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"Piracy Shield" is an unmitigated disaster, a terrible idea everyone knew would be useless and harmful, but Serie A bribes make up for it. The next step has already been announced, going after VPNs. Yeah, you read that right, because of a stupid football league there's attempts undergoing to block commercial VPNs and managers instigating against them without even knowing what they are.
Italy is diving into the Internet dark ages, the past few years have been a disaster after another. Another recent ruling will attempt to limit access to adult-content and unrestricted social media usage only by using the government-mandated, privately-owned identification system (SPID) and sites not complying will be blocked. Europe as a whole is heading in this direction with other things such as ChatControl too.
It wouldn't be Italy without a few dark ages here and there, historically speaking
I love how the largest IT innovation coming from Italy is internet gambling and sports betting. It's a lost case, let the payday loan predators and mafia rule their digital infrastructure as an anti example for everyone else.
>let the payday loan predators and mafia rule their digital infrastructure as an anti example for everyone else
Why would you assume it would be an anti-example for everyone else? If other see this works in Italy with no backlash what's gonna stop them implementing it in other places?
Students (at least in Italy) often relies on notes on Google Drive, I laughed hard when on reddit one commenter said:
"too bad I can't study this weekend, but fortunately I enjoyed watching a pirate soccer streaming!"
>Italy has an administrative blocking mechanism and a technical blocking platform, Piracy Shield, operated by rightsholders in the private sector.
>There’s almost zero transparency and any information of any use is routinely withheld from the public, even when that information relates directly to the public. People who demand access to information are routinely ignored, even punished.
Imagine selling out your country this bad.
>Imagine selling out your country this bad.
Selling out your country is literally the default modus operandi in most places on the planet. In fact, not selling your country, like the Nordics for example, is the rare exception to the rule.
Well, they gave the key to their country to facism yet again so there is that.
You don't block an entire tram line just because there are pickpockets on board some trams
The "solutions" implemented here in Italy are not solutions, but abominations imho
This thread is meandering into Russian examples of government malfeasance which is cool but does everyone know about Operation Gladio in Italy itself?
Nah you fill it up with poison gas because you don’t negotiate with terrorists.
This isn't a good analogy because the people being pickpocketed and the people on the trams are the same people.
A better analogy is blocking the tram line because it interferes with some guy's antiquated business model.
So police should not close entire co-consignment flea market if a stall is found selling drugs there?
This is how we get to big brother 1984 status. Slowly and gradually in the name of public safety. First you limit information deemed “harmful”, next you make it illegal, then you use your powers to make your own rules.
With the corporate control structure, it looks like we’re heading more towards Neuromancer or Brave New World than 1984. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Your comment is hyperbolic. I don't think we're sliding into 1984, and saying we are became cliche at least a few years ago. This isn't information being limited in the name of some shadowy "public safety" to dumb down the proles, it's limiting access to free entertainment to protect shareholder's profits with a shitty implementation (see: capitalism). Big brother would be very happy if the proles did nothing but watch pirated content made by the ministry of handball. The people in power aren't going to start making rules that benefit themselves- that's what being in power has meant since the dawn of man.
If you haven't read either of those two books I'd advise you to do so. I don't see how either relate to your concern about censorship. I'll be very impressed when the corporations usher in a singular world state. And maybe a few more years of LLM research and we'll get neuromancer working!
You're not necessarily wrong, but GP did say "slowly and gradually" and "in the name of public safety." They weren't saying we're there now, or that this step is equivalent to big brother.
Let's hope they just keep doing what they're doing, it's a great way to get the public to call for tearing down this ugly censorship^Wanti-piracy system.
Relatedly, Backblaze b2 is routinely blocked by corporate IT (and even Chrome's anti-malware list from time to time) for similar "bad neighbour" reasons.
It's bad enough that you basically have to stick a reverse proxy in front of it to reliably serve content at scale.
This is just the beginning. Read the DSA (Digital Services Act), where private companies will be able to take down any content or comment.
There's been surprisingly little discussion about the DSA. The brussels corporate lobbyists really earned their salaries with that one.
Because people critizing it get labeled as a right-wing nut or similar. Currently happens in Germany because a "trusted flagger" organization (whose job is to delete so called "hatespeech") is being criticized by being directly funded by the state and the media is shielding it and deflecting criticism on behalf of the government.
This feels very similar to the Indian government constantly blocking and unblocking GitHub’s “raw” content domain.
https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/act-fibernet-un...
Italy (and many other European countries) could be great and wealthy countries once again, if only it wasn't for the witless bureaucrats in charge. The only thing we seem to be innovative at is coming up with ridiculous amounts of useless regulation.
