4 ms·

It’s sad that most comments are just focusing on political bashing instead of the root problem here. It’s the fact LaLiga and Spanish ISPs comply. They’re “ca

It’s sad that most comments are just focusing on political bashing instead of the root problem here. It’s the fact LaLiga and Spanish ISPs comply. They’re “carpet” blocking entire IPs of Cloudflare. Every weekend if I need to access some of my work websites which are affected by this (while there are football games) - I need to VPN to bypass the blocking. I’m new in Spain so my ability of surfacing the Spanish law or the European is limited. But I really wish they’ll have to find a nicer approach instead of this aggressive approach.

nubinetwork 8mo ago
[flagged]
- kasey_junk 8mo ago
  Not sure I understand the joke but to be clear it’s a Spanish soccer (football) league blocking the ips not an American football (football egg) league.
- cwillu 8mo ago
  Is it football or handegg?
isodev 8mo ago
I also see another side of the problem - too many services are proxied via CloudFlare making it easy to disrupt at the same time. Folks really need to try and choose alternatives instead of feeding the “world firewall”
- muyuu 8mo ago
  why? so La Liga can more easily target smaller providers? if anything the "world firewall" here has a redeeming feature, making this nonsense a lot more costly
  - MichaelZuo 8mo ago
    Some people genuinely believe the european copyright system (and La Liga and the Spanish judiciary) has more than 0% legitimacy… is it truly that hard to imagine?
    - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
      Collective punishment is such overreach that it's a violation of the Geneva conventions. You do that and you no longer have more than 0% legitimacy.
      - MichaelZuo 8mo ago
        I meant even after the fact they still believe to some degree of legitimacy.
        AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
        Believing that an action is legitimate when it isn't simply means that they're in error.
        inigyou 8mo ago
        [dead]
- josephcsible 8mo ago
  How is that a bad thing? Our goal should be to maximize the amount of collateral damage that any censorship causes, with the ideal case being that the only two choices available to the censors are "no censorship at all" or "completely air gap yourself like North Korea".
  - jen20 8mo ago
    That extreme centralization makes the single choke-point vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. The web is supposed to be decentralized and distributed.
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      In theory. It’s strange to argue about hypothetical issues with something currently defending against actual problems. One battle at a time.
      - handoflixue 8mo ago
        I'd hardly call decentralization a "hypothetical" issue: we've already seen governments are willing to issue gag orders so that we can't even find out what they're doing inside major companies. That's clearly a lot easier to do when there's a single central point of control. If there's a single central point of control, then that also means an outage takes everything offline, instead of just 1-2 tools. That also makes it a bigger target for attackers.
        jen20 8mo ago
        It doesn't even need to be an attacker - CloudFlare themselves have managed to take down impressive portions of the internet more times than should be accepted just this year.
      - throwaway290 8mo ago
        So do you apply the same logic for measures gov/Apple/etc put out about on-device scanning and e2e messaging stuff? It's always "hypothetical" until it hits the fan.
- learningstud 8mo ago
  What DDoS mitigations are there besides the less affordable Akamai?
beloch 8mo ago
Cloudflare has become so ubiquitous that they've become a major vulnerability for non-U.S. governments. The recent outages offered a small taste of what might happen if the U.S. government, on one of their random whims, ordered Cloudflare to block everyone and every site within a target country. This in no way excuses what Spain is doing, but its important to recognize that the internet is becoming more of a battlefield every day.
- hdgvhicv 8mo ago
  Spanish citizens have control over eh Spanish government. If this is a concern they can of course change the law. Yes democracy is hard, you have to convince the country it’s important. European citizens have less control if they aren’t Spanish citizens as they can only talk to their local and European representivies and not the national ones. But they can still raise the cause, and there nothing politicians like more than a popular cause which wins them votes. Enough people say they won’t vote for party X as they back the blocking and that becomes a policy at whatever party conferences Spain has People in Spain and Europe have no control over America though. If the American governments blocks a site they have to comply with no representation. Freedom is impotent, but it doesn’t mean what Americans think.
  - graemep 8mo ago
    > European citizens have less control if they aren’t Spanish citizens as they can only talk to their local and European representivies and not the national ones. Citizens of other countries have less influence on the Spanish government than Spanish citizens? Not surprising.
  - watwut 8mo ago
    > Freedom is impotent, Did you meant to say important?
  - bilekas 8mo ago
    > Spanish citizens have control over eh Spanish government. The fact is LaLiga has more.. It's been that way for years. There was a case where they would (may still do) use the microphone on your phone via the laLiga app to hear if you were watching a match and correlate that with licensed venues. They're the most aggressive I've ever seen, and their influence in the government is unmatched.
KAMSPioneer 8mo ago
Spanish ISPs comply because Spanish judges issue legal injunctions that obligate them to institute these blocks. Sure, Movistar/Telefónica would do it anyway (I understand that they're the rightsholder in this case), but other ISPs are forced to do this by the courts. I'm a US immigrant here and since I couldn't give a shit about soccer it is extremely annoying to be blocked from websites for something I am barely aware of. The ultimate irony is that none of this bears fruit because I am capable of streaming these games with no VPN by just avoiding CF sites if I had any desire at all. The blocks are invasive and yet ineffective.
- otherme123 8mo ago
  > but other ISPs are forced to do this by the courts. They are in theory. But they were claiming "technical difficulties" to block the IPs until they also offered DAZN (socker) in their TV packages. Now they are quick to ban. Remember how this is working: TV operator (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange) demand ISPs (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange) that they block the IP for a couple of hours. The judge, who can't tell apart an IP from a car plate, agrees to the request. Nobody can appeal in practice the block, because if your site gets blocked, the judge now say "unblock", the ISPs claim "technical difficulties" to unblock, and the two hours are gone. Sunday after sunday. You can avoid the block just proxying you traffic through a ssh loop to localhost, but that is not the problem. 99% of people won't do that to access your online shop, they just assume your site is down and buy from you competition. And sunday afternoon is one of the busiest day of the week for online stores.

