• chevron_right

      ‘We’d like to shoot them all’: growing army of wolfdogs raises hackles across Europe

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 06:00

    Experts say the hybrids risk ‘polluting’ the genetic stock, but scientists disagree on how to deal with them. In Piedmont, Italy, the sight of a blond wolfdog signals the risk of another new litter

    • Photographs by Alberto Olivero

    From the moment the rangers first saw him on their trail cameras, the problem was apparent. The wolf, spotted deep in the woods of Italy’s Gran Bosco di Salbertrand park, was not grey like his companion, but an unusual blond. His colouring indicated this was not a wolf at all, but a hybrid wolfdog – the first to be seen so far into Piedmont’s alpine region. And where one hybrid is found, more are sure to follow.

    “We thought he would go away,” says Elisa Ramassa, a park ranger in Gran Bosco who has tracked the local wolves for 25 years. “Unfortunately, he found a female who loves blonds.”

    Elisa Ramassa and fellow ranger Massimo Rosso search for wolf tracks in Gran Bosco di Salbertrand park

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Project to save children from the mafia extended to Sicily and Naples

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 22:14

    Scheme was founded in 2012 to prevent at-risk children being enticed by Italy’s most powerful mafia, the ’Ndrangheta

    A project to save children from Italy’s biggest mafia by removing them from mob families is being extended to organised crime groups in Sicily and Naples, the justice ministry has announced.

    The scheme aims to prevent at-risk children from following their parents into a life of crime, breaking the cycle by which power is passed down the generations through blood ties and family loyalty.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Live ‘Piracy Shield’ Data Exposed By New Platform Reveals Akamai IP Blocking

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · 2 days ago - 14:01 · 4 minutes

    Logo piracy shield After initially denying that Italy’s new Piracy Shield anti-piracy platform had been responsible for any over-blocking, last week telecoms regulator AGCOM conceded that an IP address belonging to Cloudflare had been blocked in error .

    While that might be considered progress of sorts, the incident was downplayed as minor on the basis it was rectified a few hours later. No consolation for the many Cloudflare customers affected, of course, but that particular problem isn’t going away. Cloudflare is encouraging its customers to file complaints to draw attention to the perils of widespread blocking measures.

    Yet despite calls for more transparency, not to mention an obvious need, AGCOM is still not reporting the IP addresses subjected to blocking, instead preferring to report the volume of IP addresses blocked instead. While the latter is not unimportant information, only the former can shine light on cases where IP addresses are blocked in error. Or when IP addresses are blocked despite the legal provision that prohibits blocking when IPs are not exclusively used for piracy.

    New Third-Party Service Imposes Transparency

    Official providers of all types of content have understood for some time that if they don’t meet demand, someone else will do it for them. After calls for transparency appeared to fall on deaf ears, transparency has been imposed on the Piracy Shield system thanks to a new, unofficial third-party system: Piracy Shield Search.

    The most important feature of the service is the ability to enter an IP address or a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) to find out whether they’re on the Piracy Shield system.

    The image below consists of an original blocking order (translated from Italian) issued in response to a blocking application by Sky Italia. To protect Sky’s broadcasting rights for FIM MotoGP World Championship and the Motul FIM Superbike World Championship, the domain http://live.vitocatozzo.eu was added to the Piracy Shield system.

    The response from Piracy Shield Search added by us directly underneath the relevant section in the application confirms that the domain was indeed placed on the blocklist. The response also provides the time the rightsholder or its representative added the ticket to the system, which acts as the instruction for ISPs to go ahead and start blocking.

    Rightsholder Tickets and Top AS By IP Address

    The Piracy Shield Search system shows data relating to currently active blocking, not the total number of requests made or IP addresses/domains blocked to date.

    In the image below we can see that 662 rightsholder tickets are currently live, and together they target 2,849 IPv4 IP addresses, zero IPv6 IP addresses, and 6,601 fully qualified domain names. The panel on the right shows the top AS (autonomous systems) ranked by the total number of IP addresses allocated to the AS that are currently subject to blocking.

    The ticket panel on the left shows that the system deployed in Italy operates similarly to the blocking system operated in the UK.

    Much is made in the media about the requirement to block IP addresses and domains within 30 minutes, possibly to imply that blocking takes place mostly during live matches. However, the two items at the top of the list show that IP addresses and domains are typically added in bulk, long after matches finish or, alternatively, long before they actually start.

