Context: last year LaLiga (top-level Spanish football league) obtained a court order compelling Spanish ISPs to block certain IPs during football matches, as those IPs have been associated with illegal streams of live matches. Many of those IPs are shared Cloudflare IPs, with the result being many legitimate sites become unavailable in Spain during LaLiga matches
Personally, myself I have been greatly impacted by this measures. Several services of mine were unavailable because LaLiga said so. No notification, no justification, they block and that's all. It has been a shame since the beginning.
(Disclaimer: I don't know the first word about law)
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
It depends on the law in question. Civil law typically requires that the plaintiff's cause of action and desired remedy be defined in the relevant code or statute. This doesn't mean the average person is powerless; every civil code I know of will let you file a lawsuit for breach of contract, for example. I have no knowledge at all of Spanish law, though, so I have no idea who has grounds to sue whom and under what code. If a similar situation happened the US, you'd probably file a lawsuit against Cloudflare, the ISPs, and the relevant sports league and sort it out in court.
You would do the same in a civil law country, sue the sports league and ISP. State that an "unlawful act" happened (blocking your service) and claim damages due to loss of traffic and the extra work it caused you.
But is it actually an unlawful act? A judge decreed that La Liga can demand the blockage of certain IPs. La Liga demanded the blockage of certain IPs. Does the fact that it had an unintended consequence on others somehow make it illegal?
It doesn't have to be an unlawful act. You can recover damages for a lawful act.
Here's France, the Platonic embodiment of European civil law:
> To get damages, you must compile a file that gathers all the elements that make it possible to determine that your damage is compensable
> You must demonstrate that you are the victim of harm: [snip]
> In order for your damage to be repaired, you must also determine:
> - A fault, negligence or infringement committed by another person
> - And that your injury occurred as a result of that fault, negligence or breach.
> Example :
> A person walking down the street hits you because he is looking at his phone. You fall and you break your arm. So you are suffering bodily harm that was caused by the negligence of the person who shoved you. It was precisely this negligence that led to your damage, because if the person did not hit you, you would not have fallen. You can therefore ask him for damages.
Judges aren't perfect and just because they decree something, doesn't mean that the remedy implemented by the ISPs isn't also a violation of some law or regulation. Normally this would be handled by yet another court case, possibly going to a higher court to decide if there are contradictions or conflicts.
The law is no stranger to "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenarios.
Do they not have a charge of "tortious interference with business" in civil law like in common law? It's where one company just goes out of their way to fuck up your business for no good reason.
I think it’s a universal tactic. Maybe it’s even more extreme in the US (what isn’t), but you can drag court proceedings on pretty much anywhere there are courts and legal costs.
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?
Why would you ever accept a mismatched certificate? Even assuming that you think your ISP has no nefarious plans, are you going to be able to rigorously confirm it's their certificate? At that point you've bypassed all the mechanisms in your browser that do this heavy lifting for you.
Bit hard to get notified by the ISP if you effectively try to side-step the way they notify you, don't you think? Also bit weird to blame them for 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.
ISPs have your contact information, and they can also put up notices on their own website. Hijacking somebody else's website with forged replies isn't "the way they notify you," it's a man-in-the-middle attack, and users shouldn't be trained or encouraged to accept it.
> ISPs have your contact information, and they can also put up notices on their own website.
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.
Hijacking secured connections to inject a payload that doesn’t actually come from the source is not a legitimate form of notification - it’s a malicious infrastructure attack.
It was. La Liga isn’t satisfied with the response time of Cloudflare. Cloudflare would not commit to content being taken down during while the match is still going.
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.
More so, La Liga wants Cloudflare to take it down for the entire world, not just block it from Spanish IPs, regardless of whether the host resides in Spain. Cloudflare has refused to do so.
Presumably the Cloudflare network resources in question were not located in Spain and thus not under Spanish jurisduction. Or even if they were, it may be procedurally simpler for the Spanish government to compel ISPs to block IPs.
> it may be procedurally simpler for the Spanish government to compel ISPs to block IPs.
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.
This appears to be using "government" in American English sense, where "government" refers to anyone who works for the state in any capacity, including courts, not just the executive.
“The government” (what we would call “the executive”) being equated to the state as a whole is a uniquely American concept, likely because the word “state” already has a different meaning in the federalist sense.
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.
That's not what the constitution says though. "Government" ("Gobierno") is what an American would understand "executive branch" to be, I'm guessing this is why it's confusing. I tried to make it easier by adding the translations, but maybe that's just making it more confusing :)
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.
What matters is what the OP was communicating with it, and in English it means all state bodies responsible for administration. No one would argue the US Supreme Court is not part of the government.
No. That's what it means in the USA. Judges are not part of the government in the UK, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand either. They're part of the State.
You and others are confusing definition for meaning. An HN rule asks people to engage with the best interpretation of someones argument, in which case it's very clear what the OP was communicating by using "government" where you might use "state", and it's clear from responses that folks clearly know that but have decided to argue over pointless semantics that engage with the posters meaning. Not a single comment tried to engage with the comment with good intentions, so focused on "I gotcha!" vibes over unproductive pedantry. How pointless and petty.
I think I might be mainly responsible for the confusion, but not on purpose or with ill-intent, but literally "this word means differently for us here, who live in the country we're discussing", and I tried to make it easier to understand, but I think I made it worse.
Nothing here been a "gotcha" but basically Spanish-speaking people using English to communicate Spanish concepts to Americans who also speak English but have different understanding of those concepts. Nothing malicious here, just some good old misunderstandings :)
CF would pretty much need to monitor this live in that case which is impossible. The pirates sometimes even create new domains for specific games.
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.
On the one hand, I would tend to agree that making things painful enough might force people to stop ignoring and improve things. On the other, after seeing waves hands at everything since 2016 makes me very skeptical of accelerationism: sometimes things just get worse and worse, there's no bottom to bounce from. Or maybe we just never really hit rock bottom?
Given much of the internet today, I'm not sure if a pan-EU level blocklist on all of cloudflare (damaging as that would be) would even be worse than the status-quo, let alone rock bottom.
That'd likely lead to Cloudflare not being used much in the EU if the service is frequently disrupted. That could be a good thing to prevent their monopoly.
The bottom is just so much farther down than we remember. Tremendous progress was made in the 20th century, particularly in the aftermath of WWII, and we've kind of just been coasting on it for 50 years.
The premise of accelerationism isn't to destroy the world, it's to escape a local maxima.
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:
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.
It took tens of millions of dead to create the relative peace of the later 20th century, that is a hell of a rock bottom. We got the UN, nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, war crimes treaties, free trade, unprecedented prosperity. It's humanity's greatest achievement but we're throwing it all away. Partly due to attacks from monied interests and propagandists, partly to protect Israel (the 15th Crusade), partly because of hatred of peaceniks and bureaucrats, but largely because we've all forgotten the costly lessons.
