Viewing Illegal Streams: No Cautions, Fines or Arrests Say GM Police
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The mention of UFOs is amusing. I'll admit that every time I hear about some UFO related story part of me really wishes it was real, just because it would be exciting to interact with aliens in our lifetime. Sadly it seems like UFO claims are usually hoaxes of some kind. Can you imagine actually having a UFO encounter and later having nobody else believe you? That would be quite devastating, I would imagine.
- Buy a cable package and make sure it has both ESPN and TNT (different providers will include them in different subscription tiers, so you have to check).
- ESPN and TNT will each only broadcast a select number of primetime games, so for the rest you need NBA league pass. This may be offered as an add-on by your cable provider, or you may need to buy it directly from the NBA's own site (and use a separate app for those games).
- However your local or regional teams' games won't be available on League Pass, so you have to figure out which company has bought local rights for that particular team (e.g. Bally Sports for Knicks games in the NY area) and pay for that channel as well.
- Sometimes that regional network and your cable provider will be unable to strike a deal. If that happens - too bad, you literally cannot watch home games of your local team legally.
The situation in the NFL is even worse.
So yeah, it's no surprise that a large number of fans who would otherwise have paid for games choose to just stream them illegally with one click.
The real pain is if you're a fan of an out of market NFL team, in which case...
- Cable with ESPN for MNF (if your local team is playing, this should be free on ABC) - Prime for TNF (iirc the local market gets this on fox??) - NFL Sunday ticket
I think the only exceptions this year were the two games exclusive to peacock, and the London games. I don't know if they show the London game for free to the local market.
source: I used to be a cord-cutter
Idk why, but this hasn't really seemed bad to me. Maybe my TV has been upscaling and that's why I don't notice?
Reading around it's unclear if they broadcast above 720p anywhere, even over cable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Broadcasting_Company . Maybe the cable companies upscale?
Whatever the case may be, I'd rather have 720p for free than have to pay.
In my living room I barely notice the difference between fhd/1080p and qhd/4k on a 65" screen at 10' distance.
The pirate streams are great because you can just click on the game you want and watch it. You don't have to flip between three channels, wait for commercials, wait for other games to end, etc.
Not for nothing, but at some point this has to stop. My suspicion is that the leagues will launch their own streaming platforms, and allow people to buy either subscriptions to their team, or to the full season, perhaps with postseason packages as well. It's what likely SHOULD happen if you want to avoid alienating the fanbases, though in my experience, sports fans seem to be very much in the "thank you mistress, may I have another?" camp.
The idea of being expected to subscribe to 4+ services just to watch all of your team's games is absurd, especially when they're services that you're otherwise not interested in. Of course people are pirating things.
To have aliens that are near enough so that they made contact with us ( through some signal not by abduction of humans) would mean they they very close on cosmological scale that they must be living within our detection capabilites. And with all our searches for life so far nearby we couldn't see a signal for unique civilization signature.
The general assumption is that any visitor from outside the solar system has found a unique solution to this enormous problem beyond our current level of understanding.
I'm not very good at physics, but I know enough to state confidently that FTL will never be possible. Anyone who has studied physics will agree with me: while there is a lot we don't know, every possible answer to them still needs to fit with what we already know and you can't explain several things we know while also allowing for FTL.
You have the issue correct, but not the cause. Greed? The rights to the sports are owned by different entities, sometimes locally. Should they just hand that over to Netflix or something? I feel like if they own the product, they should benefit from the media distribution.
It seems like ideally you'd have a bunch of rights owners organize to create a single distributor that caters to viewer's desires. Maybe provide a seasonal pass to watch every game of your favorite team regardless of where they're playing? My understanding is that some sports require you to buy subscriptions with multiple different services if you want to follow your favorite team. This is obviously regarded as more favorable by the rights holder since they think they'll be able to get more money if people subscribe to their service rather than partnering with a different organization.
I don't know if this is applicable to the domain of sports, but in other industries sometimes there are local distributors which were relevant in the era of PPV or TV, but which have largely become obsolete in the modern era. Usually these entities become middle-men that just happened to keep owning the rights to media distribution, but which no longer do anything to provide value.
