Bought a Bluray Disc. Sony still tracks you.

"It also enables the delivery of advertising content"

They already paid for the product! Double-dipping assholes

triple-dipping, they also get your data.
- I don't understand. Maybe a set of adverts would help me?

Yeah I just straight up pirate movies now, I don't even try to hide it from people anynore. It's clear to me at this point that all these companies care about is getting richer by the minute off the backs of the common man, and their excuses for doing so are getting more and more pathetic.

I have friends who work in the film industry and they pirate movies and TV shows all the time.
- Me too. By the time a movie or TV show actually makes it to distribution, most people who worked on it have already made their paycheck and moved on to the next project.
What capitalists are doing is intentionally sharpening the contradiction, probably with the goal of a revolution or reform in their favor (as can be seen in the USA right now). The neat thing about sharpened contradictions is that it will inevitably lead to change, the bad thing is that this is a massively organized effort with tons of planning and coordination, and The People:tm: are not ready for it.
Pirating movies is pretty good though. Mainstream media always manages to exploit labor incredibly harshly, to the point of suicide, and that behavior should not be rewarded IMO. Of course there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, but one can dream. As an aside, pirated media is also incredibly convenient. There is a great community spirit in the piracy community.
I think I’ve bought two movies ever.

Piracy is now better and safer than using "real" discs. Well done, Sony.

Why is your Blu-ray player connected to the internet?

VLC on a Linux laptop. You think my Blu-ray player has the ability to take screenshots?
- Yes, and I assume you wrote this message on your blu-ray player and typed it with your remote
- You never heard of a capture card?
  Can I introduce you to my friend MakeMKV?
- Does VLC report this? Kinda seems like the sorta thing that only works on actual players.
- VLC can play blurays?
Yeah it seems really strange. I know some Bluray players support Internet connectivity but unless they're also a Streaming box I don't see why people would connect them to the internet. Really it seems like the majority of people don't so not sure how useful this feature is.

Welp, blu ray playyæer sure don't need no internet - gimme dumb technology plz

usually bluray and 4k players need to connect to the internet at least once in order to download the codecs, but like yea I disconnect mine from the internet right after
blu ray playyæer
Did a cat jump on your keyboard?

can we find a way to spoof this so that they think legit physical disk usage is going up?

I don't think it's a good metric since most people using Blurays don't have their players connected to the Internet anyway. Connecting Bluray players online is a very niche use-case. It might be more popular if they had built-in Streaming Apps or NAS playback but many don't and are just Bluray players.
- Or just any game console? Which is the normal Blu-ray player?
- The only reason I had my bluray player connected to the internet was because the yahoo who dropped it off at the thrift store didn't bother signing out of their pandora account, so I could listen to ad free music. Otherwise I would never connect to the internet since all the old applications ( including a blockbuster app of all things ) probably wouldn't even work.
  Knowing this could happen, I will definitely be sure to completely disconnect from the internet the next time I turn that thing on since last time I tried using pandora it wasn't working.

Haha no it doesn’t.

unplugs NIC

rips blu-ray with blu-ray drive running old firmware

Or... Here me out, don't do that.
By giving them money, from their perspective, you've accepted their t&c. If they get data or not, that's just icing on the cake.
- borrows blu-ray instead of buying it

Gran Turismo
- Farturismo

At least you can watch BDs without a web connection still. For now....

Also, LibreDrive is a thing for hacking BD drives with in order to bypass DRM, but I wouldn't be surprised if that got blocked and/or taken down at some point.

PS3 was one of the first affordable blu ray players right off the bat with internet connectivity
Most if not all 4k players are network enabled due to the DRM that is on the 4k medium. From my experiences, they usually need to connect to the internet to download the keys at least once before anything 4k works. DVD and BD usually work without issue though.
- How goofy.
  Like, I understand most people have internet at home nowadays but come on, I thought a big point of Physical Media was not needing the damn internet to work!
Mine can because it also has Netflix, Hulu, etc. built in.
- Do the apps still work? The biggest issues I've found with Bluray players like that is that the Streaming Apps on them tend to become Obsolete and broken fairly quickly.
Yes.
They can, many have Ethernet ports and even Wifi in some cases but there's no practical reason to do so unless they have streaming features you want to use but most don't, and the ones that do often aren't updated so you'll find the Streaming Apps on them usually don't work anymore.
I mean it makes sense to have them network connected like to use a receiver and networked speakers.
I bought a cheap one in 2012 and it has an Ethernet port.

