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
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?
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
I fervently hope that no one manages to obtain a similar judgment at the pan-EU level, that would be a disaster.
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?
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.
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?
If they compelled Cloudflare to do so, what makes you think they couldn't compel whatever provider those customers then switch to?
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'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.
It wasn’t a conversation. It was a court order.
I thought the government just forced their ISPs to block. Was CF involved at all?
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
It is insane that you could block access to hundreds of sites just because some people decided to watch an ilegal stream.
Great, this means Telefonica reliability goes from zero nines to still below zero nines.
Joining a select club that includes GitHub and Anthropic yay
Finally. For anyone affected by this, I have been using Clouflare WARP successfully to bypass this block.
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.
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)
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.
Your customers should be proper Spaniards and be watching the match, hence not noticing the downtime! /s
Your answer is better than mine
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.
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
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.
An IT peon at La Liga has the chance to do the funniest thing …