What other provider than Cloudflare is out there that offers the things Cloudflare does? Why are people not already switching to them if they are available?
Telefonica, the telecom company who bought the rights of LaLiga and btained the judgement against cloudflare IPs, sells some of those services through its business services branch.
There are plenty of giants that are super relevant in the global market but get their ass kicked in specific markets by the local offering. Like ebay, Uber, Starbucks, Taco Bell or whichever US brand/company you can think of.
Telefónica is nothing globally compared to Cloudflare. But in Spain it competes in some areas. Exactly where this ban is happening.
As shitty as the government approach is here we can't keep glossing over the fact that a significant part of the web is now incredibly dependent on Cloudflare and no matter how many times we face issues with huge consequences nobody seems to care.
One of the things that so often gets lost in politics is the concept of a stopping principle. If you know you want to do X, be it "enforce traffic tickets", "spend money chasing drug trafficking", or anything else, you really ought to be able to articulate some sort of stopping principle where you stop pouring the resources in. Maybe the problem is adequately solved. Maybe the further resources don't justify the tiny incremental change. Maybe the intrusion on liberty starts to overwhelm the benefits. Something. Otherwise you just end up going farther and farther down the road with no idea when to stop.
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.
> 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.
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.
…and that was already enough to get Congress to review the situation. The first paragraph in the article we are discussing says:
> 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.
The Cloudflare block has been in effect since December 2024, so it's been in effect almost a year and a half, and Congress is at the "will act", not "has acted" stage.
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.
Blocking large swathes of cloudflare IP space at the entire CIDR range level has significant negative repercussions on thousands of other completely non-football related companies, governments, non-profits, personal projects who are hosting content on them. It's absolutely unfair to those impacted by this extremely heavy handed method.
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.
I completely agree and nothing I posted suggested otherwise.
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.
I think in this case, it's more of a concept of causing damages and not having to pay for them. If LaLiga had to pay for every lost cent of revenue for every site blocked by their too-wide ban, they'd rethink what they're doing.
But with copyright, everything is broken everywhere, so they don't have to.
That depends on whether Spain is interested in being a serious country with perhaps some technology jobs, or a clown show where the highest priority is Sportsball.
I don't understand why you are downvoted. Placing economic interests of entertainment megacorp over the rest of internet is one of the things thats wrong with society these days.
I think if a court enforces a judgement and a court order, regardless of how trivial it was initially, all measures including use of armed force is warranted, the matter at hand stops being the original dispute, but sovereignity and power of the law.
Does it matter that it happens over IP or CSAM? It doesn't happen over CSAM because there is no dispute there, there is no desync there between spain,the us and cloudflare.
But the mechanisms around these court orders aren't much different than those that would be used for other illegal or contentious material.
If a vendor chooses to pool and encrypt connections in a way that it is impossible to filter by hosts, and that vendor doesn't comply with court orders, then a country should absolutely block that entire vendor.
The liability of an unrelated pooled service failing is either the responsibility of the vendor or the application that chooses that vendor, not on the courts for enforcing the law without a subjective 'stopping point'.
What these vendors do is very similar to pooling in the layering phase of money laundering, but with packets: get traffic from legitimate customers, mix it with traffic from unlawful customers, pool them, and send encrypted EHLO so that the origin domain is encrypted and the packet source /destination are replaced by the vendor's. If this were done with money it would instantly trip all AML flags, but the tech world is much younger and hasn't discovered that laundering isn't cool or free as in freedom, it's a tool that the baddies use.
Nothing stops the government from ordering Cloudflare to reveal the origin IP addresses of websites and then tracking them down and arresting them. They just don't want to. Cloudflare complies with court orders but the government doesn't think that's good enough. The government wants Cloudflare to be the internet police.
1000%
I got legit Cloudflare Workers Anycast IPs that I was using for websockets blocked.
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.
Thanks for the heads up!
I'm using it self-hosted on a Hetzner VPS.
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)
Genuinely never thought I'd see the day. This has been horrible for me running an event ticketing business in Spain... where downtime is basically not acceptable.
Why would you be using Cloudflare when there are better options, especially if you've known for years that this has been going on? Seems like a poor business decision really.
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...
Right I mean I had to move off Cloudflare. I looked into some creative options like DNS steering to keep it for all other countries, but in the end it was cleaner to just move away entirely which was a shame.
I'm interested in how those conversations went between the LaLiga and Cloudflare that convinced them to do this. I know I'm not Cloudflare, but if a company (any company) came to me demanding blocking IP ranges according the their schedule that would require a bunch of work on my end to make it happen, there's going to be a lot of push back. It'd take a dump truck load of money to make that happen.
No conversation at all needed to happen. LaLiga got a court order. The order specifically stated that if LaLiga flag your IP address, the internet providers in Spain must block it during the match. Cloudflare have nothing to do with it.
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.
Not true, they just proxy the pirating sites to their true host. They have about the same responsability as the ISP themselves. Maybe you want Cloudflare to decide what to proxy and what to block without a judge ordering it.
My ISP obfuscates my location by replacing it with an IP address . However, if the government wants to know my location, they can ask my ISP to find out a physical address based on an IP address. They can also ask Cloudflare to find out an origin IP address based on a domain name. This is normal. It's also slow. The Spanish government doesn't want to bother arresting pirates, it would rather be seen doing something about the problem, without doing something about the problem.
> Through this conduct, Cloudflare is actively enabling illegal activities such as human trafficking, prostitution, pornography, counterfeiting, fraud, and scams, among other things.
That statement from La Liga is nothing short of embarrassing. Raving about child pornography, in a simple copyright infringement case? And the repeated focus on "IPs" is incredibly disingenuous; Cloudflare's multiplexing of half the internet onto a small number of IP addresses is not exactly a secret in the tech community.
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.
That's not how this worked. Cloudflare was not involved at all. Spanish ISPs were ordered by Spanish courts to block their customers from accessing specific IP addresses.
We actually had to revert our rollout of CF Workers because enough of our users were in Spain and couldn’t access endpoints at seemingly arbitrary times (due to the matches)
They are only seemingly arbitrary to people that are not actually paying attention. Now that people are, the blocks are known in advance to those that look at a the schedule. Sure, it sucks to have to build this into your own schedule, but that's better than it happening "unexpectedly". You could do something crazy like import these times into your own calendar with reminders.
Absolutely ridiculous to make people do that. What you're proposing is not a real solution. The real solution is to not block wide IP ranges at the random desire of some private football league.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Obviously the schedule of matches is public. But what are you suggesting the business does during this time...? Their site is offline.
