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Comment by virtualritz | Hacker News Reader

I just found out that https://annas-archive.li/ is masked by my German internet provider (SIM.de/Drillisch). I usually use a VPN but I had it switched off temp. to watch Fallout (Prime Video won't let you watch through a VPN). Only when I switched Mullvad back on could I open the site.

I didn't know German providers do this.

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Yeah this is actually quite nefarious, as it is a private organization that decides what sites get blocked, with no legal oversight.

- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearingstelle_Urheberrecht_im...

- https://netzpolitik.org/2024/cuii-liste-diese-websites-sperr...

Its a DNS based block, so overriding your default DNS server is enough to circumvent it. I think Dns over Https also works.

Pretty sure this was a thing in the past, but that currently it has to be a court order.

The wikipedia article seems to concur with you, although this seems to be a voluntary policy by CUII, the members could still decide to not wait for any court orders and block whatever they want.

https://netzpolitik.org/2025/die-cuii-gibt-auf-fuer-netzsper...

It's not voluntary anymore, it's required.

> Daher habe die Bundesnetzagentur die CUII gebeten, die Überprüfung mutmaßlich urheberrechtsverletzender Seiten künftig gerichtlich vornehmen zu lassen.

this is not a requirement, they're just asking. The BNetzA just wants to not deal with it apparently.

See also the recent CCC talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-cuii-wie-konzerne-heimlich-webse...

I think it's a DNS level block. I've been using NextDNS (free plan) and one side effect (besides auto ad block) is that it doesn't have those blocks. Highly recommend - there are alternative services as well, just saw NextDNS recommended here.

Alternative: https://archive.ph/2025.12.21-050644/https://annas-archive.l...

Someone compiled a list of blocked domains (by probing different DNS servers):

https://cuiiliste.de/

This is also how, for example, RT is blocked in Germany.

In that vein, I am trying to find out why searching for

    alextud popcorntime

which should trivially yield http://github.com/alextud/PopcornTimeTV results in anything but that one particular URL in every search engine: Google, Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Bing

They even find a fork of that particular repo, which in turn links back to it, but refuse to show the result I want. Have't found any DMCA notices. What is going on?

They have marked the repo as noindex (or GitHub is forcing a noindex header).

Its returning a noindex flag so every serp is correctly doing what the repo has been asked.

That is... except for brave! I checked on my searx instance and it still showed up in brave's results

Very interesting. The security page does show up on kagi at #6.

I wonder if GitHub flags it to not be indexed or something.

Try Yandex search, trust me later.

It has 0 censorship - regarding pirated content at least.

Also true in the Netherlands, I hate these copyright freaks constantly trying to restrict access.

Was also shocked to see that (Berlin, Telekom here).

They also block some foreign "news" like Russia Today last time I checked.

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