https://cybernews.com/news/spain-laliga-streaming-piracy-cam...
What ISP? I'm using Vodafone and if I accept the insecure connection (because of mismatched certificate), I get served the notification. You don't get that?
Obviously I don't do my banking like that...
If I recall correctly, if you try to access the IP directly you get the same notification. No football game on right now though so cannot check.
Edit: In fact, I'm not sure they do DNS filtering at all actually, it may be just based on IP, can't remember off-hand, considering the collateral damage, I'd say IP blocks mainly.
So whenever you see "Connection Refused" your instinct is to go to your ISPs website?
I also don't think it's "hijacking someone's website", then it'd be global, instead it is a man-in-the-middle attack, serving different traffic than the user intended.
But I have been thinking about this quite a lot recently (mostly because I get angry at the power states sometimes have over individuals). Would the distinction really matter in this case?. I would think that in a "civil law" contry things could be even worse for the aggressor
La Liga wants to be able to point to a URL hosted by Cloudflare and demand it taken down that instant while the match is still on. It would require dedicated staff at Cloudflare to deal with La Liga stream takedowns.
The Spanish government is not the ones enforcing the ban here. La Liga and Telefonica went to the judges, who are the ones making ISPs to enforce these blocks, as an intermediate "fix" essentially.
Which are part of the Spanish government.
Judges in Spain are not part of the government ("Gobierno"). They are part of the Poder Judicial, the judiciary. The Spanish Constitution separates these clearly, give it a skim if you haven't already.
I guess broadly in English you'd say the judges are part of the state, but they're not a part of the Spanish Government.
This is against what the 1978 constitution says, but the Constitutional Court decided not to care.
You sum that to the president of the government bragging on live TV about how the current socialist government controls the prosecutors in Spain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbDsPfoE_a4) and you get a banana republic.
This is a risk with shared IP addresses. I sold CF to many customers and I would say the risk in general is minimal. At least outside Spain. But people should stop whining and use a better service if needed.
A better service that the Spanish government will also block?
Cloudflare is not the bad actor here. The Spanish government is.
(Yes, the action described in the article is explictly not legally binding. That was also true of the Brexit vote.)
Accelerationism was always a terrible idea.
You have some medium-okay but clearly sub-optimal status quo and then a bunch of defenders resisting all change because "things are fine" even though they should be better than fine, or institutions that have been captured by corrupt interests but that situation is stable as long as they continue to provide bread and circuses. If it stays mediocre then everyone muddles along; if it gets worse then people stop ignoring the issue and actually address it so that it gets better.
The problem is, it's not just bread and circuses. People have been divided into camps for the purpose of directing their dissatisfaction against each other instead of the entities responsible.
So people get mad when things go wrong but the perpetrators convince them that the enemy is their neighbors and they need to direct their resources to defeating each other instead of working together to solve the actual problems.
For example, when SOPA/PIPA was defeated, it not only wasn't just along party lines, there was more opposition to it from Republicans than Democrats:
https://projects.propublica.org/sopa/pipa.html
So who we like here are e.g. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY), because they both opposed it, even though they're in different parties. But then the "parties matter, not candidates" people would have you trying to oust everyone with the disfavored letter next to their name even if they did the right thing there. Which helps the baddies win by convincing you to oust good candidates from the "bad" party in favor of bad candidates from the "good" party, and over time makes both parties worse even as people become increasingly dissatisfied with the way things are going.
By affecting only Spain, the impact is too small for most websites to care.
Just as trying to make social media be the arbiter of speech...
These IP blocks don't seem to come with a stopping principle. They were large and growing, and inevitably more and more entities were going to say "Hey, if that company is large enough to flip the switch to protect their assets then I'm large enough for that too!" and the obvious and inevitable stopping point was 100% blockage.
Taken to its logical conclusion, and I do mean "logical" and not "rhetorically overblown for effect", this comes perilously close to just declaring that the value of the Internet is so net negative due to piracy that it should just be shut down in Spain. If that's true during certain sports matches it's already not far from being true for lots of other things too. This was leading in an obviously-economically-untenable direction.