    Tickets Reveal More Blocking Blunders

    The people behind Piracy Shield Search have decided to partially redact IP addresses requested for blocking in rightsholder tickets. Since the search facility on the front page responds to requests for specific IP addresses, there’s no need to expose the IP addresses in full here.

    However, since the names of the hosts are displayed in full, it’s possible to determine whether the IP addresses that appear on the left are likely to be operated by CDN companies. More importantly, there may also be enough information to determine whether multiple services potentially share the IP address.

    In a post to X, developer and researcher Matteo Contrini confirms what many people had suspected; Cloudflare isn’t the only major CDN provider whose IP addresses have ended up on the Piracy Shield system.

    “The platform #PiracyShield is blocking 15 Akamai IP addresses! Not only Cloudflare but also the largest CDN in the world…,” Contrini notes.

    The data suggests that transparency is a double-edged sword. Without transparency, there’s no scrutiny, and no specific fuel for criticism. When transparency exists, whether voluntarily or by imposition, scrutiny ensures that criticism can be backed up by data provided by the system itself.

    What transparency offers that opacity never does, however, is a powerful incentive to do better. Whether the addition of these IP addresses is due to blunder after uncorrected blunder isn’t clear, but the alternative is unquestionably much worse.

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

    • chevron_right

      EU nature restoration laws in balance as member states withdraw support

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 3 days ago - 13:41

    Brussels vote was cancelled after it became clear law would not pass final stage with majority vote

    The EU’s nature restoration laws are hanging in the balance after a number of member states, including Hungary and Italy, withdrew support for the legislation.

    Spain’s environment minister, Teresa Ribera, said it would be “enormously irresponsible” for countries to drop the laws, which have been two years in the making and are designed to reverse decades of damage to biodiversity on land and in waterways.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      AGCOM Admits ‘Piracy Shield’ Blunder, Cloudflare Urges Users to Complain

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · 7 days ago - 15:56 · 7 minutes

    Logo piracy shield In a little over a week’s time, Italy’s Piracy Shield system will have been fully operational for two whole months.

    Claims that IPTV piracy would be eliminated almost overnight helped to convince lawmakers that without Piracy Shield and the legislation that underpins it, Italian football could die.

    In reality, the system was never capable of eliminating piracy and football in Italy was never on life support; the big question now is whether it’s performing close to predictions, or even having any effect at all.

    Two Months of Dynamic Blocking

    During a hearing Wednesday to review Piracy Shield’s performance after almost eight weeks in the trenches, AGCOM President Giacomo Lasorella provided data to show participation in the Piracy Shield platform, specifically the number of entities that filed applications and received accreditation.

    Lasorella revealed that 314 requests have been received to date, including five relating to the main users of the platform; broadcasters DAZN, Sky (Comcast) and RTI (Mediaset Group), Serie A, and Serie B. The remaining 309 applications were received from the ISPs required by law to implement blocking instructions issued by Piracy Shield.

    In its first full month of operations, the platform handled blocking instructions related to 11 precautionary measures, all of them issued to protect live sports: football from Serie A and Serie B, UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, and UEFA Europa Conference League, plus Formula 1, MotoGP, Eurocup Basketball, ATP and WTA tennis.

    “In total from February 2 to March 3, 3,127 fully qualified domain names and 2,176 IP addresses were blocked,” Lasorella said, noting that figures are available to show IPs blocked each day.

    “Obviously these blocks mainly appear when there are sporting events; they are definitely encouraging results which we say testify to the incisiveness of AGCOM’s action.”

    The Measure of Success

    Whether the nature of AGCOM’s reporting will change as blocking matures is unknown, but in common with other countries, success in Italy is expressed through the use of blocking data; essentially the number of IP addresses and domains blocked. That’s not entirely unexpected but as a measure of success, it’s almost completely meaningless.

    The true measure of success isn’t the number of IP addresses blocked or domains rendered inaccessible, but the rate at which new customers sign up and/or remain loyal to legal broadcasting services.

    The broadcasters, DAZN and Sky, for example, will already have the data for February, most likely accurate to a single subscriber. Without sight of that all-important data, AGCOM could block the entire internet and those figures would still mean nothing. The unlikely prospect of actually blocking the entire internet took a step closer in February, however.

