Daily Archives: March 20, 2024

Italy’s Piracy Shield Blocks Innocent Web Sites, Makes It Hard For Them To Appeal so ISPs are ignoring the law because it’s stupid

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Italy’s newly-installed Piracy Shield system, put in place by the country’s national telecoms regulator, Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (Authority for Communications Guarantees, AGCOM), is already failing in significant ways. One issue became evident in February, when the VPN provider AirVPN announced that it would no longer accept users resident in Italy because of the “burdensome” requirements of the new system. Shortly afterwards, TorrentFreak published a story about the system crashing under the weight of requests to block just a few hundred IP addresses. Since there are now around two billion copyright claims being made every year against YouTube material, it’s unlikely that Piracy Shield will be able to cope once takedown requests start ramping up, as they surely will.

That’s a future problem, but something that has already been encountered concerns one of the world’s largest and most important content delivery networks (CDN), Cloudflare. CDNs have a key function in the Internet’s ecology. They host and deliver digital material to users around the globe, using their large-scale infrastructure to provide this quickly and efficiently on behalf of Web site owners. Blocking CDN addresses is reckless: it risks affecting thousands or even millions of sites, and compromises some of the basic plumbing of the Internet. And yet according to a post on TorrentFreak, that is precisely what Piracy Shield has now done:

Around 16:13 on Saturday [24 February], an IP address within Cloudflare’s AS13335, which currently accounts for 42,243,794 domains according to IPInfo, was targeted for blocking [by Piracy Shield]. Ownership of IP address 188.114.97.7 can be linked to Cloudflare in a few seconds, and doubled checked in a few seconds more.

The service that rightsholders wanted to block was not the IP address’s sole user. There’s a significant chance of that being the case whenever Cloudflare IPs enter the equation; blocking this IP always risked taking out the target plus all other sites using it.

The TorrentFreak article lists a few of the evidently innocent sites that were indeed blocked by Piracy Shield, and notes:

Around five hours after the blockade was put in place, reports suggest that the order compelling ISPs to block Cloudflare simply vanished from the Piracy Shield system. Details are thin, but there is strong opinion that the deletion may represent a violation of the rules, if not the law.

That lack of transparency about what appears to be a major overblocking is part of a larger problem, which affects those who are wrongfully cut off. As TorrentFreak writes, AGCOM’s “rigorous complaint procedure” for Piracy Shield “effectively doesn’t exist”:

information about blocks that should be published to facilitate correction of blunders, is not being published, also in violation of the regulations.

That matters, because appeals against Piracy Shield’s blocks can only be made within five working days of their publication. As a result, the lack of information about erroneous blocks makes it almost impossible for those affected to appeal in time:

That raises the prospect of a blocked innocent third party having to a) proactively discover that their connectivity has been limited b) isolate the problem to Italy c) discover the existence of AGCOM d) learn Italian and e) find the blocking order relating to them.

No wonder, then that:

some ISPs, having seen the mess, have decided to unblock some IP addresses without permission from those who initiated the mess, thus contravening the rules themselves.

In other words, not only is the Piracy Shield system wrongly blocking innocent sites, and making it hard for them to appeal against such blocks, but its inability to follow the law correctly is causing ISPs to ignore its rulings, rendering the system pointless.

This combination of incompetence and ineffectiveness brings to mind an earlier failed attempt to stop people sharing unauthorized copies. It’s still early days, but there are already indications that Italy’s Piracy Shield could well turn out to be a copyright fiasco on the same level as France’s Hadopi system, discussed in detail in Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free).

Source: Italy’s Piracy Shield Blocks Innocent Web Sites And Makes It Hard For Them To Appeal | Techdirt

Our Brains Are in Trouble: Nearly Half the World Living with Neurological Illness

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[…]According to the authors of this new paper, published this month in The Lancet Neurology, there hasn’t yet been a full accounting of all the illnesses tied to our brain and nervous system, such as neurodevelopmental disorders. For this study, scientists looked at 37 unique conditions in total, including migraines, seizures, various forms of dementia, and more.

As of 2021, the study authors found, about 3.4 billion people (43% of the world’s population) are living with at least one of these neurological conditions. Compared to other broad groups of illness, such as infectious diseases, these conditions are estimated to be the leading cause of ill health and disability. This burden isn’t felt equally, however, with about 80% of neurological deaths and illnesses experienced in low- to middle-income countries. Some of the top 10 major contributors to the loss of healthy years include stroke, neonatal encephalopathy, migraine, dementia, and diabetic neuropathy (nerve damage caused by advanced diabetes).

[…]

Between 1990 and 2021, the study found, the rate of people living with or dying from neurological conditions has decreased, after adjusting for age—meaning that the chance of developing any one of these problems has shrunk over time. But since the global population has continued to grow, the absolute number of lost healthy years has increased 18% since then. And while the neurological harm caused by some conditions like stroke, rabies, and meningitis has decreased, the harm from others has increased, with cases of diabetic neuropathy having tripled over the past 30 years.

Though there has been some success in reducing or preventing important risk factors tied to neurological illness since 1990, such as greater vaccination coverage for certain diseases like tetanus, the authors say more can and should be done. Actions like reducing air pollution or preventing high blood pressure could substantially reduce the burden of stroke, for instance, while further eliminating lead exposure would prevent many cases of intellectual disability.

