1. La Liga (Spanish Football) finds pirates streaming their games objectionable
2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing.
3. They appear in court in Spain and get an ex-parte TRO blocking all Cloudflare IPs. (Ex parte TRO: restraining order granted without Cloudflare being summoned to court)
4. Based on this, they tell ISPs to block pretty much all of Cloudflare in Spain.
5. Cloudflare goes public in frustration, noting that they could just send take down requests for infringing content like every other rights holder in the world, and that many Spanish utilities and civil resources use Cloudflare.
Interesting. My gut is that it’s hard to beat La Liga on their home turf, as evidenced by not even being invited to the court hearings which shut you down across all of Spain.
Long term, I’d guess CF wins this one? Probably they will have to escalate in some way to Eurozone courts, although I have no idea how this might work. No cloud business could meet the standard put forward by La Liga; but also there are only so many CDN companies. Meantime I guess illegal streamers can move to Google and see which legal group wins that battle.
one extra thing to mention is he role of Telefonica here. they are both an ISP that needs to apply the blocks, but also its subsidiary "Telefonica Audiovisual", who holds rights for the football, is a plaintiff.
one of the claims were that this is somewhat a procedural fraud since the plaintiff (Telefonica Audiovisual) and the defendant (Telefonica Spain) is technically the same thing. the order was granted after the defendants admitted, and therefore there wasn't any hearing with CF.
> 2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing.
And DDoS protection.
Sports broadcast piracy has a history of serious organized crime involvement, and then some, such as https://www.theregister.com/2002/03/13/murdoch_company_crack... where the allegation was NDS did the hacking and leaked the keys of the rival tech to various mob groups for exploitation.
> Cloudflare goes public in frustration, noting that they could just send take down requests for infringing content like every other rights holder in the world,
Live sports piracy has the unusual property that you have to be able to get the block in place within the ~90 minutes of a football match, even at weekends and across time zones. Otherwise there’s no point.
If the courts let Cloudflare slow roll this, at the legal system’s normal snail-like pace, the law would be effectively useless.
I might be out of date but. I think the article is incorrect. It is the same corp that owns both the streaming rights and the ISPs. The court order allows those ISPs to block IP-addresses of sites that hosts illegal streaming. I find it hard to see how CF could have a case here.
There is a new factor in the equation: Rising anti-american sentiments. This ties in with point 5 especially. Forcing Spanish websites off Cloudflare could seem like an additional benefit.
The EU should be sanctioning Spain the same way we're sanctioning Hungary for this sort of authoritarian behaviour. What's next, they're banning Google cause pirates use it to search for streams?
I don't know how this doesn't count as a net neutrality violation.
I live in Spain, while I find the whole "life-threatening" narrative a tad overblown: I agree these obnoxious blocks are unacceptable. Incredible how much power LaLiga is capable of wielding.
Didn't one of the major ISPs in Spain go down like a weeek ago (movistar) and that caused some emergency numbers to not function properly for some time? I wouldn't be surprised if critical (digital) infrastructure would rely on Cloudflare. If Liga is banning blocks of IP addresses without distinction, then anyone is at the mercy of being shutted down in Spain.
In a globalized internet, your health institutions websites may run through, or depend on (i.e. 3rd party sites, js dependencies, etc) going through Cloudflare. Or emergency services, or whatever. With enough players you go from a side possibility to a certainty.
Also Serie A, in Italy we had people losing everything this winter due to floods, and clubs were still trying to not postpone matches, it's so crap that there are so many people following football
Many will disagree here, but I really respect Cloudflare fight against government-enabled censorship and abuse of power by anti-piracy whatever.
Yes, sometimes CloudFlare used for some actually bad stuff, but same can be said for any cloud service. Having major internet infrastructure provider react to every whim of every single government in the world is not a good idea.