Not necessarily netflix but you should be able to watch all games of a given team and league on a single site/service. Something like a league wide streaming site isn't impossible. You shouldn't have to subscribe to 5 different providers to watch all of you teams games.
> The rights to the sports are owned by different entities, sometimes locally. Should
Sure but that doesn't mean the game can't be shown locally AND on a streaming site that carries all the leagues games.
UK police launched an inquiry over offensive memes in a whatsapp chat. A man was later jailed for it:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/14/ex-police-of...
UK police arrest a man over offensive tweet. 150 hours community service followed:
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/31/23004339/uk-twitter-user-...
UK police raiding a pub for displaying offensive dolls:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/golliwog-dolls-g...
https://old.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1974t9g/poli...
Decency laws are a joke.
> James Watts was serving with West Mercia police in 2020 when he shared the “grossly offensive” material in a group chat, which included former colleagues at a Warwickshire prison.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11138385/Female-pol...
But in the grand scheme of things, how noteworthy are they?
To give an example, when the government becomes upset with protests they just make them illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police,_Crime,_Sentencing_and_...
and if people in the UK strike too much, they just make that illegal too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikes_(Minimum_Service_Level...
The bigger surprise is that they have enough manpower to fill the freedom of information request to begin with. That's probably the reason the other two departments refused to answer.
I can only fathom "viewing illegal streams" leading to arrest in the case of CSAM. Regardless of any staffing or resources, it's a complete travesty to arrest anyone for using their internet connection to view lawfully produced content.
The power to restrain the physical liberty is a substantial corollary of the state's monopoly on violence, which should be employed when those arrested are a menace to other peaceful citizens.
I could see law enforcement getting involved in copyright crimes committed by commercial pirates, issuing fines to consumers or identifying them to the rights holders who can then seek redress in a court of law.
Some teenager watching the latest game of thrones (or whatever's hip nowadays) because their parent doesn't subscribe to Sky, or because they were out when it was on, isn't really the same thing.
On the other hand, I feel that creating and/or distributing CSAM should result in instant death for the creator.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Solon
EDIT: Creating and/or distributing.
Bluetooth keystroke-injection in Android, Linux macOS and iOS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38661182
These laws which criminalize viewing or reading things need to go now.
It is not acceptable to prosecute someone for the act of viewing a web site, regardless of it's content. Doing so is absolute totalitarianism.
In a free society, people should be able to browse any part of the Web without fear of punishment, it is fundamental. That includes exploring the darknet, one of the most interesting parts of the Web, without having to fear prosecution for unintentionally coming across child pornography.
Is it, though? According to the government itself, funding has increased from 12B in 2015 to 17B in 2023[0]. In real terms, the UK police now has more funding than it had pre-austerity (16.5B in 2023 money).
If they don't have the manpower, it isn't due to a lack of money.
[0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-funding-for-...
It is.
Police cuts here in Scotland are dire. If your house gets broken in to they won't even visit.
Squatting is on the uprise including violent behaviour.
The list is too long to even mention.
https://spf.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/police-budget-...
Did they ever accomplish much when they did visit?
They just care about other things way more. Like people writing mean things on the internet.
"..the teenager prosecuted for posting the lyrics of a rap song on her Instagram, because the music in question included the N-word. The 18-year-old girl, who has Asperger’s, was given an eight-week curfew and had to wear a tag, though the conviction was later overturned."
If you don't live here you have no say.
We have a collapsing healthcare, underfunded police force, rapid increase of homeless. Crime increasing.
Not only that I am on my local council so I get the local metrics from my local constabulary.
The police force is spared thin. And if you believe anything the tabloids say about "the police is fine" your a fool to believe so.
If your not from the UK get off your armchair, stop reporting he-say-she-says articles from bias tabloids and see for yourself if your going to argue.
Because I can post them too: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/05/police-still...
This month with crisis in title too.
We have a collapsing healthcare, underfunded police force, rapid increase of homeless. Crime increasing.
Not unique to Scotland.
The police force is spared thin.
Not unique to Scotland.
If your not from the UK get off your armchair, stop reporting he-say-she-says articles from bias tabloids and see for yourself if your going to argue.