    AGCOM Addresses Over-Blocking Allegations

    Following a blunder mid-February that saw an IP address belonging to Zenlayer CDN blocked in error , someone with accreditation to input IP addresses on behalf of rightsholders added one belonging to Cloudflare, with predictably disastrous results .

    Those who expected an explanation or perhaps an apology, received something else entirely. During a TV appearance helpfully facilitated by TG24, a channel operated by key Piracy Shield user Sky, AGCOM’s commissioner stated categorically that there had been no blunders. Reports published by journalists at Wired and DDaY were described as “absolutely false” and the whole debacle found itself dismissed as “fake news”.

    During the hearing Wednesday, AGCOM’s president conceded that there had indeed been some “critical operational issues” and even went on to explain what had happened.

    “The problems we encountered essentially concern the need to discriminate the legal contents from the illicit ones that exist on the same platform. That is, there are platforms where there are legitimate sites and illicit sites together, and the law prescribes that the sites must be uniquely dedicated to, let’s say, the illicit contents.”

    Pirates Using Devious Methods? Impossible, surely

    The issue of shared IP addresses and the likelihood of overblocking was repeatedly raised by tech experts in the run-up to the new legislation being passed last year. Assurances that blocking ‘dual use’ IP addresses would be explicitly forbidden in the text, which would be strictly adhered to, eventually led to a prediction that was only 50% accurate.

    According to Lasorella, however, this is a trap being laid by pirates.

    “Subjects addicted to piracy are increasingly using so-called Content Delivery Networks, CDNs. Content Delivery Networks by their nature may not be uniquely intended for activities therefore licit and illicit appear together,” Lasorella said.

    “On the same IP address used for the violation of copyright can exist a perhaps fictitious domain that spreads legitimate content and this evidently prevents this address from being obscured.”

    Or in Cloudflare’s case last month, evidently not.

    Lasorella confirmed that one of the accredited reporters uploaded a ticket to the Piracy Shield platform which contained a Cloudflare IP address. Since legitimate and illegitimate sites shared the same IP, all found themselves blocked. AGCOM’s president said everything was sorted out “in a couple of hours” but from online reports, a minimum of four hours seems closer to events on the ground.

    Potential Showdown With Cloudflare, Google

    While describing events of that Saturday a few weeks ago, Lasorella mentioned that a Cloudflare IP address had been blocked and then took the opportunity to state that Cloudflare is “always more involved in these proceedings” due to its provision of DNS and VPN services “that actually facilitate online copyright violations.”

    Google also received a mention; the company seems prepared to work with AGCOM to deindex pirate sites that appear in reports uploaded to Piracy Shield, but at the moment has not “considered being accredited” to the platform.

    “Google has confirmed its intention not to intervene on its DNS through a local block,” Lasorella said.

    It’s a little early to predict how this situation will play out but after blocking Cloudflare last month, following repeated warnings, even from Cloudflare itself , AGCOM has a side order of “we told you so” to contend with. That’s in advance of a starter being prepared right now.

    In an email sent out to all customers affected by the erroneous blocking last month, Cloudflare is now encouraging users to file an official complaint with AGCOM. The stated aim is to “expand government awareness” of the collateral damage caused by IP blocking in the hope that will prevent overblocking in the future.

    AGCOM already seems fully aware of the risks but, as a completely impartial regulator, must also weigh the interests of football against the interests of everyone else. Its response to these letters may prove informative.

    Blocking of [website redacted] via the Piracy Shield Platform

    On Saturday, February 24, 2024, a Cloudflare IP address was blocked in Italy through the Italian government’s Piracy Shield system. As a result of this action, Internet users in Italy were unable to access tens of thousands of websites. Although the block was removed within hours because of the number of innocent sites affected, we have identified your website as one that appears to have been temporarily blocked.

    The Italian Media Regulator (Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni, AGCOM) provides interested parties, including the managers of websites and pages, the right to lodge a complaint about blocks implemented through the Piracy Shield Program. Cloudflare believes it is important to document the collateral damage caused by IP blocking in order to expand government awareness of the risks of the practice and hopefully prevent future overblocking. If you would like to submit a complaint, you can submit your own complaint to tavoloantipirateria@agcom.it and agcom@cert.agcom.it, as laid out on the AGCOM website.

