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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't the intern have paid for his own bare bones VPS and done it from there? Or used a different paid VPN service, which cost roughly the same ~$5? Seems like the cost of a VPN compared to the value of his internship wouldn't even compare. All for some campus clout.

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It's potentially less anonymous to the people who might prosecute you. Probably didn't realize how anonymous it wasn't to the employer and didn't factor that cost in to the decision. But if you're willing to $5 to get a show, you're probably less likely to pirate it anyway (or at least be the seed).

That guy pirated for the glory of being the first to share it with his peers. I wouldn't be surprised if he was willing to pay for that.

As far as I recall, $20 wouldn't even get you a single GoT episode in Australia. As a consequence, Australia had one of the highest piracy rates on GoT / HBO shows.

The Foxtel monopoly has got to go, one way or another. They pay for the rights to all of the best shows, then charge huge sums for subscriptions. I'd pay for Netflix, HBO online etc if only it were possible here for a reasonable, non inflated price without content restrictions.

I was recently surprised to discover that Foxtel still exists. Even living in Australia it had been years since I had heard or seen anything to do with the company.

Personally, I dont feel like Foxtel is a problem so much as the business model of locking up a show within a paid streaming service. There are so many of them. If a show or movie isnt on the streaming services I already have access to I immediately just discard the idea of ever watching it. Its unlikely to even be worth the bother to find a way to watch it.

If you could even download it at any price. At some point people would give up on waiting 6 months for the release, say “fuck it” and just pirate it.

Worse, there was one season (S2 or S3?) where it was released on iTunes the day after each episode aired, for I bought a season pass, think it was maybe $30-40, perhaps even $50. The following season that option wasn't available due to Foxtel having a big sook, so I just stopped watching altogether.

If you were willing to wait until the month that the final episode aired, you could watch every episode for $15 (by subscribing to Foxtel Go for that month, then cancelling).

I don’t watch GoT, but I have friends who have and I know that a lot of people who were fans of the series liked to talk about the latest episode together. So waiting until later would not be an option for them.

That works for most shows, but with Game of Thrones you'd get left out of the conversation that same week and risk seeing spoilers everywhere.

Depends, was it a paid internship?

Even if it wasn't, I bet the experience of the internship would be worth more than the cost of a personal VPN. Unless the internship didn't really provide much value.

If you have no money, it doesn't matter what's the value of the internship.

what does that have to do with anything. If the opportunity was good enough for you to take the internship, then they were good enough for you not to risk it by torrenting on their material. He likely got sacked mid summer. He now can't even have that internship on his resume. So much wasted time, so mindless.

not getting paid often leads to not having much money

the solution is not to use your work equipment was my point

$5 can be the difference between eating that day or going without food for some.

yes but you can survive without watching shows, which is my point

This was what a seedbox is. You can get seedboxes really cheap (usually under 15euro/month).

Yeah, interns have so much money.

DigitalOcean bills per hour.

But their lowest tier of VPS caps out at $5 a month

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/

I believe they meant you only need it for a couple hours max so with the hourly rate it'd only be less than $0.02

IIRC they have a minimum payment. You need to put $5 in your account. Not sure what they do if you pay by subscription and only use a few hours, but when I was using DO, you needed to fund your account with $5 even if you were using the $100 free credit from GitHub education.

This is the case for PayPal and Visa debits, but not credit cards IIRC.

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