Firm says requiring site blocks within 30 minutes breaks core Internet architecture.
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Cloudflare appeals Piracy Shield fine, hopes to kill Italy’s site-blocking law
- Thread starter JournalBot
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Well, I certainly hope the Italian government prevails. After all, we all remember what happened in the early days of the Internet when piracy was rampant: no studio was able to produce new shows or movies, no new music was recorded, game development stopped, every media company on the planet was this close to filing for bankruptcy.
Let's take a lesson from the past as to how big an effect random, untrusted piracy sites have on the corporate conglomerates, shall we?
Let's take a lesson from the past as to how big an effect random, untrusted piracy sites have on the corporate conglomerates, shall we?
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I wonder how many Italian government websites would go offline if CloudFlare exits the country?
I'd honestly have to laugh of the PiracyShield/AGCOM website(s) were effected.
I'd honestly have to laugh of the PiracyShield/AGCOM website(s) were effected.
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Um, so if I complain about a law protecting slaveholders, am I also thereby complaining about having laws? Or by "rights" do you mean any possible right at all, as opposed to copyrights, or to copyrights as currenty conceived? I very much doubt that anybody complained about all laws protecting any kind of right...
Well, yes, that's certainly true...
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If Italian law prevails, cloudfare has no choice but to exit the country. Good luck with your Internet Italy if that happens.
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As I recall..the law came to be because football teams wanted to keep their regional streaming and TV coverage lockouts in places. Which, is almost as preposterous as rewriting copyright law to accommodate Disney.
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I say screw it. CloudFlare should follow the order to the letter via malicious compliance and redirect complaints to the Italian government, and provide the contact details.
Maybe then lawmakers and governments will grasp how DNS works.
Oh who am I kidding, of course the governments wouldn't.
Maybe then lawmakers and governments will grasp how DNS works.
Oh who am I kidding, of course the governments wouldn't.
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They did. Which is why there were times when Google Drive and Dropbox and other major services were taken out. The law gives only 30 minutes from time of request to takedown for compliance IIRC, which is no time at all for any due diligence. And it is an IP level block too.
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Even better. Because at this point, since any media company can block any IP within 30 minutes (NAT and CIDR blocks be damned as well!), Cloudflare can just become the middle man and say "yes sir, I will do as I'm told, even though I've already explained the consequences".
Of course my tongue in cheek suggestion is assuming they'd be able to do a quick rollback when the shit inevitably hits the fan.
It's like at any IT job and leadership wants something done where clear due diligence hasn't been done and you weren't consulted at all. You raise concerns that yes, patching DOES need to be faster but patching all domain controllers simultaneously is a bad idea to do at 9AM on a Monday morning, and they don't listen and make threats. Well, ok, here we go!
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Why would a government go after DNS? DNS is so highly redundant that Cloudflare's Italian share probably doesn't matter. Do they mean domain registry?
If this was about Cloudflare's frequently abused proxy/cache, that would make sense. That's where ever phisher, imposter site, and pirate is hanging out.
If this was about Cloudflare's frequently abused proxy/cache, that would make sense. That's where ever phisher, imposter site, and pirate is hanging out.
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Politicans fundamentally failing to understand internet infrastructure specifically, and technology more generally, is a worldwide tradition to which no country can claim ownership.
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Yup. My last employer was really bad about sanitizing site-access key card lists. Time between refreshes was often multiple years. They announced they were going to do it with like a week's notice.
Our facilities guy...ex-Army logistics, had seen every kind of F-up imaginable over the years and warned them. Loudly. As only a retired ex-army logistics guy can, with colorful language to suit the occasion. But did they listen? Nope. Which is why the morning after the purge hundreds of employees were locked out of not only their buildings--but also the keycard scanner doors within buildings as well. Because someone had the foresight to make it all networked and one easily updateable system.
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Look, don't bring logic and reason into an illogical space. It is about as futile as dividing by zero.
