That might help.

Creator of pixeldrain here. Italy has been doing this for a very long time. They never notified me of any such material being present on my site. I have a lot of measures in place to prevent the spread of CSAM. I have sent dozens of mails to Polizia Postale and even tried calling them a few times, but they never respond. My mails go unanswered and they just hang up the phone.

Have you tried Europol?

Not yet. I also thought about reaching out to the embassy, but have not had the time for it yet.

As far as I know, Europol can route your report to appropriate local authority.

Thanks, I'll give them a call tomorrow. The website only lists a dutch phone number, which is convenient, I'm dutch as well.

Creator of pixeldrain here. I have no idea why my site is blocked in Spain, but it's a long running issue.

I actually never discovered who was responsible for the blockade, until I read this comment. I'm going to look into Allot and send them an email.

EDIT: Also, your DNS provider is censoring (and probably monitoring) your internet traffic. I would switch to a different provider.

> EDIT: Also, your DNS provider is censoring (and probably monitoring) your internet traffic. I would switch to a different provider.

Yeah, that was via my ISPs DNS resolver (Vodafone), switching the resolver works :)

The responsible party is ultimately our government who've decided it's legal to block a wide range of servers and websites because some people like to watch illegal football streams. I think Allot is just the provider of the technology.

My site has nothing to do with football though. And Allot seems to be running the DNS server that your ISP uses so they are directly responsible for the block.

The Spanish courts have allowed la Liga to completely ban every website served by cloudflare during days where there are matches. All Spanish ISPs have to do dns blocking to comply.

La Liga (the football company) likes to send out takedown notices to anyone who may host anything that looks like a football to protect their precious games, no matter the collateral damage or the lack of any requirements to show damage. They have the right to block anything in Spain at their discretion either by DNS or IP. They do seem to work in good faith if you talk to them, though, and if you can either remove sites or content when they ask.

Could it be that some site in your network neighborhood was illegally streaming soccer matches?

I have my own dedicated IP range. And they specifically blocked my domain name, not the addresses. I don't know what the reason is. I have been trying to find out since the start of this year.

It is technically possible, and there is a proposal to standardize it, but it has been in draft state for nearly 10 years https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

Neat, my personal site pixeldrain.com is in there

The "refuses ro remove it" part is not even necessary. I run a large cloud storage site, and like all cloud storage it sees some abuse. I have set up a few processes to detect and remove child abuse content.

At some point the Police in Italy found some abusive content on my site. They did not inform me, they did not report the files. Instead they just blocked the whole site with a large pedophilia warning.

I have been trying to get in contact with the Italian police for months, but there is no working email address on any of the sites, and the people on the phone only speak Italian. It's a pretty hopeless situation.

Energy consumption is directly correlated to heat production. The capacity of a datacenter is basically its capacity to keep servers cool. That's why datacenter capacity is measured in watts.

I should not have posted this hours before new year's eve

Who says the US isn't controlling the narrative on US social media?

Half of US social media (and more than half of Twitter) is saying US controls the narrative on US social media and something should be done about it. describe logical knots required to explain why that is the narrative if US controls the narrative?

As a Russian people from the West saying how it's total censorship and totalitarianism amuse me.

And I see how totalitarian and censored regimes are using of the lack of censorship with great success.

Sure are alot of people insinuating they are

So, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this announcement has extremely suspicious timing.

You see, I host a cloud storage service on Hetzner. I have 12 PETABYTES of user data stored there. The data is spread over 120 of their SX type storage servers. Last week Hetzner sent me an email saying they were closing my account for an unknown reason. I have repeatedly been asking about the reason of this sudden closure, but they won't tell me. Meanwhile I have a huge problem, because I need to move 12 PB to a different hosting provider, and they only gave me until the end of November. That's an almost impossible deadline for setting up such a large storage cluster. Especially considering that Hetzner's 1 Gbps port speed makes it impossible to transfer the data in less than three weeks.

Don't trust Hetzner, guys. They screwed me over real bad here, and it seems like they will be taking the hardware that I have been renting there for 10 years for themselves now. This is incredibly scummy behaviour.

> extremely suspicious timing.

I've been wondering for well over a decade why Hetzner didn't get its ass in gear and start offering AWS-like services. Instead all they've offered for years is remote control of VMs. Even now, this new S3 offering is very little, very late -- 18 years after Amazon first offered it and took off like a rocket.

The only odd thing about the timing here is what was keeping them.

> I've been wondering for well over a decade why Hetzner didn't get its ass in gear and start offering AWS-like services.

Because unlike the hyperscalers, they are not natively a software company but a sysadmin company.

> Last week Hetzner sent me an email saying they were closing my account for an unknown reason.

