Piracy Shield blocks Google Drive: the sensational mess of the anti-piracy system

ROMA – The size of the error is truly sensational. And if it had no consequences for the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, it’s only because it happened on a Saturday night. Piracy Shieldthe system that stops the bullshit and takes down sites that illegally broadcast Serie A matches, has blocked Google Drive. In practice, if on Saturday evening workers, students, professionals, doctors, companies had needed to download a document to study or share, well: they wouldn’t have been able to do it.

Piracy Shield blocked Google Drive

Piracy Shiled is a platform that works in a very particular way. In summary: through this platform donated by the Lega Serie A to Agcom, broadcasters report to Agcom the sites that illegally transmit their content. This report is forwarded to the internet providers (to be clear, we are talking about the various Tim, Wind, Vodafone, but also secondary ones) who must quickly (within 30 minutes…) inhibit those addresses. All those reported, without being able to verify (there is a list of addresses that cannot be removed for the security of the country, called a white list). Well, something went wrong in this chain on Saturday evening. Because it was the domain used to download files from Google Drive that was blocked before dinner time.

Piracy Shield, what it is and why it went wrong

Google IP addresses (Google services for Google) on which, for example, YouTube also runs, were also filtered. Which may therefore have had an impact. The data clearly shows how on Saturday evening reports increased exponentially between 7pm and 10.15pm. During that time, the Google Drive system stopped working. It is not the first time that something similar has happened: in the “trawling” of sites that transmit illegally, and which are often identified only by intercepting the most intense traffic data, even domains that have nothing to do with piracy can end up . it has also happened to others: even a cyber security system has seen its services inhibited in recent weeks.

The problems of the anti-pezzotto platform

The problem is that when the “urgent” notification starts with the current system the internet provider has no alternatives. But the list often ends up with domains in which the illegal activity is based, and which is certainly neither the only nor the main activity of that domain. But being on the list is enough to be blocked. We need skimming models. But the system – especially the signalmen – does not have a warning system that could avoid a similar own goal. And until a few weeks ago the platform did not carry out sanity checks: this means that addresses that were not IPs could also end up in the list. The Google Drive case will force the list of untouchable domains to be extended. But maybe that’s not enough at this point.