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Have you even skimmed the article before posting? I suspect you didn't, because if you did you would have noticed that Cloudflare, which incidentally I'm not otherwise particularly sympathetic towards, is complaining about a law what was bought and paid for by a group of corporations, that is the association of football teams' owners and the media conglomerates who bought the broadcast rights for football matches, and gave them the right to block in 30 minutes any domain or ip address they want without judicial supervision, without liabilities if they block the wrong ip address or domain, and without recurse for the owners of the services that were wrongly blocked or the users who lost access to those services.
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Hey now, that's an insult to whorehouses. Unlike the US Congress, at least whorehouses get things done.
But way to misinterpret the story. The core issue is Cloudflare is trying its best to scream that the current implementation of the law WON'T WORK AS WRITTEN, for a variety of factors. The most pressing being that randomly blocking any IP address ranges requested by a shadow group (media companies) within a 30 minute window is the best way to break the entire internet at worst, and causing global outages via collateral damage at the least.
All of which can be avoided by people in Italy anyway by just using any one of the hundreds of other DNS global providers on the planet that aren't subject to this policy.
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You'd think the Cloudflare global outage last November would give them any idea what kind of trouble they'd be in should Cloudflare choose to cut off Italy but nah let's double down...
At least Matthew Prince is sensible and tries to explain how shit works. A mean (and not so bright) mf like myself I'd just exit the market and take out the popcorn.
At least Matthew Prince is sensible and tries to explain how shit works. A mean (and not so bright) mf like myself I'd just exit the market and take out the popcorn.
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English is admittedly not my first language but I really didn't understand the point you were trying to make and what side of the issue you stand.
What's that about "whackadoodle defenses of the Italian assault on due process", though ? Seems to me almost every comment so far are NOT in favor of the Italian law.
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You would think the pirates (and any human who values their privacy) would be using VPN and a private DNS anyway
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As I said, I put it poorly. The issue isn't a law protecting rights existing. The issue I have is about the people defending a law that denies due process in its enforcement. Too often, that defense is "if you don't like the law, leave." In your example, laws protecting slaveholders deny due process to the slaves, let alone acknowledge their own rights. You make my point better than I did. Thanks.
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Many Italian web sites suck to begin with. These sites can't even manage to stay online over a weekend and crash with "500" errors all the damn time. The level of absolute suck these web sites have is staggering, yet typical. Even government sites crash out all the time and seldom ever survive a weekend and don't get rebooted or whatever until after the following money. Ridiculous!
So if cloudflare pulls out, I can totally see how much worse it can get.
So if cloudflare pulls out, I can totally see how much worse it can get.
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Per the article, the current law denies due process to transit providers, DNS providers, and those being blocked.
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anguisette
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
many people think the US is the world leader in stupid, corrupt politicians, but Europe will not sit idly by and allow US dominance in this area. as this article clearly demonstrates, we are increasingly able to develop our own sources of stupid, corrupt politicians, and this will ensure Europe's oligarch sovereignty for future generations, while reducing our dependence on US interests.
thank you, Italy, for leading the way in this important endeavour.
thank you, Italy, for leading the way in this important endeavour.
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Stop beating that drum. You were wrong last time and are still wrong. No-one was defending the law. People were pissed at Cloudflare's CEO taking pages out of the MAGA playbook.
Apparently Cloudflare got their heads straight and did the right thing this time, instead of posturing and dick-waving. Good on them.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
It's going to be an IT apocalypse if they try to stick around to follow that law.
Courtesy of how hard or difficult it is to pin down "pirate" sites and of course courtesy of how staggeringly disproportionate the amount of false positives is when it comes to accusations of piracy this will mean Italy will regularly see banking, telecommunications, media stations, government organizations, educational facilities and the military blocked as the results of the steady stream of bot-driven false positives.
At some point this will have a very hard backlash.
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Perhaps, but there is a silver lining - maybe it's not too late to stop Cloudflare from growing into a mega corp that can wield their power and apply pressure to any country or region whenever they feel like it.
There are viable alternatives and this entire situation should be a wake up call for any online thing - you can litteraly blink out of existence whenever Cloudflare is unhappy.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
You sure the "500" errors are indeed based on the server being buggy rather than, say, that adress being forced to refuse response based on having received one of the millions of false positive shutdown notices getting pushed out already because of this law?
