Month: October 2024

Der Discounter Tchibo Mobil reduziert für kurze Zeit die Gebühr bei zwei Tarifen. Neben Neukunden können Bestandskunden in die Aktionstarife wechseln. (Tchibo, Mobilfunk)

Mit Deep Learning lassen sich präzise Analysen in der Objekterkennung und Bildklassifikation umsetzen. Dieser Intensivworkshop vermittelt die Entwicklung neuronaler Netzwerke für industrielle Anwendungen mit Keras und Python. (Golem Karrierewelt, Python)

Italy has an administrative blocking mechanism and a technical blocking platform, Piracy Shield, operated by rightsholders in the private sector.

Up until now, AGCOM, Italy’s independent telecoms regulator, has been Piracy Shield’s greatest supporter, at least of those not already benefiting financially from the activities of football league Serie A, currently the only beneficiary of Piracy Shield blocking.

To the extent there’s much of a ‘public’ component to Piracy Shield’s activities in Italy, the ‘private’ absolutely dominates. 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. The only people never punished are those operating Piracy Shield, no matter how big the blunder or how many people are affected.

After blocking Cloudflare a few months ago, on Saturday night another vital online service was rendered inaccessible. The nature and circumstances of this event should be a signal for the Italian government to remove rightsholders’ ability to meddle in internet infrastructure before it’s too late. The details make for very uncomfortable reading.

Warnings Pile Up, All Ignored, Again and Again

When reporting on the Cloudflare debacle in February, we included commentary from Giorgio Bonfiglio, Principal Technical Account Manager at Amazon Web Services.

Bonfiglio’s expert advice was ignored before, during, and after last year’s introduction of new law to support blocking, despite predicting the Cloudflare problem before it actually became one. As far as we can determine, Bonfiglio was first to link Google Drive’s outage on Saturday evening with Piracy Shield blocking.

“Piracy Shield blocked a Google Drive domain,” Bonfiglio revealed on X, along with the AGCOM notice displayed on the blocked domain.

The domain/subdomain blocked in the image above is drive.usercontent.google.com; not only does this URL clearly identify Google as its owner, the Google product it serves is on full display too. With no prompting a 10-year-old could identify google.com as important on the internet. So, three broad explanations for how it ended up on the system (ticket below) before causing chaos.

1. Domain was accidentally entered into the system, then evaded all subsequent checks
2. Domain was knowingly entered into the system, then evaded all subsequent checks
3. Domain was knowingly entered into the system, and then passed, regardless of risk

The losing ticket….

For good measure, the relevant Google IP address [142.250.180.129] was also entered into Piracy Shield to be blocked by local ISPs; this image shows how access to that IP degraded unlike an adjacent one.

Those hoping to access Google Drive were subject to domain hijacking instead, with requests diverted to a blocking page hosted at different IP addresses depending on the ISP involved; 195.162.95.240 [Sky] and 34.110.214.49 [TIM], for example.

Blocking in 30 Minutes, Unblocking…whenever

The domain/IP address block began to take effect a little time after 6pm and as the image below shows, three smaller ‘downtime peaks’ were followed by an almost total degradation of service around 9pm. This seems to show that blunders take at least three hours to fix, even a massive one like this. More tellingly, the constant claim of blocking internet resources within 30 mins is at best, very optimistic indeed.

We took a look at Google Trends data for Italy during the same period. The top five queries in Italy all relate to Google Drive (right) and on the left, the topic ‘Google Drive’ dominates by a very wide margin. Nevertheless, the results are sensitive enough to identify AGCOM and piracy as connected to the trending searches.

More data is needed to draw firm conclusions but under both columns, Google Drive competitor ‘One Drive’ gets a mention. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that faced with no access to their files on Google Drive, searching for a replacement would be a logical step. The hidden costs of overblocking are perhaps not quite so hidden here.

Full Unblocking Doesn’t Take 30 mins

A full twelve hours after the block was put in place, around 20% of the Italian population still had no access to their Google Drives due to the lingering IP address block that underpinned the domain-based blocking.

Had this disaster happened on a weekday, who knows the damage it could’ve caused. Luckily it didn’t, and everyone can be grateful for that, but the word ‘luck’ in a sentence to describe an event that should not have happened, period, understates the seriousness of the situation.

Whether there will be explanation of any kind on Monday is currently unknown, but there is no explaining this one away. Explanations for the Cloudflare block began with denial, slowly moved towards claims it was only a tiny, tiny block that didn’t last long, before Cloudflare was blamed for having a customer allegedly pirating football matches.

Drastic Action Required Immediately

Incompetence doesn’t qualify as an excuse, not when a Google domain is part of the equation. So if not incompetence, surely it must’ve been deliberate? Whatever the reason or excuse, the conclusion is the same; this cannot be allowed to continue, and the government must step in before the unthinkable happens.

Since users are about to be fined for piracy, an alternative would be to introduce heavy fines, directly linked to the potential damage to companies, infrastructure or government, plus compensation paid to citizens, for those who overblock.

Let’s say, a population of 59 million in Italy, a conservative 30 million Google users, one euro compensation each, leading to a 30 million euro fine. It won’t stop incompetence, but it should focus the mind during the 30-day ban on any additional blocking or until the fine is paid in full, whichever comes last.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

A hurricane so small that it could not be observed by satellite formed this weekend, surprising meteorologists and even forecasters at the National Hurricane Center.

