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My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on
- 4ndrewl 1y agoRelated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
- pedrogpimenta 1y agoMy server is also unreachable: my website, my projects (which people use)... Because it's on some IP that Vercel uses.
- pmontra 1y agoYes, we know. Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches. It would be more interesting to know if something is getting done about this. Other businesses must work, people must communicate, the very same Spanish state must keep working. Is there any protest with at least a slight amount of hope?
- Nyr 1y agoInternet mostly works in Spain when there is a match: one can see traffic figures from the mayor exchange points: they are unaffected. Big businesses are unaffected, since LaLiga will quickly reverse any block that impacts popular websites and risks triggering significant public outcry. Most people in Spain don’t care — and many aren’t even aware of the overly broad blocks. Cloudflare and RootedCON are challenging this in court, but it may take many years before a final outcome is reached.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoApparently it's not being communicated properly, or you don't actually read what you come across, because "Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches" isn't true at all. Large parts are blocked, yes, as collateral damage. But it doesn't seem like they're completely switching it off, as obviously then there would be huge protests, mostly because people wouldn't be able to legally watch the games then!
- Telemakhos 1y ago> the very same Spanish state must keep working “Vuelva usted mañana.”
- PlotCitizen 1y ago> Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches. There's a distinction between the above statement and the truth, which is that CloudFlare and other large CDNs do not work in Spain when there are football matches. Yes, it's not CloudFlare's fault in this instance, since I believe CloudFlare is not being notified to take action in real time. The blocking needs to happen quickly to block access to illegal streams of a live event. My understanding is that CloudFlare is largely out of the picture when this decision is happening, and CloudFlare is only taking the blame since that's what Twitch uses, which also can't react as quickly as La Liga wants. That being said there is a solution to this that helps protect from collateral as well as the decentralized open nature of the internet: moving away from those large CDNs
- array_key_first 1y agoI think moving away from cloudflare is not a solution because: 1. You need CDNs for reasonable web performance, especially on mobile. Hitting your dedicated server for every static asset like images is going to bring latency through the roof. 2. Many companies don't have a physical presence in Europe, but are still able to achieve adequate performance because of CDNs. 3. If everyone just moves off of cloudflare, the blocking would just increase. Nothing would be solved if even bigger ranges are blocked, and probably even more stuff would break.
- PlotCitizen 1y agoI totally agree with point number 2. Even point number 1 is reasonable. But there are many CDNs you could use, perhaps smaller ones, perhaps some that do not offer their services to streaming websites, which is arguably the reason for the blocking. Ultimately point number 3 is a prediction. I could see that happening, but I am not convinced it's set in stone that the blocking would just increase. And even if that happens, and even bigger ranges are blocked, and even more stuff breaks, perhaps more people will start to notice and put an end to this, to CloudFlare's delight.
- chakintosh 1y agoIf only Tebas put this much energy into improving LaLiga's awful and outright shady refereeing and the rampant racism problem.
- Lucasoato 1y agoIn Italy something similar is happening: they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly (that's very high for our economy). To this, add the facts that there has been a major hit to illegal streaming piracy and that football games are getting extremely boring in our country (compared to the Premier League or our Serie A of twenty years ago). The major effect of this is that newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football, much less than their parents and grandparents. These people are trying to milk a cow that will be dry in less than 5 years, unless a major revolution happens in FIGC (Italian Football Federation).
- Hendrikto 1y ago> they have split the football game rights among different competitors, so that if you want to watch every game you have to spend >100€ monthly Same in Germany. > newest generations aren't giving a shit anymore about football Also the same in Germany. But I am not sure which direction the causality goes. Maybe people are less interested in football because of the shenanigans they are constantly pulling. Or maybe they try to squeeze the remaining audience because people are less interested. It may also not be related at all.