They aren't really fighting against censorship and especially anti-piracy censorship. If they were, they'd refuse to take down sites. Instead they've a streamlined process for just that purpose, and are only fighting because they have been censored, affecting their bottom line.
I think it’s extremely naive to think Cloudflare is anti-government. It’s more likely that they’re a US Intelligence company, whose purpose is to decrypt and monitor global internet traffic.
I don't entirely disagree, but at the same time, La Liga shouldn't have this much power to shut down large swaths of the internet because of a handful of piracy sites, that probably only have a minimal impact on their income anyway.
Also, CDNs have inherent economies of scale and network effects, so it is natural that there would be just a few at the top.
Yeah. I think this is the elephant in the room. I keep stumbling upon "We need to verify you are a human" by Cloudflare in many sites around the web. Crazy.
My sarcasm well is tapped, but this is why I was sus of CDNs like Cloudflare and Akamai at the outset. Yes, they’re highly convenient and enable more sites and services to weather large attacks or traffic spikes, but we willingly sunk a huge swath of the net behind a handful of for-profit entities and yet somehow expected nothing but sunshine and roses forever.
Stop. Trusting. Companies. To. Do. The. Right. Thing.
Cloudflare could’ve prevented this if they’d taken a stand on anything but profit motives, but they’ve repeatedly chosen not to. Piracy sites pay the bills just like Porn or Government sites, after all, and companies won’t turn down money unless forced to through regulation.
I was always unsure about cloudflare as an end user - I don’t want all my traffic going through one provider, but their business use case seemed reasonable.
Then my in-laws got tricked into sending login credentials to a phishing page fronted by cloudflare. It was obviously spoofing IDP logins of Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. I sent a request assuming they would disable the domain and it was immediately closed (in minutes) as not an issue. It made no sense that they would want to front phishing sites. I eventually got them to look more closely and it was removed, but it soured my perception of them.
I think large scale internet businesses may need to start having more liability in matters like this. Being blocked from an entire country seems extreme, but if there are financial incentives to solve the problem, the problem will get solved.
Auto-closing an issue and waiting to see if there is followup is probably a decent filter for real complaints. Like you, a person with a legitimate concern will persist, at least for a while.
Of course it could claim lives. Hopefully Prince has considered people have also likely died as a result of Cloudflare's repeating captcha which holds the next page in front of you like a carrot on a stick, never letting you know that you will be clicking that box forever.
I'm sure while someone's in the process of keeling over is the perfect time to arbitrarily scrutinize their connecting details. You need to contact your doctor ASAP. Okay, but did you neighbor have a virus last week? Is your neighborhood in your city more "problematic" than average? You may have forgot to check these details before you fell ill.
Cloudflare sites should come with a big banner warning all users their connection will be arbitrarily approved by an algorithm with chilling effects built in as dark patterns.
Last I checked, Cloudflare does basically no educating of customers how badly their website will be broken for users arbitrarily when they don't use the ISP or browser Cloudflare likes. No explanation for how many customers you will lose when your website can't be visited by someone who doesn't know how to change their IP, no explanation that if you're offering a critical service then Cloudflare will give that service thousands of tiny downtimes left unknown, the screams too quiet to carry the weight of a tech CEO worried about something similar.
When I've tried to get a customer of CloudFlare to fix a consistent block of their site -- not safety-critical, but mission-critical, and costing them a SaaS sale -- nobody seemed to care.
My impression is that everyone knows that Cloudflare is blocking some legitimate people, but nobody -- neither the customer, nor Cloudflare -- cares enough to solve that problem.
It's similar to why Google doesn't have much tech support. Or why people can be locked out of their Google or Apple accounts without recourse. Caring about the people who fall through the cracks that you created isn't profitable.
When the Internet is part of the basic material of society, we need to rediscover ideals like "it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".
And we need to start removing from power the entities who are too lazy or greedy to uphold our ideals.