    To assist you, we have prepared the below template email, in both English and Italian, that may be used to submit your complaint to AGCOM:

    Template email to AGCOM:

    Re: Blocking of [website] via the Piracy Shield platform

    We write to file a complaint regarding the blocking action ordered by the Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (AGCOM) of IP address 188.114.97.7 on Saturday, February 24, which rendered our website [redacted] inaccessible to Internet users in Italy. While we understand that the blocking order under AGCOM’s Piracy Shield was intended to prevent copyright infringement, our website does not infringe copyright and has never been accused of copyright infringement.

    We formally complain about this action and request that AGCOM take immediate steps to prevent any future blocking of our website and other innocent websites.

    Re: Provvedimenti di blocco Piracy Shield / blocco del sito [website redacted]

    Scriviamo per presentare un reclamo in merito al blocco ordinato dall’Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni, sabato 24 febbraio 2024, dell’indirizzo IP 188.114.97.7 24, che ha reso il nostro sito web [redacted] inaccessibile agli utenti Internet in Italia. Pur comprendendo che l’ordine di blocco previsto da “Piracy Shield” di AGCOM era finalizzato a prevenire la violazione del diritto d’autore, segnaliamo che il nostro sito web non viola il diritto d’autore e non è mai stato accusato di simili illeciti.

    Ci doliamo formalmente di questa iniziativa e chiediamo che AGCOM voglia prendere provvedimenti immediati per prevenire qualsiasi futuro blocco del nostro sito e di altri siti web conformi alla legge.

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

    • chevron_right

      Populist parties’ divisions jeopardise chances of setting European agenda

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 7 days ago - 05:00

    Survey shows supporters of nationalist parties hold widely differing views on EU membership, migration and support for Ukraine

    Populist and nationalist parties fighting the European elections in June are deeply divided on almost all key issues, according to a survey, in a finding that questions their chances of defining the bloc’s agenda even in the event of a predicted far-right surge.

    However, the report, by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) , also said pro-EU parties risked mobilising the Eurosceptic vote if they continued to ape hard-right policies rather than coming up with persuasive alternatives.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Piero della Francesca’s Augustinian altarpiece reassembled after 450 years

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 20 March - 14:24

    Eight known components of artwork were housed in five different museums in Europe and the US before being reunited in Milan

    Eight surviving panels of Piero della Francesca’s Augustinian altarpiece have been reassembled after 450 years, possibly solving one of its enduring mysteries.

    The celebrated polyptych was created by the early Italian Renaissance master specifically for the church of the Augustinians at Borgo San Sepolcro (now Sansepolcro) in his home town near Arezzo and comprised 30 panels, the majority of which have gone missing.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Marcello Gandini obituary

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 19 March - 12:10

    Italian car designer whose greatest creations included the Lamborghini Miura, the Maserati Khamsin and the Lancia Stratos

    Marcello Gandini’s cars were made to stop the traffic. The Italian designer, who has died aged 85, created supercars for the super-rich, and such exotic machines as Lamborghini’s Miura and Countach , Alfa Romeo’s Montreal and Maserati’s Khamsin were guaranteed to draw crowds of admirers when parked outside the grand hotels of Monaco, Rome or London.

    As the chief designer of the Bertone company, he also worked at the more modest end of the market, creating the little Autobianchi A112 and the original version of the Volkswagen Polo , and restyling the British Mini for the Italian Innocenti firm. For those wanting a miniature supercar, there was Fiat’s two-seater X1/9 , a striking little wedge with its four-cylinder engine mounted transversely behind the cockpit, mimicking the location of the Miura’s mighty V12.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Bulletproof windows and ‘bunga bunga’: Berlusconi’s palace to be used by world’s press

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Monday, 18 March - 10:57

    Italy’s Foreign Press Association – branded ‘communists’ by late politician – moves into Palazzo Grazioli in Rome

    The first and only time Silvio Berlusconi held a news conference at the Italian Foreign Press Association in Rome was in November 1993. The businessman told journalists he had no desire whatsoever to enter politics, and hoped he would never be forced to.

    But when the correspondents probed further, particularly about his friendship with Gianfranco Fini, the leader of the National Alliance, a descendant of the neofascist Italian Social Movement, he accused them all of being “communists” – the ultimate insult, from those on the right in Italy – against anyone with leftwing leanings.

    Continue reading...