Clampdown on TV 'Dodgy Boxes'

I think a lot of people are wasting money on VPN's in general - thinking they will provide them with something that they can't. Granted there are uses for them however there's cons with them as well.

We've seen lots of instances where the "privacy" of the VPN has been well and truly busted.

Jeez a couple of them are unbelievably young.

I don't necessarily go with that line of thought either - plenty paid for/expensive VPN products have proven to be pointless/rubbish (depending on what you use them for).

IPTV is free/cheap - are the users the product? Thats the kind of sticck that Weckler and his ilk would have you believe.

They have, in my experience NordVPN is by a mile the best one.

No, IPTV users are just taking advantage of the opportunity to get a premium product at a cheaper price in my opinion!

Like how would fining users work? They get the list of customers from the distributor the Garda are prosecuting and then trace the IP addresses back to the ISP and send out fines?

If you have a VPN its even more untangling who the user is, if you can even get the VPN provider to comply with the police or rights holder.

It seems like an inordinate amount of work for the money involved. All just seems like scare tactics to me.

My guy is based in the UK, so how is that going to work? I doubt the Garda will be taking down any UK based resellers. Scare tactics as a poster above said.

It isn't really a question of encryption. The chap who developed some of the algorithms in the original Sky system claimed that it would take until the sun burned out before the algorithms could be hacked. It took less than 10 seconds to hack the system. It is really a question of getting people to pay for the services. The programme providers will always rely on people like Weckler and other journalists to push the fear and uncertainty of being caught. It is simply trying to convince people to pay.

If, and it's a big if, they were to go down the specific route of finning users, it's not via the delivery/reception side they would be tracking them. It would be via a combination of the payment side as well as the individualised communications that the provider has on each individual. VPNs aren't much good if you are paying your provider over revolut or something legit and traceable payment method.

The aim of the enforcers would be to get this information off the service provider who may get a more lenient sentence if they hand over the details.

However I don't see anyone having the manpower for it or indeed the amount of time needed to build cases.

While the recent rights deals Sky and other broadcasters have signed with rights holders may go against this logic I do think there's a far far bigger amount of 'piracy' going on at present than earlier times. Not only has the internet opened up a brand new method of piracy, it has also allowed this piracy to be marketed better and more recently has allowed anyone and everyone learn and ask how it can be done.

I see myself in the wider circle of colleagues and acquaintances that there's a far higher number of people using some kind of illegal method of entertainment. Not just the more techie people as would have been the case a number of years ago but many many more people, right across the demographic. Now, whether this people would ever have paid the actual price for the products in the first instance is probably the question but like a couple of people have said here already, I myself know about one person paying a sky sports subscription.

Unless the rights holders are absolutely creaming it on advertising, you'd think they wouldn't be able to pay these massive fees to rights holders too much longer.

I suspect the damage to Sky is already done. Even if you eliminate IPTV, most people won't go back to paying Sky over €100 per month.

Advertising criminal activities on social media. Thick stupid. If that the best the sky investigators can find, it'll be a cold day in hell before they can target subscribers!