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?
What you need is some form of - European - megacorp getting hurt by this and going after LaLiga for a ridiculously huge, LaLiga-destroying amount of money.
That a sports league was empowered by the courts to do this in first place is buck wild to me. I live in America, so it's not like I'm unaccustomed to the government giving preferential treatment to corporations but I cannot fathom a court allowing the NFL to tell ISPs to block IPs across the entire country.
America produces many things more valuable than the NFL, is the difference. LaLiga is presently the single most valuable brand in Spain. When e.g. Google asks low-polarization parts of the government for things, it frequently gets them.
I wonder why didn't Cloudflare just say that technically they can't block the IPs for a short time as they have no mechanism to do it and it would take a significant amount of $$ to develop it.
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.
Very ironically I get this error trying to read the article:
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....
I understand organizations as LaLiga wanting more money but massive IP blockage seems quite unfair, effective maybe but unfair so this news does not come as a surprise.
Who says it's effective? The pirate streams still go up every game, as far as people report here. They can just change their ips or hosts occasionally.
It's the honest businesses who probably won't go through the effort of evading the block every time.
Also, clients of the streaming sites are quick to find and spread workarounds, mainly VPNs. But the small shop in the same IP selling to middle/older aged lose business and look unreliable to their clients, that can't even spell VPN.
Cloudflare don't want to lose the piracy stream sites as customers, so they can't throw them off their platform. They want to specifically block the stream sites and specifically only for Spanish visitors, so the only thing they can do is reject Spanish traffic for specific IP-ranges in their infrastructure. Result is a bunch of collateral damage.
Yeah, like in the massively ilegal user spying case with LaLiga app, where the fine can be huge in Spain (kinda like messing like the FCC in the US if not worse).
I'm torn on this. It always should have gone through the courts, but the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content and not doing anything about it.
They were left with two choices if Cloudflare refuse to act. Either accept it (oh well, too big to fail), or block them.
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
> the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content
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.
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 faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here
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.
> Blocking IPs was never going to do much to solve the issue. It's a wack-a-mole game.
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.
If there’s no reasonable alternative that satisfies their “something must be done” without creating massive negative consequences for the rest of society, then in fact something must not be done, and the large corporate entity will either have to settle for not making as much money as they think they’re entitled to or figure out some other way to recapture those viewers.
> massive negative consequences for the rest of society
What are these "massive negative consequences" you're talking about? Some IPs blocks from Cloudflare are blocked for ~90 minutes, some times a week. As repeated so many times, I agree it sucks, but it's not "internet is unavailable most of the week", it's "some websites are unavailable for some hours of the week".
And also again, if you don't see "something must be done" you're not able to adopt their perspective, so of course you'll never understand this, because you're seemingly refusing to. Fine, you do what you want, but don't mislead others what the real situation is, just because you're unable to grasp it from the other side.
> it's not "internet is unavailable most of the week", it's "some websites are unavailable for some hours of the week"
A good chunk of the internet goes through Cloudflare. Something like 40% of the top 1000 websites use it.
Services depend on it (CI etc). SaaS companies are shut down. Businesses can't sell. Etc. It's a disaster. It's amazing how oblivious you seem to the gravity of the situation.
> It's amazing how oblivious you seem to the gravity of the situation.
I'm not, I don't know how I could, as every single time the blocks happen, I'm personally affected by it, since I live in Spain.
But, seemingly we have wildly different experiences. None of the companies I buy stuff from our down during those periods, it's not a disaster as far as I notice it, but clearly you do, so now I'm curious what exactly you're doing during these 2-3 hours a week when this happen that makes you so affected by this, while I'm not?
I'm genuinely curious, not a "gotcha" or anything, I just want to understand your situation better, since our experience differs so much. Which region are you in and with what ISP?
> And also again, if you don't see "something must be done" you're not able to adopt their perspective, so of course you'll never understand this, because you're seemingly refusing to. Fine, you do what you want, but don't mislead others what the real situation is, just because you're unable to grasp it from the other side.
I can see their point of view. I understand they consider this a disaster. I understand they are insistent that something must be done. I am saying that the remedy they are proposing has too many negative consequences to the rest of society to be allowed. I am saying that their interests, sincerely held though they may be, do not trump the interests of the entire rest of the country, and therefore their injury is not satisfiable in the manner they wish it were. As the man once said, you can’t always get what you want, no matter how large an economic enterprise you’re running.
I think the difference is that Cloudflare is the one party providing streaming access for their customers: not just anyone can proxy the data through Cloudflare, they need to be a Cloudflare customer first.
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.
You're the customer of your ISP who's the customer of another ISP who's the customer of another ISP who Hacker News is a customer of.
The Digital Markets Act speaks of "conduits" instead of speaking of the specific form the conduits may take. It does not give special rights to someone who forwards IP packets unmodified or to someone who receives IP packets and reissues other IP packets or to someone who changes the IP addresses in the packets. It only cares about the net effect of the transmission, and the fact is that Cloudflare is a conduit with caching.
Because they own the IPs that pirates are connecting to which makes it relevant for those IPs to be blocked. They are the easiest IPs to find since you can just resolve the domain of the piracy site.
Why are the IPs the relevant things? There are domains as well. And origin servers. Why not block the domain or the origin server, which wouldn't have collateral damage.
It's disingenuous to believe there was any merit in blocking Cloudflare. Not only this was never going to solve the piracy problem but it was always more of a pissing context.
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's unreasonable to expect cloudflare etc to be able to proactively identify legal vs illegal streams. The companies who own the copyrights can't even get that right much less a third party that has no idea if a stream is licensed.
Why though? Why is it unreasonable to expect a company to have some level of responsibility for serving clients that are using their platform for illegal activity?
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.
Because the expectation that companies police every single bit that crosses their network is completely unworkable. It's functionally impossible to tell a licensed stream from an unlicensed stream, the distinction isn't available to Cloudflare or any other networking provider it's in private contracts between the copyright owner and the streaming provider and there's a whole snarl of copyright exceptions.
To make the distinction the LaLiga would want they'd have to inspect every single packet, determine if this is a LaLiga game, determine if it's the current game, and determine if it's a licensed provider. There's a reason section 230 was created in the US.
I mean, how do we qualify which companies get punished for which crimes?
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?
That is something we'll need to figure out. Just because it requires some work to figure out where to draw the line, it doesn't make it wrong to draw one.
Banks are generally required to check that their customers are not laundering money. In a lot of countries it's illegal to buy or sell goods that you know are very likely stolen.
It don't think it's outrageous to expect more action from Cloudflare when they must know that their service is used for protecting criminal sites.
