A mistake in domain blocking to prevent copyright infringement caused Google Drive to be unavailable for more than 12 hours



As a countermeasure against copyright infringement, specialized agencies have instructed online service providers to block illegal sites from appearing at the top of search results or to make the sites themselves inaccessible. It was reported that an Italian copyright protection platform mistakenly blocked Google-related domains as a result of taking measures against copyright infringement, making Google Drive inaccessible for more than 12 hours.

Google Drive Blackout in Italy After Another Major Anti-Piracy Blunder * TorrentFreak
https://torrentfreak.com/google-drive-blackout-in-italy-after-another-major-anti-piracy-blunder-241020/



Italy passed a law in December 2023 requiring all ISPs, public DNS servers, and VPN services to participate in a site-blocking scheme called ' Piracy Shield ,' designed to eliminate sites that illegally stream live sports. When rights holders report to Piracy Shield with evidence of how a violation occurred, the IP addresses of illegal sites are blocked within 30 minutes. Site blocking requests are made by rights holders without judicial review.

Some experts have questioned the effectiveness of Piracy Shield, as it lacks proper checks and immediately blocks IP addresses, which is an unbalanced measure. Then, in February 2024, just a few weeks after the official launch of Piracy Shield, domains and IP addresses included in Cloudflare were mistakenly blocked, causing problems such as the inability to access several school sites, telecommunications companies, ticket services, etc.

Giorgio Bonfiglio, technical account manager at Amazon Web Services, has been pointing out the dangers of Piracy Shield from the beginning, and when problems actually occurred, he said, 'When Piracy Shield was on the agenda, I talked about the risks of Piracy Shield, pointing out that 'if multiple content is served from one IP, blocking part of that content is illogical and probably illegal,' 'the IP address of the content source can be changed very easily,' and 'while assigning IPs used to be complicated and expensive, it is now easy to circumvent blocking.' It is impossible for an outside observer to understand the IP address of a site.'



Regarding similar blocking troubles caused by Piracy Shield, Bonfiglio posted on X on October 20, 2024, 'Piracy Shield blocked Google Drive domain.' According to Bonfiglio's post, when accessing a blocked Google domain, a notice from AGCOM , the Italian government agency that regulates the telecommunications industry, was displayed.



TorrentFreak, an online media outlet that covers the topic of copyright infringement, said that the reason Google Drive was blocked was because 'the domain was entered into the Piracy Shield system either accidentally or intentionally and passed all subsequent checks,' pointing out the lameness of the system.

The Google Drive block was reported just after 6 p.m. local time, and by 9 p.m. almost all access was disabled. According to Bonfiglio, as of 7 a.m. the following morning, about 12 hours after the initial block request, 13.5% of users were still affected by the IP address block, and 3% were blocked by DNS.



The trouble occurred from Saturday to Sunday local time, so TorrentFreak said, 'If this disaster had occurred on a weekday, who knows how much damage it would have caused. Also, although access to Google Drive was later restored, the fact that there seems to be no compensation from the Italian government or the Piracy Shield agency for the loss of Google Drive leaves questions about where the responsibility lies.' Bonfiglio criticized, 'In Italy, people were prevented from working and studying for several hours, but they were still able to watch sports games (which Piracy Shield aims to protect). It's clear what the country's priorities are.'

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in Software,   Web Service, Posted by log1e_dh