Lol I mean it has ~53k stars on GitHub. Not exactly a secret. :p

The wider internet has some kind of brain damage where they think spreading stuff like this is a smart way of protesting.

I agree and I don't. We can rip dvds almost precisely, because spreading stuff beyond the ability for it to be easily controlled under single point of failure.

Nothing could really be done about DVDs because the hardware was immutable and already out in the wild.

Highlighting a still operating service though just draws legal attention to it.

It's like finding a crappy bar everyone hates that stores beers out back in a alley. You can keep it to yourself and enjoy it for years, or you can "protest" the bar by telling the whole town about it.

See ad-blocking for a real world example of this.

I absolutely get your point and I personally struggle with this as a concept, because, well, I was young once. There is a benefit to knowledge staying from being too... easily distributed, especially if it is used poorly. But.. having benefited from it in terms of general knowledge, I am not sure it is my place to lock the gates behind me.

Ad-blocking is definitely an interesting story, but, to me at least, it seems like another cat and mouse game resulting from lack of any pro-consumer enforcement. Corps have legal batting for them. What do we get? Control over our computers and even that is being eroded daily..

I still remember the first time I looked at the log from raspberry pihole. I am not much of a revolutionary, but seeing it all was a radicalizing moment for me. And it wasn't the childish 'I want to see X'. It was 'the fuck is all this on my network'?

Overall, I think you are wrong. Were it not for people drawing attention to this, we would not even have legal streaming now. Just like with music, pirates actually forced an adoption of somewhat sane standards..

> Were it not for people drawing attention to this, we would not even have legal streaming now.

Streming is not exactly an improvement over what we had before. If you bought a DVD or VHS you could rewatch it whenever you want and share it with your friends. With streaming services you own nothing and content disappears all the time.

I bought a tshirt with the decss key on it when that went public.

I think I still have mine somewhere.

Almost precisely? The bits are correct or they're not.

I apologize, I may have not expressed myself clearly. What I meant to indicate was that the bits being distributed the way they were was the likely reason we were able to rip dvds based on the fact entities trying to quash distribution of they key stopped.