nubinetwork 8mo ago

[flagged]

kasey_junk 8mo ago
Not sure I understand the joke but to be clear it’s a Spanish soccer (football) league blocking the ips not an American football (football egg) league.
cwillu 8mo ago
Is it football or handegg?

isodev 8mo ago

I also see another side of the problem - too many services are proxied via CloudFlare making it easy to disrupt at the same time. Folks really need to try and choose alternatives instead of feeding the “world firewall”

muyuu 8mo ago
why? so La Liga can more easily target smaller providers? if anything the "world firewall" here has a redeeming feature, making this nonsense a lot more costly
- MichaelZuo 8mo ago
  Some people genuinely believe the european copyright system (and La Liga and the Spanish judiciary) has more than 0% legitimacy… is it truly that hard to imagine?
  - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
    Collective punishment is such overreach that it's a violation of the Geneva conventions. You do that and you no longer have more than 0% legitimacy.
    - MichaelZuo 8mo ago
      I meant even after the fact they still believe to some degree of legitimacy.
      - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
        Believing that an action is legitimate when it isn't simply means that they're in error.
      - inigyou 8mo ago
        [dead]
josephcsible 8mo ago
How is that a bad thing? Our goal should be to maximize the amount of collateral damage that any censorship causes, with the ideal case being that the only two choices available to the censors are "no censorship at all" or "completely air gap yourself like North Korea".
- jen20 8mo ago
  That extreme centralization makes the single choke-point vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. The web is supposed to be decentralized and distributed.
  - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
    In theory. It’s strange to argue about hypothetical issues with something currently defending against actual problems. One battle at a time.
    - handoflixue 8mo ago
      I'd hardly call decentralization a "hypothetical" issue: we've already seen governments are willing to issue gag orders so that we can't even find out what they're doing inside major companies. That's clearly a lot easier to do when there's a single central point of control. If there's a single central point of control, then that also means an outage takes everything offline, instead of just 1-2 tools. That also makes it a bigger target for attackers.
      - jen20 8mo ago
        It doesn't even need to be an attacker - CloudFlare themselves have managed to take down impressive portions of the internet more times than should be accepted just this year.
    - throwaway290 8mo ago
      So do you apply the same logic for measures gov/Apple/etc put out about on-device scanning and e2e messaging stuff? It's always "hypothetical" until it hits the fan.
learningstud 8mo ago
What DDoS mitigations are there besides the less affordable Akamai?

beloch 8mo ago

Cloudflare has become so ubiquitous that they've become a major vulnerability for non-U.S. governments. The recent outages offered a small taste of what might happen if the U.S. government, on one of their random whims, ordered Cloudflare to block everyone and every site within a target country. This in no way excuses what Spain is doing, but its important to recognize that the internet is becoming more of a battlefield every day.

hdgvhicv 8mo ago
Spanish citizens have control over eh Spanish government. If this is a concern they can of course change the law. Yes democracy is hard, you have to convince the country it’s important. European citizens have less control if they aren’t Spanish citizens as they can only talk to their local and European representivies and not the national ones. But they can still raise the cause, and there nothing politicians like more than a popular cause which wins them votes. Enough people say they won’t vote for party X as they back the blocking and that becomes a policy at whatever party conferences Spain has People in Spain and Europe have no control over America though. If the American governments blocks a site they have to comply with no representation. Freedom is impotent, but it doesn’t mean what Americans think.
- graemep 8mo ago
  > European citizens have less control if they aren’t Spanish citizens as they can only talk to their local and European representivies and not the national ones. Citizens of other countries have less influence on the Spanish government than Spanish citizens? Not surprising.
- watwut 8mo ago
  > Freedom is impotent, Did you meant to say important?
- bilekas 8mo ago
  > Spanish citizens have control over eh Spanish government. The fact is LaLiga has more.. It's been that way for years. There was a case where they would (may still do) use the microphone on your phone via the laLiga app to hear if you were watching a match and correlate that with licensed venues. They're the most aggressive I've ever seen, and their influence in the government is unmatched.

KAMSPioneer 8mo ago

Spanish ISPs comply because Spanish judges issue legal injunctions that obligate them to institute these blocks. Sure, Movistar/Telefónica would do it anyway (I understand that they're the rightsholder in this case), but other ISPs are forced to do this by the courts. I'm a US immigrant here and since I couldn't give a shit about soccer it is extremely annoying to be blocked from websites for something I am barely aware of. The ultimate irony is that none of this bears fruit because I am capable of streaming these games with no VPN by just avoiding CF sites if I had any desire at all. The blocks are invasive and yet ineffective.

otherme123 8mo ago
> but other ISPs are forced to do this by the courts. They are in theory. But they were claiming "technical difficulties" to block the IPs until they also offered DAZN (socker) in their TV packages. Now they are quick to ban. Remember how this is working: TV operator (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange) demand ISPs (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange) that they block the IP for a couple of hours. The judge, who can't tell apart an IP from a car plate, agrees to the request. Nobody can appeal in practice the block, because if your site gets blocked, the judge now say "unblock", the ISPs claim "technical difficulties" to unblock, and the two hours are gone. Sunday after sunday. You can avoid the block just proxying you traffic through a ssh loop to localhost, but that is not the problem. 99% of people won't do that to access your online shop, they just assume your site is down and buy from you competition. And sunday afternoon is one of the busiest day of the week for online stores.