Google Drive Blackout in Italy
Andy Maxwell (via Hacker News):
After blocking Cloudflare [link] to prevent IPTV piracy just a few months ago, on Saturday the rightsholders behind Piracy Shield ordered Italy's ISPs to block Google Drive. The subsequent nationwide blackout, affecting millions of Italians, wasn't just a hapless IP address blunder.
[…]
The domain/subdomain blocked in the image above is drive.usercontent.google.com; not only does this URL clearly identify Google as its owner, the Google product it serves is on full display too. With no prompting a 10-year-old could identify google.com as important on the internet. So, three broad explanations for how it ended up on the system (ticket below) before causing chaos.
[…]
A full twelve hours after the block was put in place, around 20% of the Italian population still had no access to their Google Drives due to the lingering IP address block that underpinned the domain-based blocking.
This feels very similar to the Indian government constantly blocking and unblocking GitHub’s “raw” content domain.
