Month: January 2025

Microsoft Teams bietet vielfältige Optionen für Teamarbeit und Projektmanagement. Zwei Online-Workshops vermitteln, wie sich Teams gezielt für effiziente Zusammenarbeit und erfolgreiche Projektverwaltung nutzen lässt. (Golem Karrierewelt, Microsoft)

Wie wäre es mit Half-Life 3 über die Feiertage? Es gibt offenbar schon Menschen, die als Gordon Freeman eine Vorabversion testen konnten. (Half-Life 3, Half-Life)

Ever since the existence of online piracy first hit the mainstream, the phenomenon has been described using words such as massive or vast.

Setting the bar so high means that as far as basic descriptions go, the last quarter-century has always had a huge piracy problem. Only when focusing on a relatively small aspect of the piracy market and then pausing to look up, does the true scale come into focus.

When Italy officially launched its Piracy Shield platform on February 1, 2024, the stated aim was to eliminate IPTV piracy on home turf. Almost literally, it transpires, since the majority of all blocking in 2024 has been carried out by broadcasters such as DAZN and Sky, to protect top-tier football league Serie A.

Controversies litter the past eleven months. Cloudflare and Google were both wrongfully targeted as enthusiasm to prevent piracy took precedence over the interests of internet users, and previously promised transparency gave way to almost complete unaccountability. What can or will be done to prevent further overblocking in 2025 remains to be seen but, thankfully, we can offer a little more transparency right now.

Piracy Shield: The State of Blocking 2024

Telecoms regulator AGCOM has just released its 2024 annual report (pdf) and at 200-pages long it’s a hefty read. In respect of Piracy Shield it offers little enlightenment. The report states that from February 1 to May 26, 2024, rightsholders requested and obtained 13 precautionary measures in respect of the illicit transmission of live sports.

In the same period, 18,879 fully qualified domain names (FQDN) and 4,006 IP addresses were blocked by Piracy Shield.

Data provided to TorrentFreak by an anonymous source is more comprehensive. The data claims to include all IP addresses blocked by the system until just a few days ago, more than 6,900 in total.

The number of fully qualified domain names, meaning domain names and all subdomains where they exist, is significantly larger, almost 17,500.

Piracy Shield: IP Addresses Blocked (reported locations per ipinfo.io)

Using geo-location tools provided by ipinfo.io, it’s immediately apparent that servers located in Europe itself account for the majority of IP addresses blocked by Piracy Shield. How many of these locations indicate an originating source of pirated streams is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s clear that it’s relatively uncommon for distant IP addresses to service Italy directly.

Reasons for that include a preference for local datacenters based on performance, onward distribution of streams for use by local suppliers, and in theory a reduced risk of IP addresses ending up on Italy’s blocklist and others elsewhere in Europe. Success in that respect seems patchy.

Europe and Other Regions Closer to Home

Moving more closely towards Italy reveals that IP addresses have been blocked in almost all countries in Europe, with notable absentees Denmark, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Greece.

With some of their name labels almost completely obscured by location markers, Italy’s northern neighbors appear to be among those causing the country the biggest headaches.

Piracy Shield: Closer to Home

The focus box shows that 196 IP addresses have been blocked in Italy itself. This is interesting for a number of reasons. In general, most countries limit their blocking to overseas services/locations because in theory, blocking is a last resort, useful when pirate services are beyond the jurisdiction of national police and the courts. With virtually no restrictions on which IP addresses are placed on Italy’s blacklist, nothing is a surprise.

The Badlands of Western Europe

While 196 IP addresses is normally quite a lot, for Piracy Shield that isn’t a particularly large number. When compared to other European countries with coastlines on the North Sea, it fades into insignificance.

Piracy Shield: Northern Neighbors

Considering that the Netherlands, Germany, and France all have established domestic site-blocking programs, it’s notable that these countries appear to be among the major exporters of pirate streams. That being said, the Netherlands appearing at the top of the list isn’t a surprise. In general online piracy terms, not much has changed in 20 years, except for the method used to deliver the content.

At the heart of Europe, Germany in second place isn’t a major shock either. However, given attitudes to copyright elsewhere in the EU, other locations might be a more logical, if not less practical choice, with the same applying to France. Romania’s position seems about right; the country has always had great internet, is known to be favored by some suppliers, with rightsholders still complaining about enforcement options in the background.

Given the volume of entities in the list and the shifting nature of domain names, more time is needed to process those, so we’ll return to this topic very soon.

In the meantime, the top 10 countries blocked by Piracy Shield worldwide in 2024 (IP addresses only)

Piracy Shield: Top 10 Blocked Countries 2024 (by IP address only)

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

Apple hat mit dem Budget-Smartphone iPhone SE offenbar einiges vor: Es soll wohl stärker in das aktuelle Portfolio eingebunden werden. (iPhone SE, Smartphone)

Intel ist der große Verlierer im Nasdaq. Das Unternehmen mit dem stärksten Plus im Jahr 2024 dürfte dagegen kaum jemand kennen. (Nasdaq, Intel)

Feinheiten in Gesichtern und mehr: Rockstar Games hat eine neue Version des altbekannten GTA-6-Trailers veröffentlicht. (GTA 6, Rockstar)

Immer mehr LLMs lassen sich auch auf Rechnern ohne Cloud-Anbindung nutzen, so dass dabei der Datenschutz nicht auf der Strecke bleibt. Eine Anleitung von Erik Bärwaldt (Chatbots, KI)

Mit aus Küchengeräten gebastelten Weltraumanzügen und wenig Budget wurde Dark Star zum Kultfilm, der Science-Fiction von Star Wars bis Alien geprägt hat. Von Mathias Küfner (Science-Fiction, Star Wars)