Relatedly I'd want the betting companies whose ads are shown on these illegal pages to have some amount of responsibility for where their ads are shown, and the same goes for well-renowned websites that show clearly deceiving ads.
This law on banks is a bad law. It doesn't stop money laundering, it does make it hard for lots of people to have bank accounts. We should abolish that law, not copy it.
Cloudflare can assign IPs based off customer reputation. High risk customers get high risk IPs. This way legitimate businesses stay on IPs that don't get blacklisted and sketchier businesses go on high risk IPs before they potentially get banned.
Any action by cloudflare before a court order or notice would be proactive. There's no way to effectively block streamers of live shows because they can create new sites or accounts for each event and by the time they're found, reported and cloudflare reasonably reviews and acts on them the event will be long over.
What do you expect cloudflare to actually do about these streams?
A report content form, like DMCA, with support people behind processing the tickets. It already exists.
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.
Afaik, Cloudflare are asked to block an IP, to which they answer that is not a valid IP, but a shared one, please be more precise. Being more precise takes effort and time, so they opted to ban the IP at ISP level, and they don't have to ask anyone.
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
Even if they could detect that that'd require peeking into every bit that passes through their service(s) looking for offending content AND require knowing it's not a licensed stream. The latter is own can of worms, they can't know if any particular piece of data is properly licensed or not. Bot detection is relatively easy in comparison, the distinction between licensed and illegal streams is 100% vibes from cloudflare's available data.
How much of a responsibility should the provider have to scan what they're hosting and proactively make a judgment on whether they should block it or not?
Context: last year LaLiga (top-level Spanish football league) obtained a court order compelling Spanish ISPs to block certain IPs during football matches, as those IPs have been associated with illegal streams of live matches. Many of those IPs are shared Cloudflare IPs, with the result being many legitimate sites become unavailable in Spain during LaLiga matches
https://cybernews.com/news/spain-laliga-streaming-piracy-cam...
Personally, myself I have been greatly impacted by this measures. Several services of mine were unavailable because LaLiga said so. No notification, no justification, they block and that's all. It has been a shame since the beginning.
What would it look like if you sued La Liga for using their lawful blocking power in a way that injured you?
I don’t know that this would work that well given Spain is civil law, not common law
(Disclaimer: I don't know the first word about law)
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
It depends on the law in question. Civil law typically requires that the plaintiff's cause of action and desired remedy be defined in the relevant code or statute. This doesn't mean the average person is powerless; every civil code I know of will let you file a lawsuit for breach of contract, for example. I have no knowledge at all of Spanish law, though, so I have no idea who has grounds to sue whom and under what code. If a similar situation happened the US, you'd probably file a lawsuit against Cloudflare, the ISPs, and the relevant sports league and sort it out in court.
You would do the same in a civil law country, sue the sports league and ISP. State that an "unlawful act" happened (blocking your service) and claim damages due to loss of traffic and the extra work it caused you.
But is it actually an unlawful act? A judge decreed that La Liga can demand the blockage of certain IPs. La Liga demanded the blockage of certain IPs. Does the fact that it had an unintended consequence on others somehow make it illegal?
It doesn't have to be an unlawful act. You can recover damages for a lawful act.
Here's France, the Platonic embodiment of European civil law:
> To get damages, you must compile a file that gathers all the elements that make it possible to determine that your damage is compensable
> You must demonstrate that you are the victim of harm: [snip]
> In order for your damage to be repaired, you must also determine:
> - A fault, negligence or infringement committed by another person
> - And that your injury occurred as a result of that fault, negligence or breach.
> Example :
> A person walking down the street hits you because he is looking at his phone. You fall and you break your arm. So you are suffering bodily harm that was caused by the negligence of the person who shoved you. It was precisely this negligence that led to your damage, because if the person did not hit you, you would not have fallen. You can therefore ask him for damages.
( https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1... ; note the banner saying "This page has been automatically translated. Please refer to the page in French if needed.")
Judges aren't perfect and just because they decree something, doesn't mean that the remedy implemented by the ISPs isn't also a violation of some law or regulation. Normally this would be handled by yet another court case, possibly going to a higher court to decide if there are contradictions or conflicts.
The law is no stranger to "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenarios.
I mean, really, the appropriate avenue is for the legislature to clarify law, which is the subject of the article
[dead]
Do they not have a charge of "tortious interference with business" in civil law like in common law? It's where one company just goes out of their way to fuck up your business for no good reason.
The legal system in many countries is very, very different from that is the US (or UK).
A very expensive lawsuit that, even if successful, will result in a difficult to enforce judgment?
What's difficult about enforcing a judgment against La Liga? They're as public as it's possible to be.
They have deep pockets for dragging this on much longer than you can afford it.
I doubt that will work outside of the U.S.A.
I think it’s a universal tactic. Maybe it’s even more extreme in the US (what isn’t), but you can drag court proceedings on pretty much anywhere there are courts and legal costs.
Might they appeal?
> No notification
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?
Why would you ever accept a mismatched certificate? Even assuming that you think your ISP has no nefarious plans, are you going to be able to rigorously confirm it's their certificate? At that point you've bypassed all the mechanisms in your browser that do this heavy lifting for you.
Erm, where is the danger in a mismatched certificate, if all I want is to get some noncritical information from a blog or something?
Local privilege escalation in your browser is a danger. They can also abuse any privileges you gave to the website, such as camera and microphone.
Why would I give a "random blog" access to my camera or microphon?
And how can a wrong certificate lead to local privilege escalation?
Why wouldn't you? Your computer is not gonna be hijacked by it, and you want to see what shit your ISP is now up to.
Obviously I don't do my banking like that...
Presumes you're using the ISP's DNS and not custom servers or DoH.
Bit hard to get notified by the ISP if you effectively try to side-step the way they notify you, don't you think? Also bit weird to blame them for 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.
ISPs have your contact information, and they can also put up notices on their own website. Hijacking somebody else's website with forged replies isn't "the way they notify you," it's a man-in-the-middle attack, and users shouldn't be trained or encouraged to accept it.
> ISPs have your contact information, and they can also put up notices on their own website.
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.
Hijacking secured connections to inject a payload that doesn’t actually come from the source is not a legitimate form of notification - it’s a malicious infrastructure attack.
Maybe someone can explain, but I don't understand why such an order isn't applied to cloudflare themselves?
It was. La Liga isn’t satisfied with the response time of Cloudflare. Cloudflare would not commit to content being taken down during while the match is still going.
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.
Cloudflare said they created a dedicated hotline for LaLiga, and apparently it wasn't enough for them
More so, La Liga wants Cloudflare to take it down for the entire world, not just block it from Spanish IPs, regardless of whether the host resides in Spain. Cloudflare has refused to do so.
