10 ms·

Court of Milan orders Cloudflare to block ‘piracy shield’ domains, IP addresses

148 points by DanAtC 2y ago

Fizzadar 2y ago
We really need a competitor(s- ideally) to CF because it’s heavily centralising the internet and this highlights exactly why that is a problem.
- mgbmtl 2y ago
  I'm all for competition, but smaller players would have been completely blocked by Privacy Shield, whereas they cannot block CloudFlare completely without breaking a lot of other sites. And CloudFlare went to court. Most companies would not be able to afford it.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  There are! But most have only a small part of marketshare. The issue is less so in services provided and more so in sheer scale. Hopefully that will change eventually :)
- gruez 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard Seems like they're willing to take anyone as a client >Researchers and journalists have alleged that many of DDoS-Guard's clients are engaged in criminal activity, and investigative reporter Brian Krebs reported in January 2021 that a "vast number" of the websites hosted by DDoS-Guard are "phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online".[3][1] Some of DDoS-Guard's notable clients have included the Palestinian Islamic militant nationalist movement Hamas, American alt-tech social network Parler, and various groups associated with the Russian state.[3][4][1] ...including piracy sites >DDoS-Guard provides services for the popular video game piracy website FitGirl Repacks >Sci-Hub switched from Cloudflare to DDoS-Guard for DDoS protection.
- Andoryuuta 2y ago
  There are multiple competitors though. See: Azure Front Door, Amazon CloudFront, Google Cloud/Media CDN, Akamai, Fastly, BunnyCDN, and so on. People are _choosing_ to use Cloudflare, whether that's based on cost, features, or even just brand recognition - but lack of options isn't the case.
  - miohtama 2y ago
    Cloudflare has easiest usability and generous free tier
    - jonny_eh 2y ago
      And yet it still has competitors.
    - mcmcmc 2y ago
      Free tiers are probably one of the most damaging practices for competition in the market for cloud services
      - jitl 2y ago
        Weird take. I might try all the services with free tiers, see which one works the best, and give that service my business in the long term. Like, how else to evaluate competing vendors? If there’s no free tier it means everything I want to try requires I wade through “sales motion”, and I’ll end up picking conservatively based on reputation because it’s harder/more annoying to evaluate multiple vendors. That seems less competitive - “no one got fired for buying IBM” attitude.
        jeroenhd 2y ago
        There's a difference between free tiers and trials. A trial is fine, but the unlimited free tiers offered now are a part of a race to the bottom that make it so only the largest, most investor-backed companies and loss-leaders can effectively compete.
        2y ago
- pixelesque 2y ago
  Maybe, but The Pirate Bay (at least last week when I looked) were sending cf-ray cookies, so I assume CF are "helping"/"protecting" (depending on what service they're using?) them, and The Pirate Bay's sort of been around (despite best efforts by some governments) for years...
- silisili 2y ago
  The CDN industry is shrinking, not growing. There isn't any margin to play with anymore. Any viable competitor to Cloudflare is going to have to have big coffers, or take on tons of VC debt up front. Even then, it's a race to the bottom on prices.
  - jitl 2y ago
    I think the product offerings from CDN companies are the best / most interesting they’ve ever been, compared to the overall IaaS space. “Edge computing” was a meme phrase a few years ago but really there’s no way to beat the speed of light besides putting your stuff closer to users.
  - fweimer 2y ago
    I can't believe Cloudfront is priced anywhere close to cost to AWS. They must have huge margins.
BadHumans 2y ago
The article says Cloudflare has tried to geoblock just certain IPs in Italy but what if Cloudflare tells Italy to stuff it and just withdraws from providing services to the country entirely?
- rad_gruchalski 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - brightball 2y ago
    What happened there?
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      A Brazilian judge named Alexandre de Moraes was going on a power trip, banning content and even people outright from social media. He issued unilateral orders to Twitter/X to perform this state censorship. Twitter/X refused, even though they comply with such orders elsewhere, because the orders were unconstitutional per Brazil’s own constitution. They also went public with the orders despite gag orders from this judge to keep the censorship secret. News outlets like the NYT have labeled de Moraes as a threat to democracy (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/world/americas/brazil-alexandre-de-moraes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/world/americas/brazil-ale...), for his long standing crusade against various activists, journalists, and politicians. The judge the issued orders to arrest Twitter’s lawyers in Brazil or something like that, which seemed very aggresive. So this turned into an international fiasco. The judge eventually ordered Brazil’s ISPs to block Twitter/X. That ban lasted for a little bit and then for some unknown reasons (maybe conversations between Twitter/X and the judge?) Twitter/X access was restored but some partial amount (?) of censorship was performed. Along the way Twitter/X also launched an account detailing the kind of censorship that had been forced on them in secret, along with comparisons against Brazilian law (https://x.com/AlexandreFiles/status/1829979981130416479 https://x.com/AlexandreFiles/status/1829979981130416479).
  - placardloop 2y ago
jmclnx 2y ago
No surprise with this, I wonder how long before this type of blocking is applied to all sites. That is what happens when large sites depend upon large companies like cloudflare. Already some sites are blocking people that use VPNs, I could also see this expanding as time goes on.
- someothherguyy 2y ago
  It is commonplace to block a VPN address block if you are experiencing tenacious malicious traffic. Its a consequence of sharing address space with bad actors, not something a service would likely be pursuing without cause.
shlomo_z 2y ago
While I do not support piracy, I am worried that the internet will get less and less free as tactics like this become more common.
- Reventlov 2y ago
  Step 1: Don't use CloudFlare MITM as a service Step 2: Don't get blocked because you're not a streaming pirate service Really, I see no downside to this court decision.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  On the other hand, where do you draw the line with regards to lawbreaking?