Because honestly, in an age where setting up ansd running a reliable internet service can be accomplished by a script kid and a copy of apache, I honestly don't see Italy being somehow endemically worse at IT than everyone else.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
There is indeed an issue with that law. Any similar law which did try to call for due process would lay a burden of investigation on taxpayers which is frankly ridiculous in addition to also being extremely disproportionate - i.e. calling for a solution which must by necessity in every case violate rights far more important than the privileges allegedly being violated.
I'm not keen on any entity being able to call the equivalent of a 3rd party audit on every last of my personal communications online simply because someone has levied an accusation with no evidence, for instance.
Even less so of a law which would mandate every online communication be deciphered and logged in order to accommodate the "due process" we're looking for here. But those are the options.
This was hammered home back when the DMCA was formulated but, rather than accept that such a law was itself unenforceable in practice, they decided to abstain from basic principles of law.
And the reason as to why this so is simple.
Unlawful copying of information is communication. File transfer through the torrent (or any other protocol) is functionally no different than a transaction with a bank, an online exchange of recipes, a software update, or a group converation about football...or politics.
Until you decode and translate what is being communicated, that is.
There's really only so much you can do with the question on how to stop "undesired communication" before any believer in fundamental principles of law has to shrug and acknowledge that there's nothing to be done within any framework containing proportionality and due process.
This means that any law of this kind will be a bad law. Either because it's as impossible to justify as trying to prevent people from whispering a given word in private settings...or because even the attempt to enforce it must also mean making a horrible deviation from rights far more important than the violations of privileges it's intended to address.
It would be like trying to win the war on drugs by telling the police to shoot and kill every person they saw (or thought they saw) dealing drugs. So bad a fundamental premise that no amount of due process could salvage the core principle.
...and unfortunately if you demand a law of this kind as an absolute must then the only way to do it is by having it denying due process.
Damn, I recall reading these debates some thirty years back when the DMCA was first formulated and it eventually boiled down to legal experts eventually persuading politicians that some form of "safe harbor" provision was absolutely necessary if the law's complete absence of calls for due process and reversal of burden of proof wouldn't immediately end the internet.
It's still a bad law which, courtesy of safe harbor, is now mainly paid by legitimate content creators who need to spend several hours a week defending their right to monetize their own content on youtube.
Pirates, as per usual, are not affected.
The italian law doesn't have safe harbor provisions. If it did, however, it would still be exempt from due process.
You really can't fix this kind of law. It's fundamentally broken from the outset.
Arguably this is the same of any and every attempt to "enforce" copyright. Any law intending to address piracy must either invalidate the fundamental technology which allows the internet to function, or tosses every right of privacy and personal integrity into the shredder, because the attempt itself unavoidably means surveilling any and all communication and disallowing online confidentiality.
That attempts have been made to do both of those in order to enforce the privilege of copyright is a large part of why I personally have always remained steadfastly on the pirate side of this debate. Because sure, pirates aren't affected, but the same doesn't hold true for literally everyone else.
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If CF stopped resolving .it addresses, it'd break things as surely as what they're describing in the article (yeah, whoosh, sorry). If a site is operated by a bad actor, there's better ways than screwing with the resolvers. These guys are breaking DNS because they have fewer throats to choke there than if they wanted to get null routes advertised for problem sites I suppose?
FSM please save us from legislators getting involved in the workings of our system of tubes.
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Sir, please go easy with that level of sarcasm, it has been categorised in 27 countries as a weapon of ass destruction.
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For the love of all that is holy, WHEN are governments going to learn to stop fucking with DNS? It's the source of enough problems already...
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I've done that for any site domains i own. Blocked access to/from IPs that belong to countries whose legal policies are a nightmare. France, Italy, EU in general, ad any other whose location is used for spam email.
Less traffic and spam.
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I think you should include US on that list, after all, there's not much rule of law left there.
Oh, sorry, I didn't realise that's what you were aiming for.
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