Presumably the Cloudflare network resources in question were not located in Spain and thus not under Spanish jurisduction. Or even if they were, it may be procedurally simpler for the Spanish government to compel ISPs to block IPs.
> it may be procedurally simpler for the Spanish government to compel ISPs to block IPs.
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.
This appears to be using "government" in American English sense, where "government" refers to anyone who works for the state in any capacity, including courts, not just the executive.
Do you have an English word you can recommend that refers to what (in American English) I call the entire government of a nation?
The state.
“The government” (what we would call “the executive”) being equated to the state as a whole is a uniquely American concept, likely because the word “state” already has a different meaning in the federalist sense.
> went to the judges
Which are part of the Spanish government.
> 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.
The judiciary is part of the government. Being an independent branch doesn't change that. Government doesn't just mean legislative.
That's not what the constitution says though. "Government" ("Gobierno") is what an American would understand "executive branch" to be, I'm guessing this is why it's confusing. I tried to make it easier by adding the translations, but maybe that's just making it more confusing :)
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.
[flagged]
Language nit: in english, "add to that" is more natural
Appreciated.
That’s true in America, but the word government is applied more narrowly elsewhere, including in the UK.
What matters is what the OP was communicating with it, and in English it means all state bodies responsible for administration. No one would argue the US Supreme Court is not part of the government.
No. That's what it means in the USA. Judges are not part of the government in the UK, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand either. They're part of the State.
You and others are confusing definition for meaning. An HN rule asks people to engage with the best interpretation of someones argument, in which case it's very clear what the OP was communicating by using "government" where you might use "state", and it's clear from responses that folks clearly know that but have decided to argue over pointless semantics that engage with the posters meaning. Not a single comment tried to engage with the comment with good intentions, so focused on "I gotcha!" vibes over unproductive pedantry. How pointless and petty.
I think I might be mainly responsible for the confusion, but not on purpose or with ill-intent, but literally "this word means differently for us here, who live in the country we're discussing", and I tried to make it easier to understand, but I think I made it worse.
Nothing here been a "gotcha" but basically Spanish-speaking people using English to communicate Spanish concepts to Americans who also speak English but have different understanding of those concepts. Nothing malicious here, just some good old misunderstandings :)
Nah. There was some genuine confusion. And then there were some Americans incorrectly asserting that their usage was an English language thing.
The judiciary is part of the state. The government is also part of the state. They are different parts.
Government means precisely just the executive branch in international English across most polities with institutions.
In many countries, the word “government” only refers to the executive branch
The rest are often called civil servants.
CF would pretty much need to monitor this live in that case which is impossible. The pirates sometimes even create new domains for specific games.
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.
> 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.
The state hasn't setup processes to enable that. It will happen
In Italy, Serie A got the approval of Government to do so, which is even worse
I fervently hope that no one manages to obtain a similar judgment at the pan-EU level, that would be a disaster.
I don't think there's an injunction mechanism like that at the EU level
And even if there were I doubt the legal basis in EU law exists for such an injunction
yet
I actually hope they do. this will force a proper reckoning about the situation and maybe a proper fix.
On the one hand, I would tend to agree that making things painful enough might force people to stop ignoring and improve things. On the other, after seeing waves hands at everything since 2016 makes me very skeptical of accelerationism: sometimes things just get worse and worse, there's no bottom to bounce from. Or maybe we just never really hit rock bottom?
Well, this very article is describing how popular outrage in Spain is forcing the legislature to take action against La Liga.
(Yes, the action described in the article is explictly not legally binding. That was also true of the Brexit vote.)
Given much of the internet today, I'm not sure if a pan-EU level blocklist on all of cloudflare (damaging as that would be) would even be worse than the status-quo, let alone rock bottom.
That'd likely lead to Cloudflare not being used much in the EU if the service is frequently disrupted. That could be a good thing to prevent their monopoly.
Eventually, some apparatchik will try to access pornhub during a sports match and fail, it'll resolve the issue quickly
The bottom is just so much farther down than we remember. Tremendous progress was made in the 20th century, particularly in the aftermath of WWII, and we've kind of just been coasting on it for 50 years.
Accelerationism was always a terrible idea.
The premise of accelerationism isn't to destroy the world, it's to escape a local maxima.
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.
It took tens of millions of dead to create the relative peace of the later 20th century, that is a hell of a rock bottom. We got the UN, nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, war crimes treaties, free trade, unprecedented prosperity. It's humanity's greatest achievement but we're throwing it all away. Partly due to attacks from monied interests and propagandists, partly to protect Israel (the 15th Crusade), partly because of hatred of peaceniks and bureaucrats, but largely because we've all forgotten the costly lessons.
At that scale, it might make Cloudflare customers reconsider their affiliations. It might not be as terrible.
By affecting only Spain, the impact is too small for most websites to care.
If they compelled Cloudflare to do so, what makes you think they couldn't compel whatever provider those customers then switch to?
What other provider than Cloudflare is out there that offers the things Cloudflare does? Why are people not already switching to them if they are available?
Telefonica, the telecom company who bought the rights of LaLiga and btained the judgement against cloudflare IPs, sells some of those services through its business services branch.
To say that Telefonica offers even remotely the same services and features that Cloudflare does is a lie at best.
The keyword was "some".
In the same way that a roadside lemonade stand run by a child offers some of the same services as a grocery store.
There are plenty of giants that are super relevant in the global market but get their ass kicked in specific markets by the local offering. Like ebay, Uber, Starbucks, Taco Bell or whichever US brand/company you can think of.
Telefónica is nothing globally compared to Cloudflare. But in Spain it competes in some areas. Exactly where this ban is happening.
It is not hard to see a conflict of interest.
Akamai is the OG Cloudflare, just not as cool.
And costs 1000x more
Yes, trusting Cloudflare to be the arbiter of the internet will work out great.
Just as trying to make social media be the arbiter of speech...
As shitty as the government approach is here we can't keep glossing over the fact that a significant part of the web is now incredibly dependent on Cloudflare and no matter how many times we face issues with huge consequences nobody seems to care.
One of the things that so often gets lost in politics is the concept of a stopping principle. If you know you want to do X, be it "enforce traffic tickets", "spend money chasing drug trafficking", or anything else, you really ought to be able to articulate some sort of stopping principle where you stop pouring the resources in. Maybe the problem is adequately solved. Maybe the further resources don't justify the tiny incremental change. Maybe the intrusion on liberty starts to overwhelm the benefits. Something. Otherwise you just end up going farther and farther down the road with no idea when to stop.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Cloudflare serves a whole bunch of legal and genuinely important services, and yet there was enough pressure to block them off.