(Before someone jumps on literal numbers: That doesn't mean let through 10 botnet floods, rather than prevent grandma from finding a doctor. That could just mean, for example, don't block grandma because one of her browser headers looks suspiciously like an incompetent script kiddie, even though you can see that her traffic isn't yet part of a DDoS flood. Once you change the parameters to be more consistent with a fair and just society, maybe that means that, say, a Web site's servers do see a brief blip, as a new DDoS attack spins up, so it's not a perfectly smooth ride, but every legitimate person remains served. First, don't run over grandma; apply your engineering creativity with that hard requirement in mind.)
As someone who implemented cloudflare because of a massive DDOS and bot problem, sorry, but I will cheerfully allow 1% of my visitors to find the site unusable rather than 100%.
It sucks, but no sane business would be so invested in equality of experience that they’d allow it to be completely broken for everyone.
I see so many people in these threads always complain about Cloudflare or Google CAPTCHA loops.. but even when using Private Internet Access (one of the most abused VPNs), I rarely if ever got on a full-on loop. Maybe Google CAPTCHA made me solve 3 things instead of one. Cloudflare is always just a checkbox. And I have my Brave and Firefox profiles hardened.
I'm not saying you aren't experiencing this, but I am curious: what is your setup that Cloudflare and Google treat you with such suspicion / hostility?
It's because you have previous cookies/state in your browser that you got from non-VPN addresses, which adds to your trust score. Do it with a clean browser with AdBlock and many, many things block you.
If you don't clear your state or keep its original origin VPN only, you're breaking a big point of using VPNs.
Nothing unusual here; just Safari on OSX, with an ad blocker. CAPTCHA loops happen all the time, to the point that I try to avoid Cloudflare-served websites.
Football is the cancer on European societies and economies. From low level hooligans literally bullying and beating children, to high level infuence on the broadcasting infrastructure. Sell it all to Saudis for billions of trillions and ship the football stadiums overseas as a bonus.
I live in Spain and love LaLiga games, but I dislike the executives. There's no straightforward way to stream all matches. The Cloudflare/piracy issue is the lack of clear streaming options. Even with DAZN, Movistar Plus, and TVBar, none offer complete coverage.
So on the one hand I am sympathetic. On the otherhand, I'm also pretty sure cloudflare won't take down pirated stuff, so what do they expect?
I don't like the way that large football conglomerates abuse copyright, but then those same rules _should_ be open to me for anything I produce. The main difference is I don't have a team of lawyers.
Actually, this is a Cloudflare problem - simply take extra steps to ensure your clients paying for your services aren’t harmed by natural market forces.
If you read between the lines, he’s claiming people will die because Cloudflare doesn’t want to take the time, effort, or money to fix the problem that they easily could by creating a separate system for critical services.
This type of “tech hypochondria” should be absolutely dragged at every opportunity. This guy runs a business and whines that his clients don’t deserve what his business agrees to provide? FOH with that ish mang I ain’t buying it.
The "tech hypochondria" is downstream of tech's particularly warped understanding of free speech: i.e. "censorship is when packet loss".
If you define censorship as packet loss, then anything that drops packets is inherently evil, and your business (which ultimately boils down to sending packets along) is inherently good. Ergo anything you do is good and anything that questions or checks your power is evil.
This understanding of free speech didn't evolve in a vaccum, though. It was a response to the "copyright hypochondria" of the publishing industry outfits that have been insisting that "censorship is when free movies". One of the most irritating tenets of copyright maximalism is the idea that copyright somehow backstops free speech, because having an economic incentive to publish is supposed to make politicians think twice[0] about stupid censorship bullshit?
So we have two industries here that have both psyopped themselves into thinking their profit margins are a moral good, unwilling to compromise in any way that would allow legal websites to remain online. Or at least I'm assuming both sides are unwilling to compromise, because La Liga isn't saying anything, and Cloudflare is going to the public rather than the actual courts imposing this blocking order.
