Italy likes China methods
Just a quick note to inform the outer space that we seem to have happily joined China in web censorship matters.
Since now Italy was meant to block only pedo-porn sites or heavily offending stuff. By some day though, we are suddenly not able to access anymore thepiratebay.org.
This is what italians will find now at thepiratebay.org
As a non bit-torrent user (I can’t seem to be able to even download ubuntu iso images with that) I am not touched personally. Anyway this raises a big number of concerns to me, because it sets a precedent.
A workaround seems to switch to OpenDNS, which I didn’t do it myself and likely won’t do anytime soon.
As a reaction the bay people changed IP and made it reachable via a new domain name, labaia.org, which is blocked either now.
They wrote their take on italian blocking on their blog:
This time it’s Italy. They suffer from a really bad background as one of the IFPIs was formed in Italy during the fascist years and now they have a fascist leader in the country, Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi is also the most powerful person in Italian media owning a lot of companies that compete with The Pirate Bay and he would like to stay that way - so one of his lackeys, Giancarlo Mancusi, ordered a shutdown of our domain name and IP in Italy to make it hard to not support Berlusconis empire.
You can read the full post here. If you’re italian you can read it here. You can digg the story here.
