I still don’t have an understanding whether this meaningfully downgrades Tor’s security. Because if there was no extra harm, it would be helpful when bridges are blocked frequently, but some VPN services (or just your own VPS setup) have a better obfuscation.
By banning and blocking all VPN providers not based in Italy.
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
on 21 Feb 08:43
nextcollapse
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…
Not mentionning that anyone can set up their own VPN server… Good fucking luck with that 💀
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
on 21 Feb 10:24
nextcollapse
You can ban big hosting providers, but even here they’re cautious with measures like that because it would break WAY too much. Not to mention that you could just use a lesser-known one, even if it doesn’t operate in the country legally.
neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 21 Feb 12:36
collapse
I’d like to see them ban Microsoft azure, aws, or whatever Google calls it. Not to mention the numerous smaller providers.
Italians will just pay with crypto to get around payment bans.
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.
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.
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net
on 21 Feb 08:18
nextcollapse
Hm, isn’t Airvpn based in Italy?
pastermil@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Feb 08:24
nextcollapse
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)
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.
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
on 21 Feb 10:32
nextcollapse
How many of these soccer stadiums have been build with tax payer money?
ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 21 Feb 11:28
collapse
I think all the big stadiums actually used for these big matches are privately built and owned?
That would be unusual. Most sports stadiums in most major cities are heavily subsidized by the city/state (e.g. tax payers), especially in public transportation. I’d be surprised if even a small % were 100% privately funded.
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.
Most people just want to watch a match of their home town/favourite team maybe once a week. This is very moderate, what’s so bad about that? However in order to do that they either have to either spend an absurd amount of money to get access to all matches, or spend a bit less money to play lottery and hope the match they wanted to watch gets selected.
Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz
on 21 Feb 16:07
collapse
Wow, that’s way worse than I imagined. No wonder people watch illegal streams!
This is actually about having the power of one person in an office wiping out any internet domain from the country.
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 21 Feb 12:18
nextcollapse
“The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.”
DancingBear@midwest.social
on 21 Feb 13:34
nextcollapse
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…
AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev
on 21 Feb 14:43
nextcollapse
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…
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.
biggerbogboy@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Feb 13:58
nextcollapse
Australia already has this, but it is extremely easy to circumvent, just use a different VPN.
InvisibleShoe@lemmy.world
on 21 Feb 14:18
collapse
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.
cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 21 Feb 14:03
nextcollapse
Are there even any decent VPN providers operating in Italy? What is the point of this?
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
on 21 Feb 14:56
collapse
I think airvpn is based in Italy
cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 21 Feb 14:33
nextcollapse
You seem very intent on convincing multiple people we are more inconvenienced than we feel.
I think you are missing the feeling of smug superiority that comes from defeating the feeble multi-million dollar attempts to punish us…with 5 mouse clicks. So on the surface level it might be an inconvenience, but you step into the actual activity and boom, we’re telling these dumbasses to fuck off. And that’s fun.
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk
on 22 Feb 15:57
collapse
I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, for some reason some people just want to ignore the meaning of words. I’m not saying anyone feels super inconvenienced either, like I said they’re minor inconveniences, but they’re there and they grow.
Frankly I couldn’t care less about sticking it to the man, I’ve been around the scene for 30 odd years at this point and I don’t think that’s ever been a motivator for me. I do like things that make it more convenient, more reliable and increase selection - I don’t like things that make it more difficult, no matter how small.
there is proxies, which arnt vpn they will just switch to those.
Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
on 22 Feb 09:44
nextcollapse
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?
ThePyroPython@lemmy.world
on 22 Feb 15:40
collapse
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.
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
on 22 Feb 15:41
collapse
[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
on 22 Feb 15:50
nextcollapse
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
threaded - newest
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.
Tor + vpn can circumvent these blocks?
Don’t combine. Just use tor or a VPN.