[0] The logic doesn't logic here, this is the same kind of thinking that gave us "capitalism has won" in the 1990s and "military alliances will make war impossible" a century prior. Politicians are ultimately polite brokers of violence, and economics is a tool they impose upon us to make us do things in lieu of guns to head. Not the other way around. Politicians will happily censor economically valuable art all day long.
I'm tempted to say "the master's tools can't destroy the master's house", but that saying is complete bullshit for different reasons.
I never watched sports but my kids want to, so tried to buy them subscription to some sport broadcaster.
Bundesliga, F1, NHL and FIFA world cup, that's all I (they) needed.
It turned to total mess. Service A shows F1 but not NHL. Service B shows NHL but not all NHL, only games where my city team plays. Some show LaLiga but not Bundesliga. All cost $30/mo but still show ads. Periodically they show ads instead of the event. If they can't, they split screen show the event in a little rectangle that's 25% of screen space. Dazn, TSN, ESPN are all total scam. You can see a lot of bull riding though.
We cancelled all this nonsense and just moved to pirate sites. Screw this bs.
I have done something similar too, as I wanted to watch a specific football game - Barcelona v Real Madrid - and it was available on a different streamer to the THREE that I already have. So I simply took the easier route.
How come no one is mentioning the obvious solution -- LaLiga needs to make their product as easy to access as piracy. If they offered worldwide streaming of the matches available on an easy interface at a reasonable price, then none of this would be a problem.
Piracy is almost never about the price -- it's almost always about the availability. Especially when it comes to live sports.
I suspect it's not quite that easy: it's likely similar to the situation with the Premier League in the UK (and other things like Formula 1 previously) where a particular broadcaster has been given exclusive distribution rights, and has paid a lot of money for those rights (which in theory go back into the game and pay for the huge salaries of players).
This solution clearly does not actually work. Musicians make pittances off of streaming in comparison to the money they made with physical media. Hollywood has seen strikes and streaming services continually raise prices.
I live in Spain and my ISP is Digi, which uses the network from Telefonica. These blocks are incredibly frustrating, and a ton of people have noticed websites and services not working. However, because the block lasts some hours, people don't know what is happening: "is my mobile network bad?", "Is the website down?". They try a few hours later and it's back up, so they move on.
My company's website is behind Cloudflare and I discovered this whole situation because someone couldn't access it. Also my home assistant is not accessible from the internet the days with a match. And we use it to open the garage and the house. We learned the lesson the hard way being locked outside until I managed to connect with a VPN. This is just nuts and incredibly frustrating. And for La Liga we are just a bunch of "frikis" (nerds) complaining about it... because we are the only ones that understand what the problem is.
Unfortunately, someone would have to die and a lawsuit to follow, and maybe that could stop this crazy nonsense. E.g. A few days ago I read about someone with diabetes whose device was malfunctioning because of these blocks.
CloudFlare is free/cheap, has (AFAIK) no KYC policy, and is generally unresponsive to abuse reports unless the courts get involved, so it's the default choice for nearly all piracy sites, phishing sites, DDoS providers, etc. The few which do get kicked out of CF generally have to resort to dubious Russian CDNs because none of the other mainstream CDNs will have them.
Entire Amazon AS-numbers are sometimes blocked so CloudFront consumers have the same issue. The thing with CF is the scale. They are really big and that is why it gets noticed. When it comes to Akamai they don't have shady customers in general and the risk of a problem is less. They also have a better infrastructure.
Ignoring the Spain block for a while, I wonder how/why these piracy sites use Cloudflare. Are they using something like R2 or Stream? This means someone still has to pay for it, right?
Free tier that let you hide your server IPs, cheap domain registry (with no margin) and even some also tunnels for zero trust. Like I used them for a lot of personal and tbh even commercial projects for years paying them $0. Also they have bandidth alliance with Backblaze so you can serve 100s of TBs for free.