Frankly, your service looks a bit suspicious (free and cheap file sharing). You seem to be aware of the potential for abuse - your DMCA/abuse page even says there are a "large number of abuse reports pixeldrain receives every day".

It sucks that Hetzner is closing your account. But, they are known to be pretty conservative and your users have almost certainly violated their T&C many times even if you are making a good faith effort to prevent and respond to abuse.

I have not used Hetzner to serve user facing traffic for many years. Users never connect directly to the storage servers, it's all going through custom caching nodes hosted by a different provider. That shields the hetzner servers from all abuse and also reduces traffic by about 75%. There is no risk for hetzner here.

I concede that my service has been abused a lot. I am working very hard to clean up my act. I have been implementing better content moderation, content scanning and streamlining my dmca handling process. If hetzner has a problem with any of that they should have just contacted me instead of pulling the plug like this. Very unreliable company.

You must have done something really wrong if they don’t even want to resolve this with you. Normally, you would receive an abuse notice from them — we did many times with one of the services I worked on. I guess your service is somehow connected to other Hetzner servers (not storage), or you are somehow leaking Hetzner IPs. Your servers were probably used to host CSAM or similar content, which is likely why they don’t want to communicate with you. Someone must have reported this to them.

Maybe his servers were causing paranormal activities in the Hetzner office. Probably, right

I suspect that what is happening here is that Hetzner received a lot of orders for storage node snapshots and/or evidence preservation from law enforcement (you probably won’t even be notified).

So you're paying them between €15,000 (€124 * 120 servers, hetzners cheapest sx server) and over €30,000 per month, and you really believe they sit in their little office trying to find servers of already paying customers, just to snatch them and host their own S3 service? This doesn't sound like a conspiracy theory to me; it sounds more like a serious case of megalomania.

That they don't communicate well with you really sucks, and I will read your blog post. But please stay on the sane side of reasoning.

My monthly Hetzner bill is around €15000. I have been a customer at Hetzner for nearly 10 years. In the beginning I served traffic directly from Hetzner servers, but 4 years ago I switched to a caching system hosted at a different provider. Since then I have not received any copyright claims through Hetzner.

I can't think of a reason to cancel my account except that they want to free up resources for their own storage service. I am using a lot of disks and bandwidth. They might have been looking for a reason to kick me out and the launch of their own storage service could have been the final straw.

Keep in mind that the account cancellation mail arrived almost exactly one week before this announcement. They are keeping their lips tight about the reason of my account cancellation so I can only speculate.

Have you tried calling them? Could it be linked to pixeldrain and some illegal files which were uploaded and they simply don't want to take the risk?

I'm currently on vacation with bad cell reception. I tried calling but it didn't come through. Will try again when I get back.

Hetzner does not host user facing servers for me. It's all behind caching nodes which are hosted by a different company. Hetzner would not know what is hosted on pixeldrain.

Hope you get it sorted and would be interested in a follow up. Double check your contract regarding cancelation periods and maybe get a lawyer if nothing else works to get an extension on your period.

>Hetzner's 1 Gbps port speed makes it impossible to transfer the data in less than three weeks

But don't you have that spread over 120 servers?

Each server has a 1 Gbps connection. Some servers are storing more than average, some have 160 TB. That's already 2 weeks at full line rate. But I also need to keep serving user traffic. I can't take the site offline for a month for a data migration, that would completely kill my business.

I'm guessing you're banned because you have such amounts of data/servers and push a substantial amount of bandwidth under the free "1gbps" card for each (even if the cache layer handles most requests directly)

perharps if you moved all servers to 10G and payed for the egress over 20Tb they would reconsider your account?

They still unreliable pulling stuff like this but difficult to find these hardware options off the shelf, ready for order, at this rpice

> perharps if you moved all servers to 10G and payed for the egress over 20Tb they would reconsider your account?

I considered that and even suggested it to them, but they ignore all my remarks and keep repeating that I have two months to leave.

That's terrible. Please consider documenting everything and blogging about this later on.

I will, and when it's done it will definitely appear on this forum. But in the meantime I have to focus on cleaning this mess up.

Thanks for the warning, was just about to start moving there.

As someone who has used Hetzner in one form or another for close to two decades, I frankly find this behaviour shocking.

Besides the normal support channels, try reaching out on their subreddit and also post in the customer forum - to make this more public.

If they don't want your business, fine. But giving you only a couple of weeks to move 12 PB is unreasonable.

Holy shit, you wrote pixeldrain? FYI (and I’m sure you’re very much aware), every single time I’ve come across your site, it’s always been via DDL/warez sites. I feel like you’re in a tough spot with this but I wish you all the best! I would love to read any write ups if you’ve published any!