This is like the lawyer version of my old summer job in high school. We had to fix any computer problems, but if there weren't any computer problems we might ge

This is like the lawyer version of my old summer job in high school. We had to fix any computer problems, but if there weren't any computer problems we might get asked to do anything -- rake leaves, pick up trash, whatever. As a consequence, there were always computer problems. This is like the same thing. All popular HBO content is ubiquitously available, from thousands of places, for free. I live in Japan, so I could never pay HBO for it until recently. Then they came out with their new HBO Now thing, and I figured, "Fine, John Oliver is the most important newsman in the world, I will give them a shot (even though I suspect it will end up not working out)." So I signed up through iTunes, confirmed that HBO Now was, as expected, a broken piece of shit that didn't work outside of the US, and then signed up for one of these VPN services. This makes their service $5/mo. more expensive for me, but they are now getting $180 a year as opposed to nothing. And yet, they just seem hellbent on going back to nothing. Literally ANYBODY who is willing and capable of signing up for a VPN service to access the content is also capable of just getting the same content for free on the interweb tubes. The vanishingly tiny minority of people who still have ethical qualms about doing so -- despite HBO essentially telling them, Fuck off, you don't get to watch! -- can't possibly amount to any significant business. The behavior doesn't make any sense at all, unless you think about a bunch of lawyers acting like high school kids sneakily disconnecting cables to avoid raking leaves.