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Italian Government Goes After Gambling
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-03-01
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Italian ISPs railed against new restrictions on gambling sites put in place by the Italian government. The measures put in place as of February 24th imposes dimming of betting and gambling sites that aren't up-to-date with proper authorizations.
While the issue may not seem significant, it forces Italian ISPs to "act on DNS in order to re-address users to a specifically edited 'landing web page' " according to Zone-H. This could create problems for the ISPs because of the potentially massive log-based user listings.
Fabio Ghioni, a board member at Zone-H published an editorial on March 1, attacking the maneuver and addresses some of potential security problems involved.
He said:
A few hours ago the recently approved measure forcing Italian internet service providers to block unlicensed online gaming websites entered into force.The censoring method recommended by the [Italian] Amministrazione Autonoma Monopoli di Stato - the State Monopoly Agency - is based upon the redirection of queries to unauthorized websites to a dedicated website by using the ISP DNS systems.
In addition to censorship, we could potentially be facing massive log-based user listing. As a matter of fact, the February 7th 2006 much debated measure does not clarify how to technically ban Web sites, while it is extremely explicit on how transforming Italian internet service providers into unwilling co-operators of an act of Internet censorship and user listing.
At the root of this measure, deriving from art. 1 par. 535-538 of the Legge Finanziaria 200 6 - the annual Finance Act - stands the attempt of the Italian Tax Authority to stem the large losses determined by the huge access to foreign gaming websites by Italian gamblers drawn to foreign online sites by lower gambling taxation and, therefore, higher wins.
Out of fairness it must be also be mentioned the underlying intention to safeguard users from a variety of risks and misuses - the fraudulent use of credit cards just to mention one - and other honest motivations… Nonetheless, it is well known that the way to hell is paved with good intentions…
Not very kind words for the new rules. While governments certainly have a need to protect their own businesses and their own citizens from things like cyber fraud, one must question the safety of redirection they'll be using regarding the sites that aren't up to spec. With so many government organizations getting hacked and abused, it seems only a matter of time that someone might get into their systems that shouln't and cause real problems.
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About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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