[…]

Source: Our Brains Are in Trouble: Nearly Half the World Living with Neurological Illness

Commercial Bank of Ethiopia glitch lets customers withdraw millions

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Ethiopia’s biggest commercial bank is scrambling to recoup large sums of money withdrawn by customers after a “systems glitch”.

The customers discovered early on Saturday that they could take out more cash than they had in their accounts at the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE).

More than $40m (£31m) was withdrawn or transferred to other banks, local media reported.

It took several hours for the institution to freeze transactions.

Much of the money was withdrawn from state-owned CBE by students, bank president Abe Sano told journalists on Monday.

News of the glitch spread across universities largely via messaging apps and phone calls.

Long lines formed at campus ATMs, with a student in western Ethiopia telling BBC Amharic people were withdrawing money until police officers arrived on campus to stop them.

[…]

Ethiopia’s central bank, which serves as the financial sector’s governing body, released a statement on Sunday saying “a glitch” had occurred during “maintenance and inspection activities”.

The statement, however, focused on the interrupted service that occurred after CBE froze all transactions. It did not mention the money withdrawn by customers.

Mr Sano did not say exactly how much money was withdrawn during Saturday’s incident, but said the loss incurred was small when compared to the bank’s total assets.

He stated that CBE was not hit by a cyber-attack and that customers should not be worried as their personal accounts were intact.

At least three universities have released statements advising students to return any money not belonging to them that they may have taken from CBE.

Anyone returning money will not be charged with a criminal offence, Mr Sano said.

But it’s not clear how successful the bank’s attempts to recoup their money has been so far.

The student from Jimma University said on Monday he had not heard of anyone giving the money back, but said he had seen police vehicles on campus.

[…]

Source: Commercial Bank of Ethiopia glitch lets customers withdraw millions

Google DeepMind’s new AI assistant helps elite soccer coaches get even better

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They might want to add a new AI assistant developed by Google DeepMind to their arsenal. It can suggest tactics for soccer set-pieces that are even better than those created by professional club coaches.

The system, called TacticAI, works by analyzing a dataset of 7,176 corner kicks taken by players for Liverpool FC, one of the biggest soccer clubs in the world.

Corner kicks are awarded to an attacking team when the ball passes over the goal line after touching a player on the defending team. In a sport as free-flowing and unpredictable as soccer, corners—like free kicks and penalties—are rare instances in the game when teams can try out pre-planned plays.

TacticAI uses predictive and generative AI models to convert each corner kick scenario—such as a receiver successfully scoring a goal, or a rival defender intercepting the ball and returning it to their team—into a graph, and the data from each player into a node on the graph, before modeling the interactions between each node. The work was published in Nature Communications today.

Using this data, the model provides recommendations about where to position players during a corner to give them, for example, the best shot at scoring a goal, or the best combination of players to get up front. It can also try to predict the outcomes of a corner, including whether a shot will take place, or which player is most likely to touch the ball first.

[…]

To assess TacticAI’s suggestions, GoogleDeepMind presented them to five football experts: three data scientists, one video analyst, and one coaching assistant, all of whom work at Liverpool FC. Not only did these experts struggle to distinguish’s TacticAI’s suggestions from real game play scenarios, they also favored the system’s strategies over existing tactics 90% of the time.

[…]

TacticAI’s powers of prediction aren’t just limited to corner kicks either—the same method could be easily applied to other set pieces, general play throughout a match, or even other sports entirely, such as American football, hockey, or basketball,

[…]

Source: Google DeepMind’s new AI assistant helps elite soccer coaches get even better | MIT Technology Review

VPN Demand Surges 234.8% After Adult Site Restriction on Texas-Based Users

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VPN demand in Texas skyrocketed by 234.8% on March 15, 2024, after state authorities enacted a law requiring adult sites to verify users’ ages before granting them access to the websites’ content.

Texas’ age verification law was passed in June 2023 and was set to take effect in September of the same year. However, a day before its implementation, a US district judge temporarily blocked enforcement after a lawsuit filed by the Free Speech Coalition (FSC) deemed the policy unconstitutional per the First Amendment.

On March 14, 2024, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit decreed that Texas could proceed with the law’s enactment.

As a sign of protest, Pornhub, the most visited adult site in the US, blocked IP addresses from Texas — the eighth state to suffer such a ban after their respective governments enforced similar restrictions on adult sites.

[…]

Following the law’s enactment, users in Texas seem to be scrambling for means to access the affected adult sites. vpnMentor’s research team analyzed user demand data and found a 234.8% increase in VPN demand in the state.

The graph below shows the VPN demand in Texas from March 1 to March 16.

Past VPN Demand Growths from Adult Site Restrictions

Pornhub has previously blocked IP addresses from Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Utah, Virginia, North Carolina, and Montana — all of which have enforced age-verification laws that the adult site deemed unjust.

In May 2023, Pornhub’s banning of Utah-based users caused a 967% spike in VPN demand in the state. That same year, the passing of adult-site-related age restriction laws in Louisiana and Mississippi led to a 200% and 72% surge in VPN interest, respectively.

Source: VPN Demand Surges Post Adult Site Restriction on Texas-Based Users