- BoredPositron 1y ago>>Also the same in Germany. Just because you want something to be true to make your argument...doesn't make it true. Growth for memberships over the last few years are pretty strong especially in the under 16 age group with 9% yoy.[1] Attendance is also on a steady upwards trend.[2] The last EM also had new highs in viewership linear and streaming. As overall the non-linear media surrounding football is growing...[3] [1] https://www.dfb.de/news/dfb-mitgliederstatistik-mehr-schiris-mehr-qualifizierte-und-rekord-zum-jubilaeum https://www.dfb.de/news/dfb-mitgliederstatistik-mehr-schiris... [2] https://twocircles.com/gb/articles/2024-sports-attendance-germany https://twocircles.com/gb/articles/2024-sports-attendance-ge... [3] https://www.agf.de/en/services/press/press-release/tv-bilanz-2024-live-sport-tatort-und-ein-comeback-202 https://www.agf.de/en/services/press/press-release/tv-bilanz...
- meindnoch 1y ago[flagged]
- illusive4080 1y agoMobile users should remove old from the url [0]. The old Reddit website does not load properly on my mobile device. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1np6kyn/my_games_server_is_blocked_in_spain_whenever/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1np6kyn/my_games_s... Edit: commenters below made me realize that my extension StopTheMadness messed up old Reddit. Sorry
- givinguflac 1y agoStop trying to make new reddit happen, illusive Steve Huffman! /s Seriously though, seconded that old works great still on ios 26.
- QuantumNomad_ 1y agoOld Reddit loads perfectly fine for me on iOS. What OS are you on and what is the specific problem you see when you try to load this Old Reddit link from OP?
- illusive4080 1y agoYour comment made me realize that it was an extension I’m using on my iPhone on iOS 26 that is causing the issue. The extension is StopTheMadness. I had an option called “Protect page zoom controls” which allows you to zoom on sites that disable zoom, but it breaks this website.
- SSLy 1y agowhile at it consider 'sinkit for old reddit'. makes it palatable, certainly superior to the shreddit app
- sebtron 1y agoWorks fine for me (Firefox on Android)
- piva00 1y agoFor me it's much the opposite, I even use an extension on iOS Safari to redirect "www.reddit.com" to "old.reddit.com".
- asddubs 1y agoI obviously don't agree with spain doing this, but I also have trouble feeling sorry for cloudflare, since they're also in the business of randomly blocking certain IPs from accessing half the internet
- dncornholio 1y agoCloudflare created a problem where everything is centralized. It's also, not that great. Even the most crude WordPress vulnerability scan requests aren't flagged or blocked. It seems most DDoS attacks may come through as well. Don't get me even started on the checkbox. It's a US data-hoarder.
- VoodooJuJu 1y ago[dead]
- forinti 1y agoAnd I thought things were bad in my country where all "sports" shows are about football and you can have 3 different FM stations broadcasting the same game and they'll discuss football even when there is nothing going on. It's a monothematic sporting desert. I'm glad I raised my kids oblivious to this football religion.
- iamzenitraM 1y agoSome of us are tracking their blocking over at: https://hayahora.futbol https://hayahora.futbol https://tinyuptime.sconde.net https://tinyuptime.sconde.net It's not only Cloudflare, but also other not so tiny CDNs are being blocked - currently an entire Backblaze B2 region is blocked in 3 out of 5 ISPs (!). Particularly hurtful, the entire Cloudflare R2 is blocked during football matches so you can't pull Docker images or Ollama models.
- teekert 1y agoMan, and I was already annoyed that my tax money went to extra police to prevent idiots from fighting and wrecking stuff around matches. I for one think that football streaming should be blocked when I'm pulling docker images ;)
- pzlarsson 1y agoThe amount of resources that goes into soccer in many countries is really astonishing. It can be seen as a modern equivalent to bread and circuses however. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
- swiftcoder 1y agoYou should probably check Github as well. We have consistent problems connecting to github during football matches
- FullMetalBitch 1y agoMy external home assistant doesnt work either, I have to use the VPN. Thanks Tebas.
- CodesInChaos 1y agoI find it interesting that cloudflare is okay with those piracy sites getting its shared IPs blocked, while a couple of years ago they forced a casino to shell out for the enterprise plan and dedicated IPs to contain the fallout of banned IPs.