  - adolph 2y ago
    Do electrons on a wire or photons on glass break laws?
    - gruez 2y ago
      This analogy is absurd. Steel and rubber can't break laws either, but police regularly seize guns and vehicles used for committing crimes. Most developed countries also have some sort of sanctions regime that bars its citizens from transacting with certain entities. In most cases such sanctions don't even require a court order, the executive branch can usually unilaterally add entities to sanction lists.
      - nepthar 2y ago
        Your counter analogy is also a bit cherry picked. Guns and vehicles used for committing crimes are seized, but the vehicle makers and gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them, although they do stamp serial numbers. Also, ore and parts suppliers are not required to ensure that the buyers of their material comply with all legalities with the use of their materials. There’s a line of absurdity that this crosses
cutler 2y ago
Trouble is this could easily lead to CDN, IP and proxy manipulation by state actors for repressive ends.
ollybee 2y ago
I wonder how it works that they are banned from "routing internet traffic to IP addresses of all services present on the “Piracy Shield”. With a naive approach anyone who controlled the DNS records for a site present on the privacy shield could cause some serious mischief.
- thrw42A8N 2y ago
  They really should make full use of that rule.
zb3 2y ago
Let's block all Italy and see how fast they backtrack :)
- drdaeman 2y ago
  Sanctions like this only works if 1) the people (en masse) are not against those bans, but don't feel strongly in favor of them either; and 2) the politicians genuinely represent the will of the people and react to their demands. There could be more conditions that I'm missing here, but I can think only of those two. If that's correct, it may work. But if that's not the case - it only makes things worse.
  - zb3 2y ago
    Assume people are against these bans - just like against banning stuff in the EU. I'm one of those. So what did the EU achieve? I still access unavailable services via TOR/VPN, these laws still don't protect me and US companies are still not liable. Laws only work if you have enough power to enforce them.
    - drdaeman 2y ago
      > Assume people are against these bans Yes, that's what I suspect. And that's why blocking even more online resources is not a working approach. It just won't have any positive effect. > So what did the EU achieve? Well, my guess would be weakening of their political institutions. Passing laws that aren't supported by large swathes of the population, and that won't be consistently enforced is a battle-tested recipe component for undermining a democracy.
1oooqooq 2y ago
[flagged]
- freedomben 2y ago
  "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a risky strategy, especially when that friend is the state backed up by massive corporation(s). They don't share your principles, and if you think they'll be satisfied with this and will never go after torrent sites and the like, I think you're sorely mistaken.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    it's not even that deep. you only think it's related because the inflammatory wording used in the article to try to make it about content freedom. this is about a very openly obvious crime that harms the good pirate community just the same.
dilyevsky 2y ago
The insanity of spain’s anti pirate laws continues to elevate every year. It’s puzzling to me what makes it so different even from other European countries
- ignoramous 2y ago
  > The insanity of spain’s anti pirate laws ... Unsure about the state of affairs in Iberia, but the TFA is about Italia.
  - dilyevsky 2y ago
    Doh, for some reason i read Spain. Guess Italy is catching up there
    - sureIy 2y ago
      Italy has been at it for a long while. They've been able to block access to illegal websites for a very long while, like since 2006.
  - iosonofuturista 2y ago
    Besides, there is more than one country in Iberia
    - aftbit 2y ago
      Huh, including a little bit of France, TIL.
      - bmacho 2y ago
        The current political configuration of the Iberian Peninsula comprises the bulk of Portugal and Spain, the whole landlocked microstate of Andorra, a small part of the French department of Pyrénées-Orientales (French Cerdagne), and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_Peninsula#Political_divisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_Peninsula#Political_di...
parhamn 2y ago
The conversation seems centered on Cloudflare and the broader piracy issue. The more interesting thing to me is that sports are in desperate need of their spotify/netflix moment. My current best guess is that this isn't possible because of existing longer term contracts they've had in place. Currently streameast and such have the best UI for watching sports games and it's not even close. Casual/nascent fans don't want to pay $100 a month for announcer-less access to sideline camera feeds. I don't want to look up where every game is streaming that week. I don't want a membership to peacock or whatever to see this one game I'm sorta interested in. No I don't have cable anymore either. I don't care to understand how "blackouts" work. It goes on an on. It seems maliciously bad. And their numbers are showing it. From Gen Z's low adoption rates, to lower rates of onboarding new fans and broadly reduced viewership in some sports like the NBA. I don't know a single person who pirates music these days.
- badlibrarian 2y ago
  Watching every NFL game costs around $2,500 and requires six logins. And other leagues are going to follow this model. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/want-to-watch-every-nfl-game-this-season-its-going-to-cost-you-nearly-2-500-31c4d300 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/want-to-watch-every-nfl-ga...
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    I'm not sure we should expect other leagues to follow suit. Unlike other leagues, the NFL is intentionally trying to make it difficult to watch their games to protect ticket sales. It probably doesn't make sense as a strategy for less popular sports that need to get people interested in the first place.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - badlibrarian 2y ago
      Not sure I follow. The local NFL team's game is on free TV, over the air. People pay or resort to piracy to watch the better game that's four states away. You have to subscribe to see one-off games in England, or subscribe to Netflix to watch the games on Christmas Day.
pieresqi 2y ago
[dead]