>Italy (and many other European countries) could be great and wealthy countries once again
How? That's like a dad telling his son "you can achieve anything you want" when the reality is he's already capped his max achievement potential with his barista job while still dreaming he's gonna make it big in Hollywood.
You're not gonna see an Italian/European flag on the moon anytime soon just because they did cool stuff in the past. A country is not some tiny ship you can turn around at a whim and become a US/Switzerland powerhouse overnight via some magic algorithm that the people in power were too stupid to see, the inertia of the status quo of a nation is insanely large. So the bureaucrats in charge aren't the only reason Italy and the EU is falling behind the US at the economy and innovations.
Also, speaking of the devil, those bureaucrats in charge are elected by the people and therefore a direct reflection of the population they serve, they're not some strange creatures shoehorned by aliens to rules us poorly, they're cut form the same cloth and are only doing what will get people to keep voting for them.
So if people vote trash candidates to power why are they surprised they get trash results? Stop rewarding bad behavior, and vote for someone else better. Now if all your candidates are trash, what does that say about the population and the culture as a whole? In this case do you think there's some redemption waiting around the corner for them for a spectacular turn-around or is simply the entire population as a collective at fault as well for their current situation?
Isn't Italy also the poster child for an unstable parliamentary system?
You don't like your bottle cap attached to a bottle?
There's a reason they are called the least of the great powers.
[dupe]
Earlier:
Italy's Piracy Shield just blocked one of Google's CDN
For those of us outside of Italy that might be worried that our government (and powerful corporations, which increasingly seem to be merging) isn't protecting us like the Italian government is, don't worry, pretty soon the "rightsholders" worldwide will be able to ensure we can't even browse most websites unless we're running an "authorized" OS, let alone access our cloud storage.
Apple and Google are full along implementing that, which when complete will cover a huge percentage of the population.
Then many more popular sites will start blocking (or, more likely, heavily degrading the experience with CAPTCHAs and the like) the "unknown" clients, at which point I have no doubt that Microsoft will finish any work to get Windows to that point.
Then 98% of the population is covered and even very sympathetic engineers will have to block these dangerous "unknown" clients because justifying to management why you wouldn't block these clients will require arguing that availability is more important than security, an argument that (at least in the current culture of safety being more important than everything else) is career suicide.
Then us long time Linux people who have been fighting this crap since the early 00s will sit around and reminisce about the good 'ol days when you could run uMatrix or uBlock Origin in your browser, save important youtube videos and webpages offline, or even control when your software got updated. The kids will look at us the same way we looked at the old guys reminiscing about the simplicity and fixability/upgradability and ability to tinker with the cars of the 60s and 70s.
Admittedly not quite the same thing, but this feels like part of the overall trend.
Happy Monday everyone!
Governments and ISPs should focus on improving how things work for the public and not make things worse. Seriously. Who are you working for?
The rich?
The cloud is unreliable for mission critical systems
More like crazy censorship that masquerades as anti piracy measures are incredibly short sighted measures by dumb governments that just hurt the honest users.
Pretty sure the pirates are all laughing their ass cheeks off right now.
In my experience, a specific service in "The cloud" has an uptime similar to a single raspberry pi. Some services are more reliable, maybe upto three-nines.
If you design your systems as such - expecting them to fail, then using "the cloud" is fine. If a VM running in AWS goes down, fine, the ones in hertzner continue to work.
There's levels of availability you need -- what services can go down, in what geographic location, and for how long (do you need to go sub-second from all geographic locations? Because I'm not sure you can do that in any situations. On the other extreme are you happy with a TTL of 60 and failover to another IP, which barely counts as available in my book)
Seems more to be the case that the internet will have to route around Italy.
At some point google should consider offering a VPN service :)
I just discovered that they discontinued their VPN back on June 20th.
Somehow, I am not surprised.
I live in Linux bubble which gives me decent freedom and I don't follow the hopeless privacy wars. Now I feel I woke up from few decades of coma. What what?! FOOTBALL lobbyists set up DNS filter for an entire country?!
How about we cancel this mafia-drugs-hooligan industry on the entire continent? There is nothing good coming out of them.
>government getting private property snatched in transit by extending letters of marque to ISPs
Yep, that is piracy indeed, even if done under the figleaf of "privateering".
Malicious compliance at its best :)
Crazy.
Google is nothing but blinded by greed at this point, they are so shortsightedly chasing a dollar that they can't seem to recognize this behavior is exactly what is losing the money. They are inconveniencing paying customers to combat pirates who don't care and will only double down on their efforts and incidentally expose all of this for the brain dead blunder that it is.
You might want to re-read the article. This has nothing to do with Google, it's Italy to blame.
"You give a calculator to a fucking retard he's gonna try to turn off a TV with it". Or Internet.