Dare HN: Download/purchase True Blood without BitTorrent or subscribing to HBO
I recently had my internet turned off because HBO told Qwest (soon to be CenturyLink) that I was sharing True Blood over BitTorrent. With the burden of proof in their hands, I resolved the situation and as I am now on their watch list, I don't use BitTorrent.
Be that as it may, I feel a certain duty now to -not- subscribe to HBO, even though I would like to. But I want to support the writers, directors and cast members of my favorite shows on HBO and other networks:
True Blood
Dexter
Mad Men
Big Love (girlfriend enjoys it ahem)
Californication
But for the life of me, I can't find a place to purchase current episodes of True Blood. iTunes has last season. I'm told I can go on IRC and just ask for them, but that seems so 1997. If any of you know of a simple site where I can purchase episodes for download, I'd be grateful.
If not, maybe it's time for a web-based BitTorrent of some kind. Off the top of my head, one could use the compression ratio of maximum URL length (roughly 2048 characters) to the SHA-1 length of 20 bytes or 40 hex characters, to store data in query variables.
Basically some kind of spider would go around reporting the SHA-1 of basically every URL in existence, and to upload a segment of a show, people would post a properly formatted request that causes data to hang around on sites like flickr or facebook, and then post the list of checksums somewhere where search engines will find it.
It might require a math function to swizzle the URL somehow, perhaps recording the difference between the actual URL and the desired URL in another query variable on the end. It doesn't really matter how it works, just that mathematically the opportunity is there to store data that way. The important thing is that file sharing would go back to being a download-only operation which would (ideally) free fans from the threat of disconnects and lawsuits.
Then as companies submit takedown requests for these URLs, other spiders would go around and make sure that the chunks are replicated on some number of other URLs, maybe on servers in other countries or in pictures or other persistent data.
This is all well beyond anything I could ever do, which is why I ask about it here. To me, this is the inevitable future of the web. As I like to say about my definition of inevitable, it's "that which is harder to stop than to start."
The endgame is an arms race between hackers and content providers, which mathematically the content providers can't win. So that means there will probably be legislation of some kind, making the use of certain software or the download of certain material illegal, which will be the end of the free internet because they'll have to monitor you to enforce it. Maybe this is already happening.
The flip side is that if content providers don't tone down their prosecution of their customers, they might piss off one hacker too many. I kind of feel sorry for them, they just don't know who they are dealing with.
Well I guess that's it, am I off base or is this all destined to happen?