148 points by DanAtC 2y ago

We really need a competitor(s- ideally) to CF because it’s heavily centralising the internet and this highlights exactly why that is a problem.

mgbmtl 2y ago
I'm all for competition, but smaller players would have been completely blocked by Privacy Shield, whereas they cannot block CloudFlare completely without breaking a lot of other sites. And CloudFlare went to court. Most companies would not be able to afford it.
neonsunset 2y ago
There are! But most have only a small part of marketshare. The issue is less so in services provided and more so in sheer scale. Hopefully that will change eventually :)
gruez 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard Seems like they're willing to take anyone as a client >Researchers and journalists have alleged that many of DDoS-Guard's clients are engaged in criminal activity, and investigative reporter Brian Krebs reported in January 2021 that a "vast number" of the websites hosted by DDoS-Guard are "phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online".[3][1] Some of DDoS-Guard's notable clients have included the Palestinian Islamic militant nationalist movement Hamas, American alt-tech social network Parler, and various groups associated with the Russian state.[3][4][1] ...including piracy sites >DDoS-Guard provides services for the popular video game piracy website FitGirl Repacks >Sci-Hub switched from Cloudflare to DDoS-Guard for DDoS protection.
Andoryuuta 2y ago
There are multiple competitors though. See: Azure Front Door, Amazon CloudFront, Google Cloud/Media CDN, Akamai, Fastly, BunnyCDN, and so on. People are _choosing_ to use Cloudflare, whether that's based on cost, features, or even just brand recognition - but lack of options isn't the case.
- miohtama 2y ago
  Cloudflare has easiest usability and generous free tier
  - jonny_eh 2y ago
    And yet it still has competitors.
  - mcmcmc 2y ago
    Free tiers are probably one of the most damaging practices for competition in the market for cloud services
    - jitl 2y ago
      Weird take. I might try all the services with free tiers, see which one works the best, and give that service my business in the long term. Like, how else to evaluate competing vendors? If there’s no free tier it means everything I want to try requires I wade through “sales motion”, and I’ll end up picking conservatively based on reputation because it’s harder/more annoying to evaluate multiple vendors. That seems less competitive - “no one got fired for buying IBM” attitude.
      - jeroenhd 2y ago
        There's a difference between free tiers and trials. A trial is fine, but the unlimited free tiers offered now are a part of a race to the bottom that make it so only the largest, most investor-backed companies and loss-leaders can effectively compete.
      - 2y ago
pixelesque 2y ago
Maybe, but The Pirate Bay (at least last week when I looked) were sending cf-ray cookies, so I assume CF are "helping"/"protecting" (depending on what service they're using?) them, and The Pirate Bay's sort of been around (despite best efforts by some governments) for years...
silisili 2y ago
The CDN industry is shrinking, not growing. There isn't any margin to play with anymore. Any viable competitor to Cloudflare is going to have to have big coffers, or take on tons of VC debt up front. Even then, it's a race to the bottom on prices.
- jitl 2y ago
  I think the product offerings from CDN companies are the best / most interesting they’ve ever been, compared to the overall IaaS space. “Edge computing” was a meme phrase a few years ago but really there’s no way to beat the speed of light besides putting your stuff closer to users.
- fweimer 2y ago
  I can't believe Cloudfront is priced anywhere close to cost to AWS. They must have huge margins.

