MoviePass reportedly changed passwords to prevent users from seeing films
theverge.com
theverge.com
PS. Thanks to the investors of MoviePass for giving me an appreciation of independent and foreign cinema.
I have to thank those venture capitalists.
Ha !
the main advantage being no UI to run on the pi at all.
Suddenly and out of nowhere I couldn’t login to either and had to do “forget my password” for both of them.
This triggered a several month long incident of my old passwords allowing me to log in and my new password working some of the time. I have absolutely no explanation of it but it got the to the point of having the small number of passwords I’ve used for both of them written down next to my computer. I could type in the same password three days in a row and it worked, and then the fourth day it stopped working and the another old one worked.
Deeply frustrating and still no explanation for it.
The worst thing is that they can’t even tell themselves if that boolean has to be true or false because of all the hashing.
/s
The key difference is, the monthly fee costs about 50% more than a single ticket, and you’ll be lucky to have more than 2 or 3 movies you want to watch each month, with the obvious dry-spells where nothing really appeals. Since it also gives a discount on snacks (already hugely expensive), it’s just a way to sell more sweets and pop.
It pays for itself after two films, when there are two worth watching, and as long as you don’t bother with snacks. Cineworld easily claws back some of that money when you skip the cinema for one month, or only go once.
It seems a lot better thought through than what turned out to be a free-for-all cinema subsidy with MoviePass.
In terms of utilisation; a significant portion of their users use the service for P2P (there's even dedicated P2P servers) and many more users such as myself for streaming (around geo-blocking).
Utilisation is public and many servers are indeed frequently near max utilisation, even when there are hundreds in a region. Decreasing utilisation at that scale will have a significant impact on profitability.
Namely: Create a shitty business model that depends on treating your customers like shit and you can expect to out of business as soon as your venture funds dry up.
This is the sort of problem that solves itself.
Either that or people can keep giving these jokers money, wait for some lawsuit to happen and then in 7 or 8 years after the lawyers take their cut you can expect a check in the mail for 4 or 5 dollars.
Unfortunately it doesn't. If you've ever watched the UK TV series "Watchdog" you'll see time after time people set up businesses, rip people off, go bankrupt, rinse and repeat. Game theory trumps economic models here - and the rules of the game are whatever loopholes these people can find.
To be fair these cinema clowns haven't done anything much worse than a 'fair usage policy' on a mobile phone offering 'unlimited calls' would do. They were sly about it rather than upfront. They could have just introduced new terms as of the next payment. But the general point is about the free market sorting this sort of thing out doesn't work.
That's the principle why the "letter of the law" needs to be followed, not the "spirit of the law" which isn't actually defined. (E.g. a legislature can pass a law but each representative could be voting for it for a different "spirit" or intention, while the wording is the same.)
Should there be a catchall law that criminalizes unspecified bad behavior? No. But there are a few.
A subscription company can make its service hard to use and decrease usage and therefore costs to increase profit.
But it’s at the expense of long term profit as users gradually get fed up and leave.
Moviepass took this to a whole other level.
...like I'm basically in the cinema 2-3 times a month and that's been going for years
It didn’t work for MoviePass because they are a third party and charged less than the price of a ticket per month.
so the question is not: am i allowed to reset your password. but am i allowed to limit your access to my service.
the problem is not what they did and why, but how they did it and how it affected the users.
And the clear answer to me is 'yes'. And the customer can try to sue for non-delivery of service if they like, but probably won't get back much more than the $10 subscription fee.
I have control of a user database for my site. I cannot log in as my users since I don't know their password and the database is hashed. But if I log into the database and change their password, now I know what their password is. And now I can log in as them.
You're generally liable for the consequences of that access - e.g. if Twitter would have their employees take over Trump's account and post "I'm a doo doo head" every five minutes, then that might result in some legal challenges; or if a PayPal employee made payments impersonating your account, then those payments would constitute fraud; but, in general, your employees accessing user accounts and altering data in them is not prohibited by any laws.
[edit] It would be nice if the downvoters could provide some argumentation why they disagree - I can accept that users should have some rights, but according to the current laws they don't. CFAA protects the owner of the system, who gets to decide what access is authorised and what not.