"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.
>let the payday loan predators and mafia rule their digital infrastructure as an anti example for everyone else
Why would you assume it would be an anti-example for everyone else? If other see this works in Italy with no backlash what's gonna stop them implementing it in other places?
Italy might be indeed the pilot project in implementing the vision of Idiocracy. Looking at popularity of lotteries and sport betting in other countries like e.g. Spain or Poland, I'm not joking at all.
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.
Selling out your country is literally the default modus operandi in most places on the planet. In fact, not selling your country, like the Nordics for example, is the rare exception to the rule.
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.
Letting in a large amount of people to enter a country without the necessary visas, technically is an invasion. Otherwise what's the point of country borders and border enforcement? If strangers could come and go in your house as they please without your permission, that's illegal as well and you'd call the police.
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.
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.
Both the military "Alpha Group" and "Vympel" were active combatants in both the first and second Chechen wars, they are branches of FSB, which were indeed responsible for the Russian presence in Chechnya since 2001.
Point being, the persons in charge of the the gas and raid in the theatre were also the guys in charge of tactics used in Chechnya.
That may be the case, but nevertheless when they were dealt with the hostage crisis, going back in time and correcting the policy decisions which precipitated it was not among their list of options.
(And were the commanders on the ground that week actually in decision making positions during the Chechen conflict? 'Following orders' doesn't excuse their participation, but it seems unlikely they personally were ever in a position to stop the conflict.)
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.
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.
Well, yes, but whether the government should be propping up antiquated business models is the question. The government needs to work for the people, not the oligarchs. There might very well be an argument that government should "stop the tram" because it's interfering with another business that is good for the people. But copyright has long been for the oligarchs, not the people.
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.
>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
Jesus. The biggest issue I see is who keeps these so called "trusted flaggers" in check? What accountability mechanism exists for them?
What prevents people working at those trusted flaggers from abusing the org's position and just banning stuff they don't personally like or for malicious actors to infiltrate the orgs to ban stuff? Kind of like a rogue Reddit/Discord mod on steroids. Since people who actively seek out power, are exactly the ones who shouldn't have it, according to Plato.
As all these orgs aren't elected like our politicians that we can change through votes yet they seem to have gotten the keys to online speech.
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.
>Italy (and many other European countries) could be great and wealthy countries once again
How? That's like a dad telling his son "you can achieve anything you want" when the reality is he's already capped his max achievement potential with his barista job while still dreaming he's gonna make it big in Hollywood.
You're not gonna see an Italian/European flag on the moon anytime soon just because they did cool stuff in the past. A country is not some tiny ship you can turn around at a whim and become a US/Switzerland powerhouse overnight via some magic algorithm that the people in power were too stupid to see, the inertia of the status quo of a nation is insanely large. So the bureaucrats in charge aren't the only reason Italy and the EU is falling behind the US at the economy and innovations.
Also, speaking of the devil, those bureaucrats in charge are elected by the people and therefore a direct reflection of the population they serve, they're not some strange creatures shoehorned by aliens to rules us poorly, they're cut form the same cloth and are only doing what will get people to keep voting for them.
So if people vote trash candidates to power why are they surprised they get trash results? Stop rewarding bad behavior, and vote for someone else better. Now if all your candidates are trash, what does that say about the population and the culture as a whole? In this case do you think there's some redemption waiting around the corner for them for a spectacular turn-around or is simply the entire population as a collective at fault as well for their current situation?
I might getting old but I don't believe in the "hidden greatness" or the "past greatness". We have the best what we can get. What we have is the outcome of very educated and well financially rewarded people. Italian elites? The oldest universities in Europe, most venerable families, biggest fortunes on the continent... and this is their outcome.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.