BadHumans 2y ago

The article says Cloudflare has tried to geoblock just certain IPs in Italy but what if Cloudflare tells Italy to stuff it and just withdraws from providing services to the country entirely?

rad_gruchalski 2y ago
[flagged]
- brightball 2y ago
  What happened there?
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    A Brazilian judge named Alexandre de Moraes was going on a power trip, banning content and even people outright from social media. He issued unilateral orders to Twitter/X to perform this state censorship. Twitter/X refused, even though they comply with such orders elsewhere, because the orders were unconstitutional per Brazil’s own constitution. They also went public with the orders despite gag orders from this judge to keep the censorship secret. News outlets like the NYT have labeled de Moraes as a threat to democracy (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/world/americas/brazil-alexandre-de-moraes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/world/americas/brazil-ale...), for his long standing crusade against various activists, journalists, and politicians. The judge the issued orders to arrest Twitter’s lawyers in Brazil or something like that, which seemed very aggresive. So this turned into an international fiasco. The judge eventually ordered Brazil’s ISPs to block Twitter/X. That ban lasted for a little bit and then for some unknown reasons (maybe conversations between Twitter/X and the judge?) Twitter/X access was restored but some partial amount (?) of censorship was performed. Along the way Twitter/X also launched an account detailing the kind of censorship that had been forced on them in secret, along with comparisons against Brazilian law (https://x.com/AlexandreFiles/status/1829979981130416479 https://x.com/AlexandreFiles/status/1829979981130416479).
- placardloop 2y ago

jmclnx 2y ago

No surprise with this, I wonder how long before this type of blocking is applied to all sites. That is what happens when large sites depend upon large companies like cloudflare. Already some sites are blocking people that use VPNs, I could also see this expanding as time goes on.

someothherguyy 2y ago
It is commonplace to block a VPN address block if you are experiencing tenacious malicious traffic. Its a consequence of sharing address space with bad actors, not something a service would likely be pursuing without cause.

shlomo_z 2y ago

While I do not support piracy, I am worried that the internet will get less and less free as tactics like this become more common.

Reventlov 2y ago
Step 1: Don't use CloudFlare MITM as a service Step 2: Don't get blocked because you're not a streaming pirate service Really, I see no downside to this court decision.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
On the other hand, where do you draw the line with regards to lawbreaking?
- adolph 2y ago
  Do electrons on a wire or photons on glass break laws?
  - gruez 2y ago
    This analogy is absurd. Steel and rubber can't break laws either, but police regularly seize guns and vehicles used for committing crimes. Most developed countries also have some sort of sanctions regime that bars its citizens from transacting with certain entities. In most cases such sanctions don't even require a court order, the executive branch can usually unilaterally add entities to sanction lists.
    - nepthar 2y ago
      Your counter analogy is also a bit cherry picked. Guns and vehicles used for committing crimes are seized, but the vehicle makers and gunsmiths are not ordered to go substantially out of their way to prevent criminals from using them, although they do stamp serial numbers. Also, ore and parts suppliers are not required to ensure that the buyers of their material comply with all legalities with the use of their materials. There’s a line of absurdity that this crosses

cutler 2y ago

Trouble is this could easily lead to CDN, IP and proxy manipulation by state actors for repressive ends.

