> 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.
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.
Hello, sorry you're right, I misunderstood what Show HN was for.
Apologies for the noise. I'll take this down and come back later. Just wanted to solicit feedback and advice from the group first
Thank you for sharing! I made this one. Had the same problem as the OP, the Google results are full of junk, so I made it just so I had something reliable to use.
You have uBlock Origin or another ad blocker installed, their cookie banner disables scrolling but your ad blocker is blocking the cookie banner (same thing happened to me)
Same here with uBlock on iOS. This happens every now and then, not too often. But when it does, I usually decide the page is probably not worth reading anyway.
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