So there a lot of convinience and free stuff. It's quite obviously that when I had commercial customers where for whatever reason free tier wasn't anough I juse used them as well. Why not? There are horror stories about their corporate pricing, but for smaller company paying $20-200 for CDN is no brainer.
Also huge massive advantage of CloudFlare is that majority of their services are not metered so it's hard to wake up to $100,000 bill like it can happen with AWS and almost any other CDN provider.
I still believe this kind of centralized MiTM is bad for us all, but honestly I'd rather it be CloudFlare than Amazon, Microsoft or some other "evil corp".
Maybe they should separate vetted services behind different IP ranges. Or even company. And put in place massive financial penalties for those services if for any reason because of them they have to block traffic.
Very telling how the article ends with a snippet about how the previous season had record-breaking revenues and how La Liga is one of the most profitable sports competitions in the world. It is never enough.
Football leagues are in a bit of a weird position here where one league (English) being drastically stronger in pure monetary terms than the rest means the others can't really let up.
Similarly there's quite a lot of push from the most powerful teams in some of these leagues to break off and form a European Super League; with Spain's two biggest teams being the biggest backers of the project.
ETA: not agreeing with how aggressive they are exactly, but do think long term they're probably in a lot of trouble if/when money starts to properly force a European Super League into existence.
It's bad to steal things and we should try to prevent it.
(I'm generally pro-piracy and don't know the details here, but am also old enough for "the people like MONEY" to not be a particularly noteworthy quality. The things that jump out to me here are A) is Cloudflare's attempted implication that they just need a better injunction true? B) The sophomoric argument that "people will die due to this" is my "people like MONEY" smell)
I wonder why the site owners and the users who are affected by such broad and indiscriminate blocking will not sue LaLiga AND the judges for damages and violation of freedom of speech?
I seem to recall news a while back about how cloudflare was very deliberately making it impossible to block only some things they provide, specifically for the purpose of causing any blocks to have enough blast radius to cause popular outrage. At the time it was presented in terms of fighting back against political censorship.
This is the second time I have seen an article on this topic that talks about "LaLiga" without ever defining it. As if ordinary people outside of Europe are expected to know what LaLiga is.
This goes to Spain government (Nazi-like behavior has long tradition there) and Spain citizens letting laws, which allows this, to pass.
Because same law was or will be used to block opposition, etc.
Of course, that similar organizations (paid by huge copyright companies) tried the same in my country.
And luckily our government listens to local experts (NIC.cz and others) and not to mention, pirating has big tradition here.
So they failed to pass this ridiculous law. (blocking IP addresses)
It's a taste of his own medicine. Having your entire service blocked due to a portion of it being illegal is not much different to how he personally terminated service for 8chan due to a portion of it he claimed was illegal.
vessenes|9 months ago
1. La Liga (Spanish Football) finds pirates streaming their games objectionable
2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing.
3. They appear in court in Spain and get an ex-parte TRO blocking all Cloudflare IPs. (Ex parte TRO: restraining order granted without Cloudflare being summoned to court)
4. Based on this, they tell ISPs to block pretty much all of Cloudflare in Spain.
5. Cloudflare goes public in frustration, noting that they could just send take down requests for infringing content like every other rights holder in the world, and that many Spanish utilities and civil resources use Cloudflare.
Interesting. My gut is that it’s hard to beat La Liga on their home turf, as evidenced by not even being invited to the court hearings which shut you down across all of Spain.
Long term, I’d guess CF wins this one? Probably they will have to escalate in some way to Eurozone courts, although I have no idea how this might work. No cloud business could meet the standard put forward by La Liga; but also there are only so many CDN companies. Meantime I guess illegal streamers can move to Google and see which legal group wins that battle.
m3drano|9 months ago
one of the claims were that this is somewhat a procedural fraud since the plaintiff (Telefonica Audiovisual) and the defendant (Telefonica Spain) is technically the same thing. the order was granted after the defendants admitted, and therefore there wasn't any hearing with CF.
fidotron|9 months ago
And DDoS protection.
