes I think so purely because what they are offering is different, the privacy and anonymity is the product, without it nobody’s going to buy.
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It’s perfectly reasonable to always remain cautious and aware the data is always there and government agencies can likely demand to override things but I think it’s somewhat the difference between putting your documents in a filing cabinet or renting a secure vault in the bank. If the latter isn’t any more secure in reality then the bank secure storage serves no purpose and would cease from having no customers.

Star Wars: Twin Turd Assault
Yes indeed, for twin turds of spoilage are about to liberally splattered across the internet – the process has already likely started elsewhere, for we have:
– The Mandalorian premiere 12 Nov.
– Then, 15 Nov, Jedi: Fallen Order one of the biggest SW games in years.