> I wonder if Netflix had any monitoring that noticed them initiating a stream of every single video. I wonder if they used multiple Netflix accounts.
I am very curious why this matters to you.
I am very curious why this matters to you.
I would think Netflix would be protective of their content and would likely have monitoring to detect mass downloading. The adversarial nature of one person trying to do something and other people trying to detect and stop them is interesting to me. I find JSOR's account of their monitoring, detection, and attempted blocking of Aaron Swartz's downloading of academic papers (not just metadata like this post), and the cat and mouse game that followed to be very interesting. https://docs.jstor.org/summary.html
And the perspective from the other side: the authors of this paper, whether they were concerned with being detected by Netflix and possibly blocked or even banned from Netflix for life, and maybe took action to avoid that such as using multiple accounts or VPNs.
Paypal does do checks to ensure that blocked accounts are not easily resurrected.
Netflix has less incentive to perform such a costly operation but it's more than possible, this is what every credit and background check agency can do.
Sure if you want to get a completely new identity, credit history and address you can probably fool most of these but you are going to be violating a few laws in the process and it would be probably be cheaper to purchase the entire Netflix library on DVD/BR at that point.
Billing address sort of, but address verification is usually only on the numbers, not the names of the street. Very few credit card systems pass the name on to the bank when requesting authorization. If you're only using streaming, it doesn't really matter if the street address isn't correct.
Credit and background checks usually request a lot more information than netflix does; nobody would give netflix their social security number, or recent addresses.
The FBI was involved before it was even discovered who it was or what was the purpose of the device.
When an institution discovers such an incident when an unauthorized device is plugged to a secure network and in a covert manner their hands are tied.