“The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Italy to require VPN and DNS providers to block pirated content
Submitted 2 months ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
notannpc@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They will, at best, mildly inconvenienced the pirates.
Xanza@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I’ve been pirating a long time. Not once have I been inconvenienced by any anti-Piracy measure. There’s always another way around.
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Having to find a way around is an inconvenience.
balder1991@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Even North Korea can’t stop pirating completely.
hossein@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
Never heard of forcing VPN providers to block something. Kinda defeats the purpose. Long live Tor I guess?
Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.org 2 months ago
It’s a fascist government, they don’t care about reality, just looks.
Hubi@feddit.org 2 months ago
France has been attempting the exact same thing recently.
Zoldyck@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Tor + vpn can circumvent these blocks?
Cephalotrocity@biglemmowski.win 2 months ago
Don’t combine. Just use tor or a VPN.
DancingBear@midwest.social 2 months ago
Can’t you just vpn to another vpn ?
Xanza@lemm.ee 2 months ago
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.
CarbonBasedNPU@lemm.ee 2 months ago
mullvad doesn’t know where you live nor do they care.
AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 2 months ago
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…
Evotech@lemmy.world 2 months ago
China is a whole other can of worms. It’s not so much the firewall, but the regime.
Evotech@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Tor wsdentially
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Tor is bad for piracy because it’s designed for low bandwidth applications. Maybe I2P?
PresidentCamacho@lemm.ee 2 months ago
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.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
So Italy is going to block all VPNs, then?
cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Why tf are countries with a differing middle and lower classes targeting them especially?
Top squeeze one more monthly subscription out of them?
To just make then skip the culture they can’t afford?ThePyroPython@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Yes.
But billionaires fighting back is just issuing an order for someone professional to do so.
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.
balder1991@lemmy.world 2 months ago
“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.
Cyclist@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Not if you’re MetaFace it isn’t.
Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
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?
Giooschi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The only options you have are:
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Dazn Standard (45€/month, 35€/month if you pay for 12 months) to get access to all the SerieA matches (and a whole bunch of other sports nobody cares about)
-
Dazn Goal Pass (20€/month, 14€/month if you pay for 12 months) to get access to 3 SerieA matches per week which you don’t get to choose (and a bunch of other sports nobody cares about)
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Sky (16€/month for the first 18 months, then whatever Sky wants after that) to get access to 3 SerieA matches per week which you don’t get to choose (and a bunch of other stuff nobody cares about)
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.
Damage@feddit.it 2 months ago
Important note: wages in Italy are VERY low. 45€/month is a significant expense.
Petter1@lemm.ee 2 months ago
🤮
Imagine stuffing so much cash in the butt of a rich guy, only to look how other, most likely better earners than you, play against each others using a tiny ball.
I don’t get sports fanatics…
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
How many of these soccer stadiums have been build with tax payer money?
Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Wow, that’s way worse than I imagined. No wonder people watch illegal streams!
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twinnie@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Won’t happen. Enforcing this would cost way too much.
Akasazh@feddit.nl 2 months ago
They will use it to jail anyone caught using the internet illegally. Most likely people that are ideologically opposed to them.
sudneo@lemm.ee 2 months ago
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.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
So will the Italian government provide an Official List of Pirated Content or do the VPN providers need to determine it manually?
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
[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.
undu@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
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
kiagam@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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
biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Australia already has this, but it is extremely easy to circumvent, just use a different VPN.
InvisibleShoe@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
pastermil@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Heh… Good luck forcing VPN to do anything!
bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Has no log VPN
“We have no record of anything, oh well.”
rickdg@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This actually about having the power of one person in an office wiping out any internet domain from the country.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 2 months ago
there is proxies, which arnt vpn they will just switch to those.
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Hm, isn’t Airvpn based in Italy?
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Are there even any decent VPN providers operating in Italy? What is the point of this?
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 2 months ago
I think airvpn is based in Italy
Kyrgizion@lemmy.world 2 months ago
How exactly will they force compliance for companies not based in Italy, or even the EU?
DavidGA@lemmy.world 2 months ago
By banning and blocking all VPN providers not based in Italy.
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 2 months ago
I am experiencing such banning of providers right now. It is a whack-a-mole, seems futile. Not to mention that most people use sketchy free noname VPNs that are just too numerous. Or apparently some people set up basic XRay/VLESS/whatever and sell it via a Telegram bot…
Womble@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Sounds like a possible violation of EU rights. Similar practices have cost other governments dearly in the past.
orize@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Supreme fascist control doesn’t start in a day. It needs to take one small baby step every day.
jaybone@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Better yet, how will they determine what is “pirated content”?
sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 2 months ago
Making something illegal and actually stopping it are two different things. Also see: drugs.