ollybee 2y ago

I wonder how it works that they are banned from "routing internet traffic to IP addresses of all services present on the “Piracy Shield”. With a naive approach anyone who controlled the DNS records for a site present on the privacy shield could cause some serious mischief.

thrw42A8N 2y ago
They really should make full use of that rule.

zb3 2y ago

Let's block all Italy and see how fast they backtrack :)

drdaeman 2y ago
Sanctions like this only works if 1) the people (en masse) are not against those bans, but don't feel strongly in favor of them either; and 2) the politicians genuinely represent the will of the people and react to their demands. There could be more conditions that I'm missing here, but I can think only of those two. If that's correct, it may work. But if that's not the case - it only makes things worse.
- zb3 2y ago
  Assume people are against these bans - just like against banning stuff in the EU. I'm one of those. So what did the EU achieve? I still access unavailable services via TOR/VPN, these laws still don't protect me and US companies are still not liable. Laws only work if you have enough power to enforce them.
  - drdaeman 2y ago
    > Assume people are against these bans Yes, that's what I suspect. And that's why blocking even more online resources is not a working approach. It just won't have any positive effect. > So what did the EU achieve? Well, my guess would be weakening of their political institutions. Passing laws that aren't supported by large swathes of the population, and that won't be consistently enforced is a battle-tested recipe component for undermining a democracy.

1oooqooq 2y ago

[flagged]

freedomben 2y ago
"the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a risky strategy, especially when that friend is the state backed up by massive corporation(s). They don't share your principles, and if you think they'll be satisfied with this and will never go after torrent sites and the like, I think you're sorely mistaken.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  it's not even that deep. you only think it's related because the inflammatory wording used in the article to try to make it about content freedom. this is about a very openly obvious crime that harms the good pirate community just the same.

dilyevsky 2y ago

The insanity of spain’s anti pirate laws continues to elevate every year. It’s puzzling to me what makes it so different even from other European countries

ignoramous 2y ago
> The insanity of spain’s anti pirate laws ... Unsure about the state of affairs in Iberia, but the TFA is about Italia.
- dilyevsky 2y ago
  Doh, for some reason i read Spain. Guess Italy is catching up there
  - sureIy 2y ago
    Italy has been at it for a long while. They've been able to block access to illegal websites for a very long while, like since 2006.
- iosonofuturista 2y ago
  Besides, there is more than one country in Iberia
  - aftbit 2y ago
    Huh, including a little bit of France, TIL.
    - bmacho 2y ago
      The current political configuration of the Iberian Peninsula comprises the bulk of Portugal and Spain, the whole landlocked microstate of Andorra, a small part of the French department of Pyrénées-Orientales (French Cerdagne), and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_Peninsula#Political_divisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_Peninsula#Political_di...

parhamn 2y ago

The conversation seems centered on Cloudflare and the broader piracy issue. The more interesting thing to me is that sports are in desperate need of their spotify/netflix moment. My current best guess is that this isn't possible because of existing longer term contracts they've had in place. Currently streameast and such have the best UI for watching sports games and it's not even close. Casual/nascent fans don't want to pay $100 a month for announcer-less access to sideline camera feeds. I don't want to look up where every game is streaming that week. I don't want a membership to peacock or whatever to see this one game I'm sorta interested in. No I don't have cable anymore either. I don't care to understand how "blackouts" work. It goes on an on. It seems maliciously bad. And their numbers are showing it. From Gen Z's low adoption rates, to lower rates of onboarding new fans and broadly reduced viewership in some sports like the NBA. I don't know a single person who pirates music these days.

badlibrarian 2y ago
Watching every NFL game costs around $2,500 and requires six logins. And other leagues are going to follow this model. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/want-to-watch-every-nfl-game-this-season-its-going-to-cost-you-nearly-2-500-31c4d300 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/want-to-watch-every-nfl-ga...
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  I'm not sure we should expect other leagues to follow suit. Unlike other leagues, the NFL is intentionally trying to make it difficult to watch their games to protect ticket sales. It probably doesn't make sense as a strategy for less popular sports that need to get people interested in the first place.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - badlibrarian 2y ago
    Not sure I follow. The local NFL team's game is on free TV, over the air. People pay or resort to piracy to watch the better game that's four states away. You have to subscribe to see one-off games in England, or subscribe to Netflix to watch the games on Christmas Day.

pieresqi 2y ago

[dead]