- iMerNibor 1y agoI would assume they'd just decline and shut operations for that particular domain and create a new domain/account on cloudflare for the new site? Not sure how attached these sites are to their specific brand/domain (or if this is indirect where main sites link to other sites that host the video)
- lyu07282 1y agoThey are not okay with it, they first in march tried to get it annulled that was rejected by the courts [1]. Now they are appealing in the constitutional court [2]. Spanish sources: [1] https://www.genbeta.com/actualidad/gol-laliga-a-cloudflare-juez-no-considera-que-bloqueo-masivo-webs-le-cause-danos-a-nadie https://www.genbeta.com/actualidad/gol-laliga-a-cloudflare-j... [2] https://www.xataka.com/legislacion-y-derechos/bloqueos-ip-laliga-amenazan-proxima-temporada-asi-que-cloudflare-ha-presentado-recurso-constitucional https://www.xataka.com/legislacion-y-derechos/bloqueos-ip-la... Cloudflare also said they are prepared to go all the way to EU courts if necessary.
- christkv 1y agoI think companies need to start suing for damages when their business applications get blocked.
- aucisson_masque 1y agoI’m surprised it’s still going on. There are things a southern Europe government shouldn’t mess with, gas prices and football are part of them. Spanish are surprisingly quiet about that or they bought vpn en masse.
- nromiun 1y agoThat is wild. Which other country gives a private body the power to ban any IP address for the entire country?
- addandsubtract 1y agoI mean, the power was given by the court, so you could argue that the ISPs are just following court orders. On the other hand, there's SpaceX which has the power to block an entire country from accessing the internet.
- nromiun 1y agoYou could only say that if the IP address list was given by the court to the ISPs.
- gpderetta 1y agoItaly.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y agoBoth countries are soccer addicts, funny
- maverwa 1y agoI am somewhat surprised (and happy) germany is not in on it already. There are already (afaik voluntary) block lists ISPs are applying, but I am surprised its not breaking things on a similar scale to italy and spain, an that the DFB isn't already piping /dev/urandom-domains into it...
- rock_artist 1y agoIn the reddit there's a link to another article related and there's response from Laliga (If I got it right): > Desde LaLiga también advierten que "aquellos clientes de Cloudflare que puedan sufrir bloqueos en sus webs, pueden dirigirse al email afectadoscloudflare@laliga.es con el fin de hacer llegar a Cloudflare que el contenido ilegal alojado en la IP de su misma web no tiene su autorización". So they eventually made an email to report if you're being affected by their blocking.
- erremerre 1y agoWhat they do if receive such an email, it is to bully and threaten the owner of the webpage saying that their web is hosted in the same IP than pirates streaming and they would take legal action. Just, so that you know what is really going on.
- arximboldi 1y agoBut the intent of that email is not to unblock the IP, but to put pressure on Cloudfare to stop giving service to the allegedly pirate sites.
- npteljes 1y agoLarger discussion here: "LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
- aosaigh 1y agoI might be naive, but this is absolutely outrageous. What laws allow a private company dictate what IPs can be banned across an entire country? Are the ISPs voluntarily cooperating or are they now all obliged to follow LaLiga requests?
- erremerre 1y agoISP with the right to football goes to court to report themselves (not a joke) about piracy happening in their networks. An old man judge which understand technology as much as I understand biochemistry (nothing) decides that they need to stop piracy, His solution is to give laliga the power to block those illegal streams, that all ISP must comply for the time that a match exist. The judge covers himself by saying, that the blockage can't affect third parties. All ISP happy comply. It does affect third parties. Cloudflare (third party) puts a recourse to say that it is affecting their business. The very same old man, decides, that is not going to proceed with that investigation. So cloudflare needs to to through a different slower legal procedure. Meanwhile, we have a company with the authority to block what they want thanks to corruption.
- aosaigh 1y agoThanks for the summary. I assume this will go up the chain of appeals etc. and on to the EU courts if needed?