…and that was already enough to get Congress to review the situation. The first paragraph in the article we are discussing says:
> 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.
The Cloudflare block has been in effect since December 2024, so it's been in effect almost a year and a half, and Congress is at the "will act", not "has acted" stage.
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.
Nobody was claiming that future blockages couldn’t happen.
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.
Blocking large swathes of cloudflare IP space at the entire CIDR range level has significant negative repercussions on thousands of other completely non-football related companies, governments, non-profits, personal projects who are hosting content on them. It's absolutely unfair to those impacted by this extremely heavy handed method.
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.
I completely agree and nothing I posted suggested otherwise.
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.
I think in this case, it's more of a concept of causing damages and not having to pay for them. If LaLiga had to pay for every lost cent of revenue for every site blocked by their too-wide ban, they'd rethink what they're doing.
But with copyright, everything is broken everywhere, so they don't have to.
Why not declare that the value of La Liga's "IP" is a net negative and holding society back, and then simply invalidate all of it on the spot?
That depends on whether Spain is interested in being a serious country with perhaps some technology jobs, or a clown show where the highest priority is Sportsball.
I don't understand why you are downvoted. Placing economic interests of entertainment megacorp over the rest of internet is one of the things thats wrong with society these days.
I think if a court enforces a judgement and a court order, regardless of how trivial it was initially, all measures including use of armed force is warranted, the matter at hand stops being the original dispute, but sovereignity and power of the law.
Does it matter that it happens over IP or CSAM? It doesn't happen over CSAM because there is no dispute there, there is no desync there between spain,the us and cloudflare.
But the mechanisms around these court orders aren't much different than those that would be used for other illegal or contentious material.
If a vendor chooses to pool and encrypt connections in a way that it is impossible to filter by hosts, and that vendor doesn't comply with court orders, then a country should absolutely block that entire vendor.
The liability of an unrelated pooled service failing is either the responsibility of the vendor or the application that chooses that vendor, not on the courts for enforcing the law without a subjective 'stopping point'.
What these vendors do is very similar to pooling in the layering phase of money laundering, but with packets: get traffic from legitimate customers, mix it with traffic from unlawful customers, pool them, and send encrypted EHLO so that the origin domain is encrypted and the packet source /destination are replaced by the vendor's. If this were done with money it would instantly trip all AML flags, but the tech world is much younger and hasn't discovered that laundering isn't cool or free as in freedom, it's a tool that the baddies use.
Nothing stops the government from ordering Cloudflare to reveal the origin IP addresses of websites and then tracking them down and arresting them. They just don't want to. Cloudflare complies with court orders but the government doesn't think that's good enough. The government wants Cloudflare to be the internet police.
Finally. The situation is ridiculous and afaik it really didn't do anything to solve the piracy problem.
1000% I got legit Cloudflare Workers Anycast IPs that I was using for websockets blocked.
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.
I don't think RustDesk was hit by this. If you weren't able to access it two weeks ago, it was due to an outage on their end: https://github.com/rustdesk/uptime/issues/53
Thanks for the heads up! I'm using it self-hosted on a Hetzner VPS.
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)
I’m suprised no one has sued over it, some sort of class action.
Who would you sue? The courts?
In the US, I think it would be covered by this: https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_24
So presumably the analogue to that in Spain.
Genuinely never thought I'd see the day. This has been horrible for me running an event ticketing business in Spain... where downtime is basically not acceptable.
Are you saying your event-ticketing business having downtime is not acceptable or that having downtime for the Spanish demographic is not acceptable?
For the business. eg you don't want to be able to not sell tickets, or scan tickets on the door...
Why would you be using Cloudflare when there are better options, especially if you've known for years that this has been going on? Seems like a poor business decision really.
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...
Right I mean I had to move off Cloudflare. I looked into some creative options like DNS steering to keep it for all other countries, but in the end it was cleaner to just move away entirely which was a shame.
Is there a good alternative option for their reverse tunnels/ways to hide my real egress that'll also block the bots?
I've used AWS CloudFront & Bunny on some projects
A VPS?
I'm interested in how those conversations went between the LaLiga and Cloudflare that convinced them to do this. I know I'm not Cloudflare, but if a company (any company) came to me demanding blocking IP ranges according the their schedule that would require a bunch of work on my end to make it happen, there's going to be a lot of push back. It'd take a dump truck load of money to make that happen.
No conversation at all needed to happen. LaLiga got a court order. The order specifically stated that if LaLiga flag your IP address, the internet providers in Spain must block it during the match. Cloudflare have nothing to do with it.
Who could have forseen, that LaLiga would end up abusing this system!?
Cloudflare are very much pushing back: https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela...
This statement really makes no sense..
> 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.
Cloudflare are actively involved in publishing this content — they are equivalent to the hosting provider.
Not true, they just proxy the pirating sites to their true host. They have about the same responsability as the ISP themselves. Maybe you want Cloudflare to decide what to proxy and what to block without a judge ordering it.
Your ISP will route your packets and not obfuscate the original destination nor cache any content, provide Ddos protections, WAF,...
Cloudflare does.
My ISP obfuscates my location by replacing it with an IP address . However, if the government wants to know my location, they can ask my ISP to find out a physical address based on an IP address. They can also ask Cloudflare to find out an origin IP address based on a domain name. This is normal. It's also slow. The Spanish government doesn't want to bother arresting pirates, it would rather be seen doing something about the problem, without doing something about the problem.
> Your ISP will route your packets and not obfuscate the original destination nor cache any content,
That's not true. ISPs modify returned content. https://lukerodgers.ca/2023/12/09/optimum-isp-is-mitming-its... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NebuAd
That's true, at least for most internet service providers. You're just nitpicking for the sake of it.
it's La Liga, what do you expect?
> Through this conduct, Cloudflare is actively enabling illegal activities such as human trafficking, prostitution, pornography, counterfeiting, fraud, and scams, among other things.
Pornography is illegal in Spain now?
Prostitution isn't illegal, is a-legal (the prostitutes register as waitress or similar). Pimping is illegal.
hey, at least they've dropped terrorism and organized crime from the list of "if you support piracy you are really supporting..."
That statement from La Liga is nothing short of embarrassing. Raving about child pornography, in a simple copyright infringement case? And the repeated focus on "IPs" is incredibly disingenuous; Cloudflare's multiplexing of half the internet onto a small number of IP addresses is not exactly a secret in the tech community.
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.
conservative (as in old school, football friendly) judges are not exactly new
From the link:
> Cloudflare has facilitated by knowingly protecting criminal organisations for profit
The propaganda is strong with these guys ...
