Google Drive Blackout in Italy After Another Major Anti-Piracy Blunder

"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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

[dupe]

Earlier:

Italy's Piracy Shield just blocked one of Google's CDN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41890460

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 cloud is unreliable for mission critical systems

At some point google should consider offering a VPN service :)

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 give a calculator to a fucking retard he's gonna try to turn off a TV with it". Or Internet.