- riffraff 1y agoTribunals. But notice that a possible outcome here is that _Cloudflare_ gets mandated by the same tribunals to perform the blocking of sport streaming sites. This is what's happening in Italy, for example.
- dabeeeenster 1y agoRelated (7 years ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/8q1j0o/la_liga_uses_its_official_app_to_spy_on_bars_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/8q1j0o/la_liga_uses... - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. - The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions. - La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect if the sound matches with that of a football match. In addition, it uses the geolocation of the phone to locate exactly where the establishment is located. That way they can locate bars and other establishments where football is being pirated or showed without paying for the bar package. Still amazes me this just sort of went by and no one really seemed bothered. Absolutely insane.
- Phemist 1y agoWait, does that also mean bars have to police what people are watching on their phone, otherwise risking big fines? E.g. I go to the pub, have a drink and watch some random LaLiga match on my phone?
- piltdownman 1y agoNo, the bar pays something like 10x the price of a normal subscription to be able to publicly show live Sports as a draw for their customers. In UK/Ireland you can easily identify if the venue in question is paying for the commercial package as it will intermittently display a pint glass symbol in a bottom corner of the screen. Indeed, Sky investigators, who do spot checks, use it to quickly ensure that the pub has a valid pub contract and not a residential contract. https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/668952/why-pub-TVs-have-pint-glass-in-corner-screen https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/668952/why-pub-TV... La Liga are presumably muxing infrasonic audio into their residential streams to try and: (a) watermark the residential account(s) used to provide the streaming services so they can prosecute the providers (b) Detect commercial usage of residential accounts used in piracy to prosecute the venues, by listening out via the App. They could presumably get around GDPR by virtue of the fact they're only listening and recording audio out of human audible range, and only for identification of copyright infringement as per the TOS of the La Liga App.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- diego_moita 1y agoAs a Brazilian I say: the world would be a much better place without football. It seems that being a crook is a requirement to be on the management of any national football league, from Brazilian CBF to FIFA and La Liga.
- NickC25 1y agoanything that encourages the youth to get outside and play makes the world a better place almost by default. god forbid they exercise, they should be indoors studying or playing on their phones 100% of the time. </s> maybe the world would be a better place without football hooligans, sure. but without a sport that billions love and play? no.
- gloosx 1y agoFootball is wild. Imagine countries and governments collect taxes. Then they use the taxes to buy petroleum products from Qatar. Then Qatar spends €262 millions on a single football player and gazillions on a European club, which is at €889 million loss over the last five years In the end, who is paying for it all? Ordinary people ultimately foot the bill – whether through higher energy prices, taxes, or the opportunity cost of that money leaving the productive economy – while the football circus rolls on.
- philipwhiuk 1y ago> Then they use the taxes to buy petroleum products from Qatar. This isn't how the energy market works.
- gloosx 1y agoFair point, governments don't literally wire tax money straight to Qatar for oil. But whether it is at the pump or through subsidies, it is still ordinary people who end up carrying the cost — and that money gets recycled into football vanity projects.
- fluoridation 1y agoI mean, if you're going to consider indirect transactions too, eventually every part of the economy ends up affecting every other part. That money that goes into those projects doesn't just vanish, it gets spent and flows back out into the economy.
- bamboozled 1y agoI think you know what they mean...fuel is subsidized by the government, and Qatar winds up with the subsidized money. Need it be more complicated?
- gloosx 1y agoFrom a wider perspective it does vanish in terms of productive value: billions go into inflated transfers and club losses that generate little beyond spectacle, instead of going into things that improve lives (cheap energy, infrastructure, innovation, public goods)
- casey2 1y agoObvious corruption. Shameful
- yeasku 1y agoIpv6 is not blocked. O2 gives me ipv6.
- otikik 1y agoLove the sport, hate the business.
