"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.
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.
>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.
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!"
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
Or the apartment bombings debacle, where the GRU and FSB launched false flag bombing attacks against it's own citizens. Several of them were arrested by police planting bombs. At one point a Duma representative denounced 'breaking news' of an attack by 'terrorists' in a specific location 3 days before it actually happened.
Not to mention generating exodi from Venezuela and Syria just so that your puppet candidates in the US and the EU can rally against the "invasion" of refugees.
Pretty sure this had nothing to do with trains or negotiating with terrorists. A closer comparison would be a recent event during which a military prevented kidnappings by killing the people who could be taken as hostages.
It was pretty fucked up for the government to not coordinate an antidote with hospitals, but other than that, can anybody really be sure that another approach would have resulted in fewer hostage casualties? The terrorists had the whole place rigged with bombs. Considering the circumstance I think the gas was a pretty good idea with a poor followup.
It was not a terrible approach, the use of "poison gas" is a bit of a misnomer. They weren't dousing the theatre with chlorine and melting everyone's lungs for example. It was not deadly poison gas, it was "get high" poison gas. That unintentionally made some people get so high that they died in a state of euphoric bliss.
The gas, high speculated but nobody 100% sure, is thought to be basically super-fentanyl. Fentanyl itself is like hyper powerful heroin, and this stuff was hyper powerful fentanyl. But not fatal per se, certainly intended not.
So all this hubbub about the theatre gas isn't so bad. Per capita if you just walk down the sidewalk in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, you would be exposed to more fentanyl fumes than you would have in that theatre. In the tenderloin residents talk wistfully of the the theatre gassing with superfentanyl, wishing they could have partaken in that bliss. If they had taken a good dozen people off the tenderloin and sent them to the theatre they easily would have smoked it up with between 100 and 1000x times the concentration of opioid fumes.
There is a pretty convincing argument made that a less violent foreign policy would have made the terrorist act significantly less likely to happen in the first place.
Sure, I buy that. But the guys tasked with responding to that hostage crisis couldn't go back in time and fix Russia's [domestic] policy. They had to deal with the situation they were given.
Yeah, maybe you're right. Excluding the "less violent foreign policy" sibling comment that is also correct, given that the situation had already started, I guess gas isn't a terrible way to handle the situation.
Really terrible about not coordinating with the EMTs, though. They could have saved hundreds of people if they'd just carried Narcan.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
It could, but it currently doesn't. Regulating and enforcing censorship is a lot harder when the offending material is not publicly accessible / easy to find. So even if you have offending content on your own private cloud, as opposed to have someone elses offending content on a shared public cloud, the censors would first have to find out about it.
If your connection to your private cloud passes through public internet, all bets are off. I don't think all companies have their private clouds at the basement level, completely owned data centers, connected via edge switches near the water cooler.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
>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.
Well, they gave the key to their country to facism yet again so there is that.
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!"
[flagged]
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
Nah you fill it up with poison gas because you don’t negotiate with terrorists.
If anyone misses the reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis
Or the apartment bombings debacle, where the GRU and FSB launched false flag bombing attacks against it's own citizens. Several of them were arrested by police planting bombs. At one point a Duma representative denounced 'breaking news' of an attack by 'terrorists' in a specific location 3 days before it actually happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombing...
This is widely regarded as putin's move to consolidate power.
Justifying oppression through manufactured foreign threats. Still works just as well as it ever has.
Not to mention generating exodi from Venezuela and Syria just so that your puppet candidates in the US and the EU can rally against the "invasion" of refugees.
"Ryazan sugar" is worth a search by itself.
Pretty sure this had nothing to do with trains or negotiating with terrorists. A closer comparison would be a recent event during which a military prevented kidnappings by killing the people who could be taken as hostages.
> a military prevented kidnappings by killing the people who could be taken as hostages.
which events are you talking about?
What the fuck
It was pretty fucked up for the government to not coordinate an antidote with hospitals, but other than that, can anybody really be sure that another approach would have resulted in fewer hostage casualties? The terrorists had the whole place rigged with bombs. Considering the circumstance I think the gas was a pretty good idea with a poor followup.
It was not a terrible approach, the use of "poison gas" is a bit of a misnomer. They weren't dousing the theatre with chlorine and melting everyone's lungs for example. It was not deadly poison gas, it was "get high" poison gas. That unintentionally made some people get so high that they died in a state of euphoric bliss.
The gas, high speculated but nobody 100% sure, is thought to be basically super-fentanyl. Fentanyl itself is like hyper powerful heroin, and this stuff was hyper powerful fentanyl. But not fatal per se, certainly intended not.
So all this hubbub about the theatre gas isn't so bad. Per capita if you just walk down the sidewalk in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, you would be exposed to more fentanyl fumes than you would have in that theatre. In the tenderloin residents talk wistfully of the the theatre gassing with superfentanyl, wishing they could have partaken in that bliss. If they had taken a good dozen people off the tenderloin and sent them to the theatre they easily would have smoked it up with between 100 and 1000x times the concentration of opioid fumes.
There is a pretty convincing argument made that a less violent foreign policy would have made the terrorist act significantly less likely to happen in the first place.
E.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Dagestan_(1999) and the following bombing of Chechnya.
It's less work for sharers of links to remove m. from their URLs than it is for everyone on a desktop to do so.
Sure, I buy that. But the guys tasked with responding to that hostage crisis couldn't go back in time and fix Russia's [domestic] policy. They had to deal with the situation they were given.
Yeah, maybe you're right. Excluding the "less violent foreign policy" sibling comment that is also correct, given that the situation had already started, I guess gas isn't a terrible way to handle the situation.
Really terrible about not coordinating with the EMTs, though. They could have saved hundreds of people if they'd just carried Narcan.
[flagged]
This thread is meandering into Russian examples of government malfeasance which is cool but does everyone know about Operation Gladio in Italy itself?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
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.
That is not an useful analogy, because as far as government is concerned, you just made an argument in favour.
So police should not close entire co-consignment flea market if a stall is found selling drugs there?
Correct. A single stall is a single stall.
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.
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!
[dupe]
Earlier:
Italy's Piracy Shield just blocked one of Google's CDN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41890460
The cloud is unreliable for mission critical systems
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)
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.
Yes this sort of thing makes public cloud unreliable for mission critical systems
Why? Dumb government censorship could also block your private cloud as well.
It could, but it currently doesn't. Regulating and enforcing censorship is a lot harder when the offending material is not publicly accessible / easy to find. So even if you have offending content on your own private cloud, as opposed to have someone elses offending content on a shared public cloud, the censors would first have to find out about it.
You're a shared tenant on a shared system. You are at the mercy of what other tenants do.
not really
If your connection to your private cloud passes through public internet, all bets are off. I don't think all companies have their private clouds at the basement level, completely owned data centers, connected via edge switches near the water cooler.
Unless you uses Onion routing, yes
Seems more to be the case that the internet will have to route around Italy.
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?
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...
>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".
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.
It's still there, they changed the name to "VPN by Google". I'm sure some director got celebrated for that exciting 'new' product launch.
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.
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.
[dead]
Malicious compliance at its best :)
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.
Crazy.
[flagged]
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.