I’m still getting justified in my boycott of anything Sony that started in 2005, when they bricked my PC for daring to put a Sony CD in my computer’s CD player! Fucking rootkit.

Yes I’m still holding that grudge and I will not relent, for as long as I live.

Any movie I watch I make sure it’s not a Sony product, any music I listen to, I make doubly sure it’s not from a Sony studio. Any electronics I buy, I make triply sure it doesn’t contain any Sony product. Sony is not getting a dime from me ever again!

Fuck Sony!

That rootkit thing failed miserably, thankfully, and audio CDs have been DRM-free ever since.
- Sure, but I'm not touching anything Sony with a 10 foot pole.
Yes! I’ve never met anyone else who’s been boycotting Sony since the rootkit! Maybe there are dozens of us? Either way: fuck Sony!

My Blu Ray player has never been connected to the web, its region free, but doesn't do 4k-BD. My Linux HTPC is configured with an ASUS libredrive, and has MakeMKV installed. The Linux variant of MakeMKV is borked right now, in a good way! The 30 day trial period doesn't expire!

If I wanna watch a 4k bluray I have to rip it and watch it on my PC, because I'd rather do that than get a BD player that needs internet

The author posts new temporary keys on the official forums regularly, in one of the stickies.
- Havent needed them in months, I've been at 30 days remaining in evaluation period for 3 months.

What happens of you hit skip. Does it not let you play the disk?

It let's you continue no problem.
Just like most modern video games these days that have the second agreement after the EULA. They make it seem necessary, knowing 99% of people will see all of the words and just skip to the bottom and hit "accept."
Still gross, but not really the problem that people here seem to think it is.

This is the evil shit

LMFAO. And when I tell people to take care about leaving Jellyfin public with their open API endpoint issues... Yeah Sony WILL abuse your shit... They already do it.

I run a pivpn setup so that nothing is exposed to the internet at all. It's just too dangerous now. It was bad back in the day, but now I literally have bots trying to join any public facing Minecraft server. It's so many times worse now than it was a decade ago.
- I guess the bots are trying to find servers still vulnerable to the Log4J exploit. Man that was a juicy one 👀
- Oh man. I have an open minecraft server for my kids and their friends. Every few weeks I have someone show up to the server leaving notes or interacting with us trying to educate me on whitelisting.
  I get more "educators" than i do bots. It's actually quite annoying. I dont know what accounts these kids login with, you're not educating me. The server is literally for 6-8 year olds. It's been wiped 100s of times. I don't care. Stop. The server is grief resistant anyway. And my ban list is long (and getting at least one longer). /little rant

I legitimately cannot remember the last time I paid for a movie or TV show, or music.

Digitally, or physically.

Even if you count streaming services, its been over 5 years since I laid for Spotify... stopped paying for any kind of on demand videos before even that.

Friends wanna watch a movie at my place? Oh, I have a 10 TB library.

Oh, at your place? Does your TV have a USB port? Tell me its model number and I can figure out what codecs it can actually read.

Does it still work by clicking skip?

This isn't a EULA in that it still allows you to use the product even if you decline...

This option is available with most modern games these days. They often ask you to click "approve" twice, knowing you won't read either and knowing that you believe that you need to accept both to proceed. When in reality, the second one is almost always optional (perhaps even by law because of laws in the EU).

Still gross. And definitely a major dark pattern, but if people just took an extra 3 seconds to double check, they'd stop sending all of their data to these companies.

Are there any region-free 4K blu-ray drives available? I’m asking for a friend.