- bashy 1y agoWill be very similar to this type of abuse report someone got on their Hetzner server (even though it had no piracy activity); > On 27 Nov 23:27, operations@friendmts.com wrote: To whom it may concern: Our reference: PRB-XXXXXX Security Code: 2x364371x-x45x-59x2-8760-32x46276790 Access to the IP address detailed below has been blocked in the United Kingdom by court order. The block will apply to: IP Address: 95.217.118.31 For all Premier League Match Periods Until: 07 Dec 2020 Further notifications will not be sent about this IP address unless and until further infringements are detected after the date and time indicated above, though the IP address will remain subject to blocking until then. If your organisation is planning to reallocate this IP address to another customer before the date listed above, please notify us at ipallocation@friendmts.com with the appropriate information so that we can consider releasing the IP from subsequent blocking. A copy of the court order, which was obtained by the Football Association Premier League Limited is available here: https://www.fmtsoperations.com/HC-2017-002013-ORDER.PDF https://www.fmtsoperations.com/HC-2017-002013-ORDER.PDF Any affected server operator or hosting provider has the right to apply to the Court to discharge or vary the Order.
- ericzawo 1y agoThis is the most Spanish thing of all time.
- barbazoo 1y agoMandatory siesta.
- hyperman1 1y agoI see 2 nasties here: On one hand, this is a clear overreach of the courts: They gave a private party the right to censor random sources without judicial oversight. On the other hand, the courts still need to judicate in their respective countries. If cloudflare says: We're in another country so the courts cant make us block illegal things, well, the courts have to overblock or they lose the ability to enforce their decisions.
- dmitrygr 1y agoSome decisions do not need to be possible. No amount of court judgements will make pigs fly. Perhaps it is about time we took the decisions of what may or may not be on the internet outside the reach of idiots. We. You, me, readers here, are the people who are in charge of design decisions for future systems and networks. When designing them, favor reliability, resilience, decentralization! Make it impossible to take things down! Let them pass useless judgements and make toothless rules. Design so that those judgements and rules apply no more to the internet of tomorrow than they do to the sun, moon, and stars.
- polski-g 1y agoLots of these sorts of European problems could be fixed if Cloudflare+Google+Apple+Microsoft colluded to block an entire country from all their services at once until it is resolved. And then move on to the next country, and the next.
- JaxonNovak 1y ago[dead]
- charcircuit 1y ago>they randomly ban cloudflare IP ranges. It's not random. Many pirate sites use Cloudflare and Cloudflare does not do a good enough job of taking them down which enables pirating of the sport broadcast. Routing your game traffic through a CDN is not normal anyways.
- EIREXE 1y agoThe game traffic is a drop in the water compared to the website itself, it's mostly there for leaderboards, the web frontend and game backend are compiled into a monolithic native executable.
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago[dupe] LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y agoAnd this,people, it's insane. Rome would get entirely stuck during soccer matches and they found a way to make the same happen on the Internet in Spain. Italy will follow. As an Italian who hated soccer and all the toxicity around it, this is a nightmare.
- FearNotDaniel 1y agoI've read this and many of the comments and still don't quite understand what is being blocked. Nobody has quite stated it explicitly, and what seems to be being implied seems too absurd to be true, but I'm assuming it must be true hence all the outrage against La Liga, their media partners and the government. So just to really spell it out for an idiot like me: this means that _all_ internet users in Spain are blocked from accessing _any_ of the IP ranges that La Liga doesn't like, while a football match is in play, regardless of whether the services they are trying to access have anything to do with pirating football matches? Is that the actual situation? Edit: thanks @npteljes for providing context from a previous HN post... > "LaLiga's Anti-Piracy Crackdown Triggers Widespread Internet Disruptions in Spain" > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323856
- bastard_op 1y agoIt ought to be a useful indicator to Spain/Italy and their population that the only thing they're good for is football and causing misery for everyone else. Maybe some self-reflection is due. They shut down the internet because they're poisoned peoples minds to crave watching football, and then overcharge the hell out of them to the point they seek any and all alternatives. You will watch our goddamn football and pay us for the privilege whether you like sports or not, or well shut down the internet! Imagine if the MPAA/RIAA had this sort of authority in 2003 with Kazaa. It's almost like Disney ran government, which even the US isn't far from.