Hurricane Oscar developed on Saturday near Turks and Caicos, and to the northeast of Cuba, in the extreme southwestern Atlantic Ocean. As of Saturday evening, hurricane-force winds extended just 5 miles (8 km) from the center of the storm.

This is not the smallest tropical cyclone—as defined by sustained winds greater than 39 mph, or 63 kph—as that record remains held by Tropical Storm Marco back in 2008. However, this may possibly be the smallest hurricane in terms of the extent of its hurricane-force winds.

Read full article

Comments

A hurricane so small that it could not be observed by satellite formed this weekend, surprising meteorologists and even forecasters at the National Hurricane Center.

Hurricane Oscar developed on Saturday near Turks and Caicos, and to the northeast of Cuba, in the extreme southwestern Atlantic Ocean. As of Saturday evening, hurricane-force winds extended just 5 miles (8 km) from the center of the storm.

This is not the smallest tropical cyclone—as defined by sustained winds greater than 39 mph, or 63 kph—as that record remains held by Tropical Storm Marco back in 2008. However, this may possibly be the smallest hurricane in terms of the extent of its hurricane-force winds.

Read full article

Comments

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has submitted its latest overview of “Notorious Markets” to the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR).

These submissions serve as input for the USTR’s yearly overview of piracy ‘markets’ which helps to shape the U.S. Government’s global copyright enforcement agenda going forward.

The ESA, which represents video game companies including Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, and Ubisoft, hopes that the interests of its members will be taken into account. In the report, the group lists various pirate sites that enable the public to download games for free.

FitGirl Repacks

The most notable newcomer in ESA’s overview is FitGirl-Repacks. The site, commonly abbreviated as “FitGirl” publishes slimmed down copies of pirated games which are easy to distribute and share. These repacks are in high demand and, as one of the most famous repackers, FitGirl became a brand in and of itself.

At this point, many gamers associate FitGirl’s supposed likeness (image above) with piracy, instead of the film Amélie, from where the image was originally sourced. Yet despite being active for well over a decade, FitGirl-Repacks shows no signs of slowing down.

Admittedly, the site’s domains have been blocked in several countries, including Italy and Spain, but rightsholders have yet to identify the person or people who run the site.

According to ESA, FitGirl continues to serve an audience of millions of visitors today. The site doesn’t host content directly but links to pirated content hosted on third-party platforms.

“In July 2024, fitgirl-repacks received 22 million visits, offering visitors access to ESA member personal computer (‘PC’) game titles. Internationally, this website has been subject to scrutiny for its failure to comply with takedown notices reporting infringing content,” the ESA writes.

More Newcomers

Seeing FitGirl listed as a notorious piracy site comes as no shock; it’s more surprising that it was never mentioned in earlier years. The same can be said about Dodi-Repacks, another new entry on ESA’s list this year.

From ESA’s submission

Dodi-Repacks hasn’t been around as long as FitGirl and the site doesn’t have as much traffic, but ESA notes that it poses a significant threat nonetheless.

“The site operator is non-responsive to ESA take-down notices and runs a backup version of the site at dodi-repacks.download. Both domains utilize a CDN,” ESA informs the USTR.

Other newcomers highlighted by the ESA are cosmocheats.com, a relatively small cheat seller with a few thousand daily visits, and the online marketplace eldorado.gg that sells game accounts and virtual items without permission.

Eldorado.gg

Emerging Threats Disappear

ESA’s list of notorious pirate sites and services includes other familiar targets, such as torrent site 1337x, hosting sites 1fichier.com and megaup.net, as well as other dedicated game pirate services.

Interestingly, the game companies no longer mention last year’s “growing trends”, which included malware and cryptocurrencies. These issues haven’t disappeared overnight but ESA, apparently, doesn’t feel the need to separately focus on these again.

ESA’s mention of Scene release groups and highly skilled hackers also disappeared from the latest USTR submission. However, according to the group, repackers were part of this category, so this mention might have been replaced by the FitGirl and Dodi listings.

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A copy of ESA’s submission for the 2024 Special 301 Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets is available here (pdf). An overview of the (online) threats is listed below. The bold entries are new, and the ones with a strike-through were listed last year, but removed in 2024.

Hyperlinking Websites (“Linking Sites” or “Link Sites”)
– nsw2u.com
– Game3rb.com
– fitgirl-repacks.site
– dodi-repacks.site

Hosting Websites (“Cyberlockers”)
– 1fichier.com
– megaup.net

Torrent Indexing Websites
– 1337x.to
– Solidtorrents.to

Cheats
– unknowncheats.me
– mpgh.net
– cosmocheats.com

Unauthorized Online Marketplaces
– playerauctions.com
– G2G.com
– eldorado.gg

Malware

Cryptocurrency

Scene Release Groups

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Elon Musk verlost täglich 1 Million Dollar an Leute, die seine Petition in Swing-States unterzeichnen. Das soll die Wählerregistrierung für die Republikaner fördern. (Elon Musk, Politik)

Trotz weggefallener Fördermittel des Bundes sieht Rock Tech die geplante Lithiumhydroxid-Raffinerie in Brandenburg nicht in Gefahr. (Lithium, Elektroauto)

Der Drohnenhersteller DJI wehrt sich vor Gericht gegen das US-Verteidigungsministerium, um die Einstufung als chinesisches Militärunternehmen anzufechten. (DJI, Politik)

Amazon führt zum 30. Oktober 2024 eine neue Regelung für die Rücksendung schwerer und sperriger Artikel ein. (Amazon, Wirtschaft)