Sports broadcast piracy has a history of serious organized crime involvement, and then some, such as https://www.theregister.com/2002/03/13/murdoch_company_crack... where the allegation was NDS did the hacking and leaked the keys of the rival tech to various mob groups for exploitation.
michaelt|9 months ago
Live sports piracy has the unusual property that you have to be able to get the block in place within the ~90 minutes of a football match, even at weekends and across time zones. Otherwise there’s no point.
If the courts let Cloudflare slow roll this, at the legal system’s normal snail-like pace, the law would be effectively useless.
AtNightWeCode|9 months ago
im3w1l|9 months ago
cinbun8|9 months ago
[deleted]
candiddevmike|9 months ago
moffkalast|9 months ago
I don't know how this doesn't count as a net neutrality violation.
Zealotux|9 months ago
dakiol|9 months ago
gmuslera|9 months ago
lnxg33k1|9 months ago
Yeul|9 months ago
Fokamul|9 months ago
TacticalCoder|9 months ago
It's not even about the power. It's about how freaking dumb of a "solution" that is.
It's not "you're too powerful" (la liga and the judges enforcing this) but really "you're too fucking dumb".
qoez|9 months ago
[deleted]
SXX|9 months ago
Yes, sometimes CloudFlare used for some actually bad stuff, but same can be said for any cloud service. Having major internet infrastructure provider react to every whim of every single government in the world is not a good idea.
phoronixrly|9 months ago
xk_id|9 months ago
the_player|9 months ago
[deleted]
blibble|9 months ago
thayne|9 months ago
Also, CDNs have inherent economies of scale and network effects, so it is natural that there would be just a few at the top.
dakiol|9 months ago
bearjaws|9 months ago
Bot protection, waiting rooms, cheap static assets, WAF.
Odds are if you are running a popular platform, you need all of these things.
stego-tech|9 months ago
Stop. Trusting. Companies. To. Do. The. Right. Thing.
Cloudflare could’ve prevented this if they’d taken a stand on anything but profit motives, but they’ve repeatedly chosen not to. Piracy sites pay the bills just like Porn or Government sites, after all, and companies won’t turn down money unless forced to through regulation.
pier25|9 months ago
AFAIK BunnyCDN is the only service that comes close but their cloud offerings are kinda new and they charge egress.
77pt77|9 months ago
Google, X, Facebook, Cloudflare.
All minor player are absorbed or eliminated.
jonhohle|9 months ago
Then my in-laws got tricked into sending login credentials to a phishing page fronted by cloudflare. It was obviously spoofing IDP logins of Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. I sent a request assuming they would disable the domain and it was immediately closed (in minutes) as not an issue. It made no sense that they would want to front phishing sites. I eventually got them to look more closely and it was removed, but it soured my perception of them.
I think large scale internet businesses may need to start having more liability in matters like this. Being blocked from an entire country seems extreme, but if there are financial incentives to solve the problem, the problem will get solved.
SoftTalker|9 months ago
globie|9 months ago
I'm sure while someone's in the process of keeling over is the perfect time to arbitrarily scrutinize their connecting details. You need to contact your doctor ASAP. Okay, but did you neighbor have a virus last week? Is your neighborhood in your city more "problematic" than average? You may have forgot to check these details before you fell ill.
Cloudflare sites should come with a big banner warning all users their connection will be arbitrarily approved by an algorithm with chilling effects built in as dark patterns.
Last I checked, Cloudflare does basically no educating of customers how badly their website will be broken for users arbitrarily when they don't use the ISP or browser Cloudflare likes. No explanation for how many customers you will lose when your website can't be visited by someone who doesn't know how to change their IP, no explanation that if you're offering a critical service then Cloudflare will give that service thousands of tiny downtimes left unknown, the screams too quiet to carry the weight of a tech CEO worried about something similar.
neilv|9 months ago
My impression is that everyone knows that Cloudflare is blocking some legitimate people, but nobody -- neither the customer, nor Cloudflare -- cares enough to solve that problem.