That's not how this worked. Cloudflare was not involved at all. Spanish ISPs were ordered by Spanish courts to block their customers from accessing specific IP addresses.
I thought the government just forced their ISPs to block. Was CF involved at all?
It wasn’t a conversation. It was a court order.
Cloudflare are apparently not involved. It's an order against local ISPs to block Cloudflare.
It is insane that you could block access to hundreds of sites just because some people decided to watch an ilegal stream.
try 45 million sites including many absolutely critical to people's lives and health.
https://trends.builtwith.com/cdn/Cloudflare
And people wonder why Spain is doing so poorly when tribal corporate entertainment takes such a priority over everything else.
I wonder why you think "Spain is doing so poorly".
hope that doesn't end on "monitoring the situation" and doing nothing. entire cloudflare IP blocks are being blocked, even on work days
We actually had to revert our rollout of CF Workers because enough of our users were in Spain and couldn’t access endpoints at seemingly arbitrary times (due to the matches)
Your customers should be proper Spaniards and be watching the match, hence not noticing the downtime! /s
Your answer is better than mine
They are only seemingly arbitrary to people that are not actually paying attention. Now that people are, the blocks are known in advance to those that look at a the schedule. Sure, it sucks to have to build this into your own schedule, but that's better than it happening "unexpectedly". You could do something crazy like import these times into your own calendar with reminders.
Absolutely ridiculous to make people do that. What you're proposing is not a real solution. The real solution is to not block wide IP ranges at the random desire of some private football league.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Obviously the schedule of matches is public. But what are you suggesting the business does during this time...? Their site is offline.
Service Unavailable For Scheduled Maintenance
However, my post was a tounge-in-cheek response.
Finally. For anyone affected by this, I have been using Clouflare WARP successfully to bypass this block.
I hadn't heard about Cloudflare WARP. Found this Reddit thread with questions/comments I also had, https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/ldejnt/how_is_c..., and also what I think is CF's main website for WARP info, https://one.one.one.one/ (which I must confess I had never head even though I use 1.1.1.1).
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!
Great, this means Telefonica reliability goes from zero nines to still below zero nines.
Joining a select club that includes GitHub and Anthropic yay
Nah, those two have a proud one nine of reliability. It just feels like it must be less when you eat every single outage to your face.
The lofty .88889
Negative nines
What you need is some form of - European - megacorp getting hurt by this and going after LaLiga for a ridiculously huge, LaLiga-destroying amount of money.
That a sports league was empowered by the courts to do this in first place is buck wild to me. I live in America, so it's not like I'm unaccustomed to the government giving preferential treatment to corporations but I cannot fathom a court allowing the NFL to tell ISPs to block IPs across the entire country.
America produces many things more valuable than the NFL, is the difference. LaLiga is presently the single most valuable brand in Spain. When e.g. Google asks low-polarization parts of the government for things, it frequently gets them.
I wonder why didn't Cloudflare just say that technically they can't block the IPs for a short time as they have no mechanism to do it and it would take a significant amount of $$ to develop it.
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 not blocked by Cloudflare, but by ISPs (as far as I understand)
Love the hypocrisy (my IP is blocked):
403 ERROR The request could not be satisfied. Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)
CloudFront may sound like Cloudflare, but it is an unrelated AWS service (https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/)
(Disclaimer: I work for Cloudflare)
It's related because it does the same thing.
> The PP and Vox voted against it. Junts abstained from the session.
This is the bad guys.
Very ironically I get this error trying to read the article:
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....
I understand organizations as LaLiga wanting more money but massive IP blockage seems quite unfair, effective maybe but unfair so this news does not come as a surprise.
Who says it's effective? The pirate streams still go up every game, as far as people report here. They can just change their ips or hosts occasionally.
It's the honest businesses who probably won't go through the effort of evading the block every time.
Also, clients of the streaming sites are quick to find and spread workarounds, mainly VPNs. But the small shop in the same IP selling to middle/older aged lose business and look unreliable to their clients, that can't even spell VPN.
It's been going on for a while, but a couple of weeks ago they announced it would be expanded to other sports, that's probably why
Sorry. Why can't an indivudual bad actor site be targeted without affecting non bad actor sites? Why does the blocking have to be so broad?
Cloudflare don't want to lose the piracy stream sites as customers, so they can't throw them off their platform. They want to specifically block the stream sites and specifically only for Spanish visitors, so the only thing they can do is reject Spanish traffic for specific IP-ranges in their infrastructure. Result is a bunch of collateral damage.
Because both sites are on the same IP address.
Presumably that's a choice Cloudflare can make.
The court can order Cloudflare to block a website, but that isn't what the court did.
If IP addresses are a shared resource then it shouldn't be possible to block an IP or IP range because some of the domains are hosting illegal stuff.
This is like blocking access to a street, a block of flats or even an estate because drug dealers and hookers operate from them.
Wait, so a private company in the business of men kicking balls around a field was able to make this happen without government support?! How?
Their supreme court allowed it. Their congress is now overturning it.
Yeah, like in the massively ilegal user spying case with LaLiga app, where the fine can be huge in Spain (kinda like messing like the FCC in the US if not worse).
So politically speaking how influential is LaLiga compared to other nation's football leagues, or America's largest sports leagues?
Play stupid games... win stupid prizes.
The judicial, nation-wide blocks on CDN IPs is absurd and should have never been allowed.
That shows the power of the Spanish FA and Telefonica together.
It’s not football; it’s LaLiga.
About time, this was crazy and should result in some action against cloudflare for allowing it
You can’t punish companies for court order against them. Thats insane
An IT peon at La Liga has the chance to do the funniest thing …
And yet democrata.ch, who released the article, blocks me from accessing their free website because of my VPN :)
I'm torn on this. It always should have gone through the courts, but the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content and not doing anything about it. They were left with two choices if Cloudflare refuse to act. Either accept it (oh well, too big to fail), or block them.
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
> the fact is that cloudflare are providing access to illegal content
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.
> Why not eg block Google Chrome?
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 faithfully trying to adopt their perspective here
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.
> Blocking IPs was never going to do much to solve the issue. It's a wack-a-mole game.
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.
If there’s no reasonable alternative that satisfies their “something must be done” without creating massive negative consequences for the rest of society, then in fact something must not be done, and the large corporate entity will either have to settle for not making as much money as they think they’re entitled to or figure out some other way to recapture those viewers.
> massive negative consequences for the rest of society
What are these "massive negative consequences" you're talking about? Some IPs blocks from Cloudflare are blocked for ~90 minutes, some times a week. As repeated so many times, I agree it sucks, but it's not "internet is unavailable most of the week", it's "some websites are unavailable for some hours of the week".
