Italy to require VPN and DNS providers to block pirated content
The new measures are set to be added to the country's Piracy Shield
How exactly will they force compliance for companies not based in Italy, or even the EU?
By banning and blocking all VPN providers not based in Italy.
So by going harder on blocking content that China? Because that's what they do but most of the big providers get through after a day or two of downtime each time the government make a change to block them.
Sounds like a possible violation of EU rights. Similar practices have cost other governments dearly in the past.
Supreme fascist control doesn't start immediately. It needs to take one small baby step every day.
Better yet, how will they determine what is “pirated content”?
Making something illegal and actually stopping it are two different things. Also see: drugs.
"The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it."
Never heard of forcing VPN providers to block something. Kinda defeats the purpose. Long live Tor I guess?
It's a fascist government, they don't care about reality, just looks.
France has been attempting the exact same thing recently.
Tor + vpn can circumvent these blocks?
Don't combine. Just use tor or a VPN.
Can’t you just vpn to another vpn ?
I’m not an expert on internet security but I do know there is no way in hell to legislate around blocking internet. Even China’s great firewall isn’t working.
I guess by passing legislation like this you get most people to be compliant, but this is about pirates, who were already actively non compliant in the first place.
The folks who pirate the content are literally going to have to click one extra button or something like that to work around the vpns trying to block stuff…
Can’t you just vpn to another vpn ?
Won't even have to. Just use any VPN provider outside of Italy that doesn't have to comply with Italian law. lol.
mullvad doesn't know where you live nor do they care.
I'm sure there will be workarounds.
I think there are plenty of people who would be pirates if it were more convenient, but I suspect the point of diminishing returns for legislation has already been passed. If you're savvy and dedicated enough to use a VPN in the first place, then this probably won't stop you. Non-tech-savvy people are already turned off of torrents for half a dozen different reasons.
DNS, though? That will block a lot of people from accessing things like Z-library, which is currently easy enough to access for anyone who knows how to use Google.
China's measures have been largely successful, unfortunately. It's still possible to VPN out, but it's a risk a lot of people are unwilling to take since it could realistically get them in trouble. I've lost contact with some friends in China because we have no shared platforms and the increasing blocking measures over the past 10 years finally passed their tolerance threshold.
I guess I could figure out how to use iMessage, which AFAIK is the only end-to-end encrypted messaging service that still works (or at least the only moderately popular one). Makes me wonder how secure it really is if China hasn't banned it...
China is a whole other can of worms. It's not so much the firewall, but the regime.
Take this with a grain of salt, I am by no means qualified to say anything on this topic with total certainty.
All a VPN does is encrypt traffic between you and the VPN. The VPN Hub you're connected to has to unencrypted your outbound traffic, fulfilling those requests, and then encrypting inbound traffic back to you. A VPN obscures traffic by allowing you to make your requests from a different location, where thousands of others also do it, all while hiding who is making any requests it fulfills, and hiding your activity from your ISP with encryption. A good VPN will also not keep logs of anything it does, and will have options to connect to Hubs outside of five eyes countries.
This would mean that while the VPN might not know who is making what requests, they would know what those requests are, so they could blacklist illegal content. All this to say a VPN >VPN >VPN > VPN still has a final VPN that has to make the request, and they will know where the request is going and what its for. But unless that final VPN company or Hub is actually inside of Italy they have no jurisdiction.
The real problem with this method is A) who determines what is blacklisted B) How do you enforce this blacklist C) How do you make the blacklist grow as fast as pirates spread out. This is a stupid law that wouldn't do anything even if the entire world got on board.
Tor essentially
Tor is bad for piracy because it's designed for low bandwidth applications. Maybe I2P?
So Italy is going to block all VPNs, then?
Why tf are countries with a suffering middle and lower classes targeting them especially?
To squeeze one more monthly subscription out of them?
\
To just make then skip the culture they can't afford?
Because they don't fight back unlike the billionaires who threaten to take jobs away / donate to their political rivals, the criminals who blackmail or threaten bodily harm (since this is Italy we're taking about), and the individuals who fall into both categories.
Yes.
But billionaires fighting back is just issuing an order for someone professional to do so in their behalf, themselves risking basically nothing.
Middle and lower classes need to do to work, do their chores, fight stress, organise, research, maybe take a loan to pay for legal costs, etc.
Someone might say the system is rigged.
Won’t happen. Enforcing this would cost way too much.
They will use it to jail anyone caught using the internet illegally. Most likely people that are ideologically opposed to them.
It's Italy, there is no chance of that efficiency. This is - as usual - stuff done to prevent pirated sport content. Nothing else has ever and probably will ever be done.
“Italian organized crime groups receipts have been estimated to reach 7–9% of Italy's GDP.”
But I guess pirating books is a more pressing problem.
Not if you're MetaFace it isn't.
With these kind of news from Southern Europe it's always about pirate football streams. How much does it cost to watch football legally in Italy?
The only options you have are:
Most people care only about some specific matches, so your only option is Dazn.
Dazn is also a very crappy service, it often has connectivity problems and also has ads. Fun fact, if you get a connection issue while watching a Dazn ad, it will restart.
So, as usual, monopoly, high costs and crappy services drive piracy.
Important note: wages in Italy are VERY low. 45€/month is a significant expense.
Wow, that's way worse than I imagined. No wonder people watch illegal streams!
So will the Italian government provide an Official List of Pirated Content or do the VPN providers need to determine it manually?
[Speculation]
They'll probably get a list of hashes from major copyright holders. So the biggest torrents won't work, but you'll still be able to pirate small-time artists.
But the individual network packets are usually at most 1500 byes long, and applications encrypt the content. Hashing doesn't prevent jack squat. It's more likely to be DNS + IP blocks
How would a hash help? The dns just gives you info to resolve the destination, not the content.
They would need to map the trackers most likely
Australia already has this, but it is extremely easy to circumvent, just use a different VPN.
Don't even have to go that far, just change your DNS to a non-Australian one. Anything that turns up from a "top 10 dns providers" search works.
Heh... Good luck forcing VPN to do anything!
Has no log VPN
"We have no record of anything, oh well."
This is actually about having the power of one person in an office wiping out any internet domain from the country.
there is proxies, which arnt vpn they will just switch to those.
Hm, isn't Airvpn based in Italy?
Are there even any decent VPN providers operating in Italy? What is the point of this?
I think airvpn is based in Italy