It's similar to why Google doesn't have much tech support. Or why people can be locked out of their Google or Apple accounts without recourse. Caring about the people who fall through the cracks that you created isn't profitable.
When the Internet is part of the basic material of society, we need to rediscover ideals like "it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer".
And we need to start removing from power the entities who are too lazy or greedy to uphold our ideals.
(Before someone jumps on literal numbers: That doesn't mean let through 10 botnet floods, rather than prevent grandma from finding a doctor. That could just mean, for example, don't block grandma because one of her browser headers looks suspiciously like an incompetent script kiddie, even though you can see that her traffic isn't yet part of a DDoS flood. Once you change the parameters to be more consistent with a fair and just society, maybe that means that, say, a Web site's servers do see a brief blip, as a new DDoS attack spins up, so it's not a perfectly smooth ride, but every legitimate person remains served. First, don't run over grandma; apply your engineering creativity with that hard requirement in mind.)
brookst|9 months ago
It sucks, but no sane business would be so invested in equality of experience that they’d allow it to be completely broken for everyone.
spacebanana7|9 months ago
jorvi|9 months ago
I'm not saying you aren't experiencing this, but I am curious: what is your setup that Cloudflare and Google treat you with such suspicion / hostility?
mac-mc|9 months ago
If you don't clear your state or keep its original origin VPN only, you're breaking a big point of using VPNs.
Filligree|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
candiddevmike|9 months ago
sionisrecur|9 months ago
vvillena|9 months ago
lifestyleguru|9 months ago
renatovico|9 months ago
KaiserPro|9 months ago
I don't like the way that large football conglomerates abuse copyright, but then those same rules _should_ be open to me for anything I produce. The main difference is I don't have a team of lawyers.
6stringmerc|9 months ago
If you read between the lines, he’s claiming people will die because Cloudflare doesn’t want to take the time, effort, or money to fix the problem that they easily could by creating a separate system for critical services.
This type of “tech hypochondria” should be absolutely dragged at every opportunity. This guy runs a business and whines that his clients don’t deserve what his business agrees to provide? FOH with that ish mang I ain’t buying it.
kmeisthax|9 months ago
If you define censorship as packet loss, then anything that drops packets is inherently evil, and your business (which ultimately boils down to sending packets along) is inherently good. Ergo anything you do is good and anything that questions or checks your power is evil.
This understanding of free speech didn't evolve in a vaccum, though. It was a response to the "copyright hypochondria" of the publishing industry outfits that have been insisting that "censorship is when free movies". One of the most irritating tenets of copyright maximalism is the idea that copyright somehow backstops free speech, because having an economic incentive to publish is supposed to make politicians think twice[0] about stupid censorship bullshit?
So we have two industries here that have both psyopped themselves into thinking their profit margins are a moral good, unwilling to compromise in any way that would allow legal websites to remain online. Or at least I'm assuming both sides are unwilling to compromise, because La Liga isn't saying anything, and Cloudflare is going to the public rather than the actual courts imposing this blocking order.
[0] The logic doesn't logic here, this is the same kind of thinking that gave us "capitalism has won" in the 1990s and "military alliances will make war impossible" a century prior. Politicians are ultimately polite brokers of violence, and economics is a tool they impose upon us to make us do things in lieu of guns to head. Not the other way around. Politicians will happily censor economically valuable art all day long.
I'm tempted to say "the master's tools can't destroy the master's house", but that saying is complete bullshit for different reasons.
stackedinserter|9 months ago
Bundesliga, F1, NHL and FIFA world cup, that's all I (they) needed.
