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Ask HN: My website has been blocked in all of Italy. Is there anything I can do?

4 points by Fornax96 ↗ HN
About two weeks ago I started receiving messages from my paying customers that my cloud storage site (pixeldrain.com) had become unavailable in Italy. The blocking seems to happen at DNS level. Switching to Cloudflare, Quad9 or Google DNS solves the issue. But anyone who is using their ISP's DNS servers is not able to reach the site.

I have been trying to contact Italian ISPs to ask what's going on but all my messages are ignored. I have not received one answer in more than a week time. I have never gotten any e-mails from Italian authorities indicating that I'm doing anything wrong.

I'm not sure where to go from here. Any suggestions?

4 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 21.5 ms ] thread
nness
I would guess that someone was hosting illegal content (likely piracy), a right's holder won an injunction, and the ISP's were told to blanket-ban the domain or IP.

Not sure there is a way you can check the courts?

Fornax96
Piracy is a bit of a problem on pixeldrain, but I am fighting it. I have automated DMCA processing and am banning infringing users.

I'm not able to find any court cases. I'm not sure where to look either though.

mattl
> The abuse mailbox relies on e-mail forwarding to work. The mail is first processed by the pixeldrain server and then forwarded to my mailbox. If your sending e-mail server has an SPF policy which restricts forwarding your message will not arrive in my inbox.

Seems like you might have been sent an email but you've made it harder to receive those emails.

Fornax96
Oh, I actually fixed that issue a few months ago. I just haven't updated the site yet.