What you’ve described there is completely overblown for rhetoric.
The internet is still needed for delivering legal streams of matches. So there’s never going to be any pressure to turn off the entire internet.
Plus the likes of Amazon, and other online businesses would sue the hell out of La Liga for loss of trade.
So there’s no way in hell the situation would descend into your “logical conclusion”.
That’s not to say that the situation couldn’t get worse that it already is. Just that your logical conclusion isn’t very logical.
Cloudflare serves a whole bunch of legal and genuinely important services, and yet there was enough pressure to block them off.
> The complaints about the massive fall of web pages caused by LaLiga's fight against piracy reached Congress months ago. And the Chamber is now preparing to take measures.
But even ignoring the fact that TFA directly disproves your and the GP's argument, the point you're making that "x got approved so y also will" isn't how things work in the real world. People do have a pain threshold and just because CloudFlare was tolerated until now doesn't mean greater blockages would have been equally tolerated.
And yes, of course you're right, that people have a pain threshold, but it's also true that people will normalise behaviour over time. I'm not saying further blockages will happen, just that I don't take it for granted that they won't.
The argument I was disagreeing with was the statement that “a total internet block is the logical conclusion”
Which it isn’t. But, and as I said in my comment you claimed to disagree with, that doesn’t mean things can’t still get worse.
It's like saying there's some people who have been seen selling counterfeit made in China purses from a blanket in a street market in one particular neighborhood in a big city, so we're going to erect a roadblock to all vehicle and pedestrian traffic, and cut off metro train access to the area.
My point was just that Amazon is large enough to scare La Liga in ways that nearly no other online retailer is. Ergo La Liga wouldn’t ever push for a total internet block like the GP claimed.
But with copyright, everything is broken everywhere, so they don't have to.
I also got blocked from using RustDesk.
It's been crazy. As this happens intermittently. I had to set up a tailscale exit node in one of my servers to circumvent this crap. I lost several days and called Vodafone (ISP) to understand what was going on.
That's when I read Reddit and saw that crap.
Apparently they also block certain ports. As soon as I route the traffic through Tailscale through the same VPS I can connect without issues (My phone was affected as well)
So presumably the analogue to that in Spain.
Don't get me wrong, I hate getting blocked just because there is a La Liga game, but lets also take some responsibility for our own decisions here...
This is the bad guys.
Who could have forseen, that LaLiga would end up abusing this system!?
> Google, Cloudflare, VPN providers, and other entities facilitating piracy are responsible for the illegal activities they enable and profit from.
Why wouldn't ISPs be responsible too? or the cable modem providers? or the computer providers? or your eyes. Let's just blame all those things and not the person that made it or the person that consumes it.
Pornography is illegal in Spain now?
Why are Spain's courts allowing this injunction to stand? It's clearly being used to bring the court system itself into disrepute at this point.
> Cloudflare has facilitated by knowingly protecting criminal organisations for profit
The propaganda is strong with these guys ...
I struggle with LaLiga's filter during matches, but I am more interested if it'll help with latency/speed. Have you noticed any different when using WARP vs. without it regarding Internet speed?
Thanks!
403 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. Request blocked. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation. Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)
Qui blockat blockodiodes? Cloudfare, it turns out....
Right after this statement they could have permanently block all the IPs and let the outraged customers make enough noise that would have prompt the government to act sooner.
It's the honest businesses who probably won't go through the effort of evading the block every time.
403 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)
(Disclaimer: I work for Cloudflare)
I dislike what is happening but I kind of like that they don't care about the size of Cloudflare and hold them as accountable as they would a small hosting company in Belarus. Blocking entire ranges due to illegal content isn't exactly new, the scale is new.
Again though, I really dislike that it isn't going through the legal system
Why make CloudFlare ultimately responsible though? There are lots of companies between users and the servers providing pirated content. Cloudflare is just one step in the whole chain. Why not eg block Google Chrome?
In any case, blocking Cloudflare was a stupid thing to do. Especially because it didn't anything to solve the actual problem.