It turned to total mess. Service A shows F1 but not NHL. Service B shows NHL but not all NHL, only games where my city team plays. Some show LaLiga but not Bundesliga. All cost $30/mo but still show ads. Periodically they show ads instead of the event. If they can't, they split screen show the event in a little rectangle that's 25% of screen space. Dazn, TSN, ESPN are all total scam. You can see a lot of bull riding though.
We cancelled all this nonsense and just moved to pirate sites. Screw this bs.
omnee|9 months ago
latchkey|9 months ago
https://x.com/eastdakota
bantunes|9 months ago
bantunes|9 months ago
dpkirchner|9 months ago
jedberg|9 months ago
Piracy is almost never about the price -- it's almost always about the availability. Especially when it comes to live sports.
pixelesque|9 months ago
JambalayaJimbo|9 months ago
carlosbaraza|9 months ago
My company's website is behind Cloudflare and I discovered this whole situation because someone couldn't access it. Also my home assistant is not accessible from the internet the days with a match. And we use it to open the garage and the house. We learned the lesson the hard way being locked outside until I managed to connect with a VPN. This is just nuts and incredibly frustrating. And for La Liga we are just a bunch of "frikis" (nerds) complaining about it... because we are the only ones that understand what the problem is.
Unfortunately, someone would have to die and a lawsuit to follow, and maybe that could stop this crazy nonsense. E.g. A few days ago I read about someone with diabetes whose device was malfunctioning because of these blocks.
koakuma-chan|9 months ago
bilekas|9 months ago
ErneX|9 months ago
gosub100|9 months ago
otterley|9 months ago
jsheard|9 months ago
AtNightWeCode|9 months ago
reynaldi|9 months ago
vvpan|9 months ago
SXX|9 months ago
So there a lot of convinience and free stuff. It's quite obviously that when I had commercial customers where for whatever reason free tier wasn't anough I juse used them as well. Why not? There are horror stories about their corporate pricing, but for smaller company paying $20-200 for CDN is no brainer.
Also huge massive advantage of CloudFlare is that majority of their services are not metered so it's hard to wake up to $100,000 bill like it can happen with AWS and almost any other CDN provider.
I still believe this kind of centralized MiTM is bad for us all, but honestly I'd rather it be CloudFlare than Amazon, Microsoft or some other "evil corp".
wbl|9 months ago
speedgoose|9 months ago
Ekaros|9 months ago
andrepd|9 months ago
ryandrake|9 months ago
padraigfl|9 months ago
Similarly there's quite a lot of push from the most powerful teams in some of these leagues to break off and form a European Super League; with Spain's two biggest teams being the biggest backers of the project.
ETA: not agreeing with how aggressive they are exactly, but do think long term they're probably in a lot of trouble if/when money starts to properly force a European Super League into existence.
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
refulgentis|9 months ago
(I'm generally pro-piracy and don't know the details here, but am also old enough for "the people like MONEY" to not be a particularly noteworthy quality. The things that jump out to me here are A) is Cloudflare's attempted implication that they just need a better injunction true? B) The sophomoric argument that "people will die due to this" is my "people like MONEY" smell)
sinuhe69|9 months ago
unknown|9 months ago
[deleted]
tbrownaw|9 months ago
neom|9 months ago
mvdtnz|9 months ago
froidpink|9 months ago
[deleted]
tough|9 months ago
Paella and sol heh, not CDN's
Fokamul|9 months ago
Of course, that similar organizations (paid by huge copyright companies) tried the same in my country. And luckily our government listens to local experts (NIC.cz and others) and not to mention, pirating has big tradition here. So they failed to pass this ridiculous law. (blocking IP addresses)
pyb|9 months ago
rafelolszewski|9 months ago
[deleted]
computerthings|9 months ago
[deleted]
AtNightWeCode|9 months ago
[deleted]
absurdo|9 months ago
[deleted]
fuckyou69|9 months ago
[deleted]
doctorpangloss|9 months ago
[deleted]
charcircuit|9 months ago
pier25|9 months ago
https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/1924969551478804543