I’ll stop combining them when Tor can punch through the censorship in this country
What? The link you posted didn’t even say that. Just to avoid if your not an advance user. They literally have a page explaining benefits…
What nonsense. If I want my origin to tor to start with a VPN then I will and I’ll be more anonymous because of it.
I still don’t have an understanding whether this meaningfully downgrades Tor’s security. Because if there was no extra harm, it would be helpful when bridges are blocked frequently, but some VPN services (or just your own VPS setup) have a better obfuscation.
France has been attempting the exact same thing recently.
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.
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…
Not mentionning that anyone can set up their own VPN server… Good fucking luck with that 💀
You can ban big hosting providers, but even here they’re cautious with measures like that because it would break WAY too much. Not to mention that you could just use a lesser-known one, even if it doesn’t operate in the country legally.
I’d like to see them ban Microsoft azure, aws, or whatever Google calls it. Not to mention the numerous smaller providers.
Italians will just pay with crypto to get around payment bans.
I bet there comes the day that I need to share access to my server to allow people from other countries accessing the real free web through me…
Host a Tor node or bridge right now if it is safe for you))
Or vpn hopping, works too.
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.
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.
Hm, isn’t Airvpn based in Italy?
Heh… Good luck forcing VPN to do anything!
Has no log VPN
“We have no record of anything, oh well.”
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:
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)
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.
How many of these soccer stadiums have been build with tax payer money?
I think all the big stadiums actually used for these big matches are privately built and owned?
That would be unusual. Most sports stadiums in most major cities are heavily subsidized by the city/state (e.g. tax payers), especially in public transportation. I’d be surprised if even a small % were 100% privately funded.
Important note: wages in Italy are VERY low. 45€/month is a significant expense.
🤮
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…
Most people just want to watch a match of their home town/favourite team maybe once a week. This is very moderate, what’s so bad about that? However in order to do that they either have to either spend an absurd amount of money to get access to all matches, or spend a bit less money to play lottery and hope the match they wanted to watch gets selected.
Wow, that’s way worse than I imagined. No wonder people watch illegal streams!
This is actually about having the power of one person in an office wiping out any internet domain from the country.
“The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.”
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…
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.
Tor essentially
Tor is bad for piracy because it’s designed for low bandwidth applications. Maybe I2P?
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.
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.
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.
Are there even any decent VPN providers operating in Italy? What is the point of this?
I think airvpn is based in Italy
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/0ed2e1de-9c67-4d19-8c80-6d9934ece2c4.webp">
So Italy is going to block all VPNs, then?
They will, at best, mildly inconvenienced the pirates.
I’ve been pirating a long time. Not once have I been inconvenienced by any anti-Piracy measure. There’s always another way around.
Having to find a way around is an inconvenience.
lol not really. Not a single piracy measure I’ve ever come across was anything more than a 3-5 minute Google fix away.
Yep
It’s like when YouTube finds a way to show you an ad, and then you go to ublock and update filters and boom fixed.
Oh no Italy is requiring something unenforceable, hopefully nobody from other countries ignores this and provides VPN access unhindered.
In the nicest possible way, what you’re both describing are minor inconveniences.
You seem very intent on convincing multiple people we are more inconvenienced than we feel.
I think you are missing the feeling of smug superiority that comes from defeating the feeble multi-million dollar attempts to punish us…with 5 mouse clicks. So on the surface level it might be an inconvenience, but you step into the actual activity and boom, we’re telling these dumbasses to fuck off. And that’s fun.
I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, for some reason some people just want to ignore the meaning of words. I’m not saying anyone feels super inconvenienced either, like I said they’re minor inconveniences, but they’re there and they grow.
Frankly I couldn’t care less about sticking it to the man, I’ve been around the scene for 30 odd years at this point and I don’t think that’s ever been a motivator for me. I do like things that make it more convenient, more reliable and increase selection - I don’t like things that make it more difficult, no matter how small.
Even North Korea can’t stop pirating completely.
there is proxies, which arnt vpn they will just switch to those.
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.
“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.
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