The police receive more funding than they used to. The numbers are there.
And again... this is not unique to Scotland.
They may of got more money but the actual monetary value is a lot less. So yes, an increase in sum, but less in value.
Scotland is more less off than the UK. Scotland is UKs taking ground and always the first to get cuts, that and wales too.
When austerity kicked in, most forces offered redundancy to long-serving officers on good contracts. At the depths of the austerity era, the police practically gave up on investigation - outside of CID and other specialist department, the sheer volume of work forced the police into a purely reactive posture, dealing only with the most urgent and visible problems in the quickest way possible. When funding started to pick back up, they brought new and inexperienced staff into a dysfunctional service. The number of officers isn't down that much compared to pre-austerity levels, but huge amounts of institutional learning was lost.
A lack of resourcing and policy failures in the mental health system meant that the police - the public service of last resort - had to pick up the slack. It's now quite normal for officers to spend a substantial proportion of their time dealing with mental health calls that fundamentally aren't a police matter, or to spend an entire shift waiting to hand over an s.135/s.136 patient to a place of safety.
A lack of funding in the Courts Service and the Criminal Prosecution Service has created a huge bottleneck in the criminal justice pipeline. Cases are taking years to get to court, hearings are being repeatedly re-scheduled and the CPS have tacitly set a much higher bar on the quality of case they're willing to prosecute, all of which has an obvious impact on police resources, recidivism and the wellbeing of victims.
Dysfunction in British policing is part of a much broader dysfunction of the British state as a whole. There's a consistent story across the whole of the public sector - under-resourced services are dealing with an increasingly complex and demanding workload, because vulnerable people are being failed by multiple parts of the state simultaneously. Teachers rarely see students who are [i]just[/i] struggling in school; those kids invariably have home lives that are marred with multiple socioeconomic problems. Doctors spend most of their time treating people who aren't [i]just[/i] ill, but who are also poor and lonely and living in inadequate housing. If you'll forgive the double entendre, it's a death by a thousand cuts - services that don't have the resources to cope with their own workload are having to pick up the pieces for other services, creating a vicious circle of rising demand.
It just happens to be when about 7 years of funding cuts ended.
Funding in 2009 was £19.3bn, which is £32bn adjusted for inflation to today.
22/23 funding was £24bn (£27bn inflation adjusted)
I can't find the figures for 2009 (this is most likely due to significant changes in the funding structure in 2015, see [1]), but according to [0] the number of police officers was about the same in 2010 as in 2009 - so the austerity cuts clearly only hit in 2011.
Also, my numbers are for England & Wales - because that's what was easily available. I'm not sure where you numbers come from, but they definitely don't match up with the England & Wales ones the UK government provide.
[0]: https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/output_url_files/bn20...
[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-are-the-co...
During this period the UK population has grown considerably, comparing officers or £ spent per capita is probably more appropriate.
> West Yorkshire Police received the same request (pdf) and was able to confirm that the words ‘UFO’, ‘UAP’, ‘ALIEN’ or ‘SPACESHIP’ appeared in log text 1805 times.
Then there is PICPU and presumably other specialist units that do nothing else.
I am glad I left the UK long ago. When I go back I see cameras literally everywhere. Going on the motorway is insane, indeed any given road is peppered with speed cameras, but the motorway has taken it to the max.
It's well known that an individual can be tracked pretty much across the country on various CCTV. While this is great for crime detection it does have a social morale cost that is not considered as they quietly descend unimpeded into 1984.
Anyone see the debacle of the piano player being gaslit by a police officer dealing with Chinese people complaining he was filming them in public?
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35/notes/division/...
> A key component of an ongoing anti-piracy campaign in the UK includes sensitizing the public to the risk of being convicted for fraud offenses carrying prison sentences of up to 10 years. Not for getting involved in the supply or sale of pirate streams, but for simply watching them.
Pretty sure the premise of the article is to discredit “scare tactics” being used to claim otherwise by interested parties.
I’m a big fan of copyright. Not a big fan of scaremongering.
For a live cultural events it should be 1 year max. 99% of the value of Man U vs Arsenal is in the first 24 hours, before the result is known.