The anti-piracy system set up in this European country is supposed to prevent the illegal streaming of sports matches. Within hours, it made many unrelated sites inaccessible.
In the never-ending war between rights holders and pirates, battles over illegal broadcast of sports matches are particularly violent. In Europe, this type of streaming has exploded in 2022, forcing stakeholders such as the English Premier League to show firmness. If each entity in charge of a sporting competition can always submit requests to block this or that pirate site, one country has decided to create a a new kind of automated platform.
Announced as capable of end illegal streaming of football matches, it is being implemented in Italy in August 2023, but is of absolutely no use. The fault is too hasty a start. Finally, the Piracy Shieldor anti-piracy shield, is put in place at the beginning of 2024.
The idea is that a rights holder submits an IP address to be blocked. If the request is not canceled within 60 seconds, it is sent to theAGCOM, the Italian Communications Regulatory Authority, where an automatic process validates it or not. After acceptance, orders are sent to internet service providersof DNSofsite hostingof cloud… Everyone must block the associated siteand even services like Google must deindex its contents.
This country’s illegal sports streaming system blocks thousands of unrelated legitimate sites
After a short test phase, the system is fully deployed. The first weeks, everything went well and the government was pleased with the success of the service. But the slippage, inevitable according to many experts, occurs when a blocking request concerns the IP address 188.114.97.7 managed by Cloudflare. The problem is thatit is shared by 42,243,794 sites. We suspect that the vast majority have nothing to do with the illegal streaming of football matches.
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Result: at least half of Italian personal sites become inaccessible. And individuals are not the only ones affected. The web page of a telecom companythat of a Charity association and those of several schools of the country bear the brunt of the anti-piracy shield. Around 5 hours later, the incriminated request disappeared from the platform according to sources. So much the better for sites that are unfairly blocked, but this corrective maneuver would not be legal.
One of the affected people asked AGCOM information regarding the incidentas well as resignation of its president “for gross negligence in the implementation of the Piracy Shield project“. The institution did not comment at the time of publishing this article.
Source: TorrentFreak