this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024

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Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield’ Creating Real Problems As VPNs Start Turning Away Italian Users (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

it is so dystopian...

all 38 comments

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I was in Italy in maybe 2013 or 2014 and every vpn ever was blocked. The only one that wasn't blocked was the one running on my home server back home. Even mcdonalds wifi in Methsota US isn't like that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

As an Italian... Fuck

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Man, I've used AirVPN forever. Should I change now?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Id like to know as well

[–] [email protected] 49 points 9 months ago (1 children)

AirVPN is an Italian company incorporated in Rome.

Of course they comply. 99.9% of VPN providers are however not domiciled in Italy or elsewhere in the EU, and don't give a flying fuck about Italian demands and jurisdiction.

This is a total non-issue.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Exactly: Italian companies (like AirVPN) are now forced to comply to the new law, but being a member of the EU means you cannot forbid other EU countries to sell you their products. So any Italian citizen has still the right to purchase the same service from any other Country, thus stifling their own economy.
The current Italian Government keeps fucking themself in their own ass with this kind of actions: they get bribed by big companies (in this case Comcast's Sky and DAZN) and keep putting in serious difficulties small local companies, because of their total inability to think even a single a step ahead

[+] [email protected] -17 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The Italian population is very old. This old generation of white man can't die fast enough

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Mh, interesting, I would like to disagree

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This whole thing happened while a young woman is in power. This has to do with submission to economic power, not with gender and age.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I think from her part it was more about planting the seeds of a censorship tool than pleasing economic powers. Right-wing scum always attack freedom of speech first.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I don't think this is needed to implement censorship. It's Italy, I know better than thinking something is done out of malice, when it can be the result of incompetence. I completely believe this is some idiotic implementation of what football an TV economic powers wanted. Either way, this idea that everything bad is because "old white men" is bs. We don't even need meloni, we can use the dear iron lady as an example...class and economic positions count way more than age and gender, ultimately.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Will this change something for italian pirates?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago

They will just buy a VPN from a company that isn't incorporated in Italy (airvpn is based in Italy so they were forced to do that)

And everyone in Italy need to be forced to get a VPN as we (I'm Italian) gave the keys to a few copyright trolls with no supervision or repercussions for wrong blockings.

Saturday afternoon my uptime Kuma telegram bot started to send me hundreds of notifications "your websites are down!" And I panicked. I literally had no idea what was going on. My server was ok, why I couldn't access my websites? Rebooted 5 times, still down. Cloudflare tunnels were giving a weird error. After two hours of troubleshooting and still hundreds of down notifications I just gave up. "Maybe it's an issue with cloudflare" - I thought. I disabled the telegram bot and I went to sleep.

It was the fucking copyright trolls that blocked fucking cloudflare

And no official media talked about this. When Facebook has 3 minutes of downtime, the news on TV act like Italy was cut out from the world for a week. Here the copyright trolls blocked the biggest CDN in the world for a fucking day and the media fucking ignored the issue. Not a single news about that. The block was silently removed, and it never officially happened.

I hope that this disaster triggers the EU to forbid a platform like this because this is too dangerous. What if next time instead of blocking cloudflare accidentally it's blocked "accidentally"?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

On the plus side, maybe more tor users?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There's another one after airvpn? That was because they had the headquarters in Italy so they had no other choice.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Exactly, and it remains the only one. Clickbait, nothing else.

[–] [email protected] 106 points 9 months ago (3 children)

How long until people will be carrying Raspberry Pis over the borders for their own hotspots? /s

It's crazy how quickly mass censorship is becoming commonplace though. From shadowbanning on Reddit and Twitter, to court blocking in the UK, Spain and Italy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Why not use TOR?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (1 children)

MFW I climb a light pole outside of the McDonald's to install my solar powered rpi jump box and find that there are already seven other solar powered rpi jump boxes up there.

MFW this is the fourth pole I've tried.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

MFW this is the fourth pole I've tried.