And also again, if you don't see "something must be done" you're not able to adopt their perspective, so of course you'll never understand this, because you're seemingly refusing to. Fine, you do what you want, but don't mislead others what the real situation is, just because you're unable to grasp it from the other side.
> it's not "internet is unavailable most of the week", it's "some websites are unavailable for some hours of the week"
A good chunk of the internet goes through Cloudflare. Something like 40% of the top 1000 websites use it.
Services depend on it (CI etc). SaaS companies are shut down. Businesses can't sell. Etc. It's a disaster. It's amazing how oblivious you seem to the gravity of the situation.
> It's amazing how oblivious you seem to the gravity of the situation.
I'm not, I don't know how I could, as every single time the blocks happen, I'm personally affected by it, since I live in Spain.
But, seemingly we have wildly different experiences. None of the companies I buy stuff from our down during those periods, it's not a disaster as far as I notice it, but clearly you do, so now I'm curious what exactly you're doing during these 2-3 hours a week when this happen that makes you so affected by this, while I'm not?
I'm genuinely curious, not a "gotcha" or anything, I just want to understand your situation better, since our experience differs so much. Which region are you in and with what ISP?
> And also again, if you don't see "something must be done" you're not able to adopt their perspective, so of course you'll never understand this, because you're seemingly refusing to. Fine, you do what you want, but don't mislead others what the real situation is, just because you're unable to grasp it from the other side.
I can see their point of view. I understand they consider this a disaster. I understand they are insistent that something must be done. I am saying that the remedy they are proposing has too many negative consequences to the rest of society to be allowed. I am saying that their interests, sincerely held though they may be, do not trump the interests of the entire rest of the country, and therefore their injury is not satisfiable in the manner they wish it were. As the man once said, you can’t always get what you want, no matter how large an economic enterprise you’re running.
I think the difference is that Cloudflare is the one party providing streaming access for their customers: not just anyone can proxy the data through Cloudflare, they need to be a Cloudflare customer first.
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.
You're the customer of your ISP who's the customer of another ISP who's the customer of another ISP who Hacker News is a customer of.
The Digital Markets Act speaks of "conduits" instead of speaking of the specific form the conduits may take. It does not give special rights to someone who forwards IP packets unmodified or to someone who receives IP packets and reissues other IP packets or to someone who changes the IP addresses in the packets. It only cares about the net effect of the transmission, and the fact is that Cloudflare is a conduit with caching.
Because they own the IPs that pirates are connecting to which makes it relevant for those IPs to be blocked. They are the easiest IPs to find since you can just resolve the domain of the piracy site.
Why are the IPs the relevant things? There are domains as well. And origin servers. Why not block the domain or the origin server, which wouldn't have collateral damage.
Cloudflare provide a service masking the IP address of the illegal content, really you know the answer to when them and not Chrome
Okay and Chrome provide a service displaying the illegal content to the user. What now?
Can you get closer to the source than chrome? Can you get closer to the source than cloudflare?
Don't be disingenuous just because you like the company.
Sure I can: whatever hosting service they are using. Find where they are hosted, e.g. AWS, and ask Amazon to bring a zone down for Spain for 5 hours.
"find out where they are hosted" is doing a lot of lifting here against a massive company whose business model is hiding where end users are hiding.
They reply to subpoenas just like everyone else. But that's too slow for the greedy fat cats at LaLiga.
It's disingenuous to believe there was any merit in blocking Cloudflare. Not only this was never going to solve the piracy problem but it was always more of a pissing context.
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's unreasonable to expect cloudflare etc to be able to proactively identify legal vs illegal streams. The companies who own the copyrights can't even get that right much less a third party that has no idea if a stream is licensed.
Why though? Why is it unreasonable to expect a company to have some level of responsibility for serving clients that are using their platform for illegal activity?
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.
Because the expectation that companies police every single bit that crosses their network is completely unworkable. It's functionally impossible to tell a licensed stream from an unlicensed stream, the distinction isn't available to Cloudflare or any other networking provider it's in private contracts between the copyright owner and the streaming provider and there's a whole snarl of copyright exceptions.
To make the distinction the LaLiga would want they'd have to inspect every single packet, determine if this is a LaLiga game, determine if it's the current game, and determine if it's a licensed provider. There's a reason section 230 was created in the US.
I mean, how do we qualify which companies get punished for which crimes?
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?
That is something we'll need to figure out. Just because it requires some work to figure out where to draw the line, it doesn't make it wrong to draw one.
Banks are generally required to check that their customers are not laundering money. In a lot of countries it's illegal to buy or sell goods that you know are very likely stolen.
It don't think it's outrageous to expect more action from Cloudflare when they must know that their service is used for protecting criminal sites.
Relatedly I'd want the betting companies whose ads are shown on these illegal pages to have some amount of responsibility for where their ads are shown, and the same goes for well-renowned websites that show clearly deceiving ads.
This law on banks is a bad law. It doesn't stop money laundering, it does make it hard for lots of people to have bank accounts. We should abolish that law, not copy it.
Cloudflare can assign IPs based off customer reputation. High risk customers get high risk IPs. This way legitimate businesses stay on IPs that don't get blacklisted and sketchier businesses go on high risk IPs before they potentially get banned.
They already do this. Free tier IPs are separate from Pro tier, Enterprise tier, etc.
They must not be doing a good enough job if legitimate sites are being taken out by these blocks too.
Almost all of their customers are using the free, high-risk tier, because it's free.
Free users and being high risk is not the same thing. There are many many low risk free customers.
Who said proactively?
Any action by cloudflare before a court order or notice would be proactive. There's no way to effectively block streamers of live shows because they can create new sites or accounts for each event and by the time they're found, reported and cloudflare reasonably reviews and acts on them the event will be long over.
What do you expect cloudflare to actually do about these streams?
A report content form, like DMCA, with support people behind processing the tickets. It already exists.
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.
Afaik, Cloudflare are asked to block an IP, to which they answer that is not a valid IP, but a shared one, please be more precise. Being more precise takes effort and time, so they opted to ban the IP at ISP level, and they don't have to ask anyone.
Cloudflare wasn't asked to do anything. LaLiga went straight to the courts to demand all ISPs in the country to block Cloudflare.
> or notice
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
Even if they could detect that that'd require peeking into every bit that passes through their service(s) looking for offending content AND require knowing it's not a licensed stream. The latter is own can of worms, they can't know if any particular piece of data is properly licensed or not. Bot detection is relatively easy in comparison, the distinction between licensed and illegal streams is 100% vibes from cloudflare's available data.
How much of a responsibility should the provider have to scan what they're hosting and proactively make a judgment on whether they should block it or not?
Who should bear that responsibility?
Once again, who said proactively?
It did go through the legal system. That’s what forces the block.