When I'm posting this message to Hacker News, I'm the "customer" of this website. I'm not customer of all the intermediate nodes in the chain. So if I were to write something illegal and HN would be irresponsive to takedown requests, the courts could order the IP of HN to be blocked, not some intermediate ISP.
I think you're not faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here, even if you don't agree with it (just like me).
They need (in their mind, again I don't agree) to block these sites somehow, as they see it as them "stealing" viewers, judges agree with this. Now, where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral?
Cloudflare is not playing ball and turning of the streams, and they appear too quickly to go through court orders all the time. Banning a web browser obviously has a huge scope, so you're effectively left with blocking based IP, DNS or both/either.
Considering they are breaking local laws, and judges feel like something should be done to stop that, the solution they arrived at, regardless of how shit it is, is probably the solution with the least collateral damage, even if it has quite a lot.
Again, I don't agree with the decision, but I can also see from their perspective that they don't have a ton of choices, if we adopt the perspective that it should be stopped somehow.
I think you're not seeing the bigger picture.
Somehow La Liga (a private company) was able to convince the courts that it should be able to ban IPs almost in real-time without any oversight from the law. This is just insane in a modern democracy and only benefitted La Liga. Certainly not the population of Spain for whom the courts work for.
Time has proven what anyone with two brain cells knew already. Blocking IPs was never going to do much to solve the issue. It's a wack-a-mole game. Cloudflare knew this and La Liga did too.
> where can the block be done, and have the least amount of collateral?
Blocking one of the biggest providers of internet infra was anything but "the least amount of collateral". Plenty of companies and services depend on Cloudflare.
But that in their mind is "solving the issue, at that time". Why do you think they want to expand it to other sports now, because "doesn't do anything" or because they actually see some effect from it?
> Blocking one of the biggest providers of internet infra was anything but "the least amount of collateral". Plenty of companies and services depend on Cloudflare.
Ok, so given their perspective is "something must be done" and Cloudflare are not blocking the users after requests, what is the alternative here? Turning off the entire internet connection for individual users? Turning off all the internet during games? I really don't know what alternative could be possible, that still satisfies their "something must be done".
Again, I agree that this is an massive overstep, wildly miscalculated and I'm personally affected by this every time a football is on, I don't like it either.
Don't be disingenuous just because you like the company.
Furthermore, La Liga somehow convinced the courts they should be able to pick IPs for all ISPs to block in real-time without any oversight from the law. Considering this is a private company this is just absolutely insane.
It the same thing with social media and moderation. We don't have to let them off the hook just because doing the right thing would make them unprofitable.
Do we punish gun manufacturers for someone being shot? Kitchen utensil companies for someone being stabbed? Car manufacturers for car crashes? Road construction companies for human trafficking?
How deep does this go? Is a steel foundry responsible for the stabbing? Is a camera lens manufacturer responsible for illegal porn?
What do you expect cloudflare to actually do about these streams?
When there is phishing or pedo content, you think they wait for court order or react to abuse ?
They are distributing content through their servers, not just displaying it.
Every hosting and CDN companies has abuse department, it's a normal part of the process. Here, Cloudflare is aware, and chooses to ignore the abuse requests, then they have to take their responsibilities.
Cloudflare is a US-based company so they are realistically out of reach, or too late.
If there are abuse requests, and Cloudflare wants to comply but not block the website, they can downgrade to DNS only, and then the host IP would be blocked.
If Cloudflare doesn't comply and intentionally keeps distributing content -> block Cloudflare.
At some point for them, the cost of complying with the law will be cheaper than handling the complaints that they are blocked.
It's like YouTube, they shutdown content on request of rights holders.
Maybe I'm being optimistic but I'm assuming the first action wasn't large scale IP blocks. Cloudflare likely didn't take action.
> What do you expect cloudflare to actually do about these streams?
I'm sorry but I'm not buying that the market leader in bot detection can't detect sport suddenly being streamed to an influx of people from a new IP at kick off. If this was the US banning them, I'm sure they'd have found a way around it by now