I think the rules state that you have to show a visual depiction of said face

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

DO IT

[–] [email protected] 35 points 9 months ago

The Internet gives some power back to the people, the powers that be would love to see it crash and burn.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (1 children)

https://web.archive.org/web/20240229043417/https://www.techdirt.com/2024/02/27/italys-piracy-shield-creating-real-problems-as-vpns-start-turning-away-italian-users/

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Scarry read.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Not really. The article mentions exactly one provider that doesn't accept Italian users... And if you look into AirVPN, you'll find that it's an Italian company... i.e. the only provider actually within the realm of Italian cease & desist orders. Nobody else cares whatsoever.

[+] [email protected] 39 points 9 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (2 children)

How would it affect their economy?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Lol. It's common place for companies to use pirated software in order to reduce costs.
Licences and subscriptions can get expensive, so when companies get forced to increase costs, they tend to fuck off somewhere else.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

In poorer countries, sure.

In most 1st world countries, using pirated software is basically giving groups like FAST a licence to fuck you out of business.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 9 months ago

Italy isn't a 1st world country. It only looks that way at the top.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's really not.

In poor countries sure, but not the US or Europe. You will get sued and you will pay if you do that at any scale.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Lol. You think Italy is rich? The lower you go down the boot, the poorer the leather.
Remember the bridge that collapsed because the company that built it cut corners? That's the standard of business there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

The bridge was near Genova, in the North, btw. For good or for bad, Italy is still a member of g7, and despite the gazillion problems, relatively to other countries, it is a rich country.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Reading the article: A ruling body filled with randos puts a site on a block list and every VPN operating in Italy must block the site within 30 minutes. There is no review or judicial oversight to sites added to the block list. This seems to include all forms of VPNs, including corporate ones. They could start charging a premium to Italian users which would start affecting businesses, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This seems to include all forms of VPNs, including corporate ones.

Eh, I doubt it. If the exit point is in Italy it would be going through an Italian ISP, and that ISP should be responsible for enforcing the filter, the same as it would be for a retail customer.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A document detailing technical requirements of Italy’s Piracy Shield anti-piracy system confirms that ISPs are not alone in being required to block pirate IPTV services. All VPN and open DNS services must also comply with blocking orders, including through accreditation to the Piracy Shield platform.

According to the article, it requires them to get accreditation to operate in in Italy, unless I'm reading that wrong.

Most corporate VPN companies I've dealt with would love to slip in additional cost to counteract this cost on their end.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

According to the article, it requires them to get accreditation to operate in in Italy, unless I'm reading that wrong.

Uh huh. So, I put a DNS server and VPN server online, and an Italian happens to find it. Is Italy going to try to extradite me or something?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Disclaimer: This is speculation, because I haven't read the actual law (and I'm not Italian, so it's not like I really have a reason to).

I would assume that they will handle it like this:

To be able to sell your VPN service in Italy, you'll have to get accredited. Since you're now taking Italian customers' money, your company's dealings in Italy fall under Italian law. They might be able to extradite you, depending on what country you operate from, but realistically most businesses don't want to get involved in that kind of stuff, because even if you don't get extradited, no one wants to be put in a situation where they need to actively avoid a country.

This leaves free VPN services, right? Well, since ISP and "legal" VPNs need to conform to the new law, the Italian government could blacklist those VPNs' websites (which all ISPs and legal VPNs are required by law to block within 30 minutes of them being added to the block list). So now, you're in an awkward position as an Italian if you want to get a VPN that doesn't follow those laws.

I'm not sure at what extent this law goes, or how they handle people who are paying to circumvent it (because you might have bought a VPN before this), but they might simply require that banks refuse to process payments from VPN providers that refuse to get accredited.

Obviously, they can't really block this thing without going the Great Firewall route (and even that has ways of being bypassed), but that's not really their goal here. Their goal is to establish a stranglehold on what the everyday citizen does. It's to put a framework in place that allows them to quickly and efficiently block content they deem you shouldn't be able to see. It's a disgusting display of a government overreaching and censoring what their citizens' have access to on the web.