Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block
14 hours ago
I just spent 1h+ debugging why my locally-hosted gitlab runner would fail to create pipelines. The gitlab job output would just display weird TLS errors when trying to pull a docker images. After debugging gitlab and the runner, I realized after a while I could not even run "docker pull <image>" on my machine as root:
> error pulling image configuration: download failed after attempts=6: tls: failed to verify certificate: x509: certificate is not valid for any names, but wanted to match docker-images-prod.6aa30f8b08e16409b46e0173d6de2f56.r2.cloudflarestorage.com
First blaming tailscale, dns configuration and all other stuff. Until I just copied that above URL into my browser on my laptop, and received a website banner:
> El acceso a la presente dirección IP ha sido bloqueado en cumplimiento de lo dispuesto en la Sentencia de 18 de diciembre de 2024, dictada por el Juzgado de lo Mercantil nº 6 de Barcelona en el marco del procedimiento ordinario (Materia mercantil art. 249.1.4)-1005/2024-H instado por la Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional y por Telefónica Audiovisual Digital, S.L.U. https://www.laliga.com/noticias/nota-informativa-en-relacion-con-el-bloqueo-de-ips-durante-las-ultimas-jornadas-de-laliga-ea-sports-vinculadas-a-las-practicas-ilegales-de-cloudflare
For those non-spanish speakers: It means there is football match on, and during that time that specific host is blocked. This is just plain madness. I guess that means my gitlab pipelines will not run when football is on. Thank you, Spain.
Heh, lucky you, at least you get a message. My ISP just drops traffic to the affected IPs. No ping, no traceroute, just a spinner in the browser until it says "page not found".
Every response and comment from LaLiga, the football organization responsible for this, has been so far that this is a minor issue that only affects a few bunch of nerds who talk about "docker images" or "github repositories" or "whatever that means".
Meanwhile, there are testimonies of smart home devices like anti-theft alarms or automatic doors, that stop working whenever there is a football match, because their backends rely on Cloudflare.
Last week, a woman asked for help on social media, as the GPS tracking app she uses to see where her father with dementia is, went offline during a match. It was getting late and he still wasn't back home, and she couldn't locate the tag he was wearing to find him: https://www.infobae.com/america/agencias/2026/04/05/laliga-d...
It's hard to say this, because no one should experience an event like this, but as stressful as these are, it's the only way to make the mainstream people care about this censorship. "I cannot pull a docker image" will never be on nightly news, but safety and personal security is a more powerful driver for discourses.
> Heh, lucky you, at least you get a message. My ISP just drops traffic to the affected IPs. No ping, no traceroute, just a spinner in the browser until it says "page not found".
This is generally how the GFW works in China. Instead of an overbearing nanny like a school or corporation's DNS blocker, you're left with a sense that you're on a version of the Internet that is just intermittently and somewhat mysteriously broken.
And indeed, in China, a lot of things that probably aren't fully intended to be blocked are not reliably accessible. Implementation varies, so you get strange routing and peering issues. It feels like an Internet that isn't fully formed, that hasn't finished coming together yet.
Nation states and corporations obviously gain some things sometimes by having Internet censorship/blocking frameworks in place. Maybe, sometimes, ordinary people even benefit, too, if it helps shut down illegal and genuinely harmful businesses.
But it feels like the whole world is gradually trending towards more and more Internet censorship without realizing that we are un-building a miraculous thing that took enormous effort and cleverness and expense to build. I wish we could think about this not only in terms of freedom (and we absolutely should think about it in terms of freedom), but how we are disintegrating the infrastructure of communication and computing.
Your last paragraph: it is sad. But we had successful global networks before the Internet (the PSTN, telegraph) and we'll certainly have global networks after this at some point in human history. Perhaps in the the time between the Internet and what's next, the world will become a bit more mature about a few things.
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> a version of the Internet that is just intermittently and somewhat mysteriously broken.
That's actually just how the Internet is. Nothing to do with the great firewall.
All people affected should file a complaint with your ISP and with Oficina de Atención al Usuario de Telecomunicaciones claiming financial loss for arbitrary service censorship.
I've been filing complaints since a year ago, told others to do the same too, nothing happens. There been moments I've meant to deploy fixes to issues but I cannot, because some tooling goes offline.
I've claimed financial loss, claimed sanity loss and everything in-between, but I'm afraid unless something reaches the European/EU courts, Spain will continue to be in the pocket of the La Liga owners.
Straight up fucking censorship with wide collateral being completely accepted in a Western country in 2026, beyond comprehension how this is allowed.
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It would be great if there was a webpage with clear instructions on how to do this, maybe fill out a few questions and get a printable pdf you can mail, or at least telling you how to file an online complaint. Making complaints very low friction will lead to more of those and perhaps more attention to the issue.
Snail mail uses up physical space so it might get more attention, it would be hilarious to see news reports of truckloads of complaint mail being dumped in front of the whatever office.
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Sadly, it won't accomplish anything. La Liga seems to have enough political power in the country to bury all of that. Probably bribing everyone involved.
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Yep, flood them with complaints.
At this point the protests should be against the matches themselves. But let's be honest: nobody cares anymore.
It's ridiculous and wrong what LaLiga does. But it's also a weakeup call to consider ditching cloudflare's centralization.
The companies relying on cloudflare won't be in Spain. If you buy a GPS tracker by a Canadian company, developed in India, manufactured in China, they are unlikely to know, even it they cared, that a single country that accounts for a tiny percentage of their sales breaks fundamental internet infrastructure on the regular "because fútbol y dinero".
And when purchasing a product, there's no "bill of materials" telling you about the services it relies on, beyond "internet connection" at best.
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I agree with this take (that it’s a wake up call). Makes one question their entire app design and if using Cloudflare is “good enough” for managing CDN, tunnels, etc. for their apps.
> there are testimonies of smart home devices like anti-theft alarms or automatic doors, that stop working whenever [...] because their backends rely on Cloudflare.
The fault here lies 100% with horribly designed IoT devices that turn into bricks when they lose internet connection.
Perhaps its time to put a VPN into all your CI jobs
You can't fight political issues with clever technical solutions
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They block the whole of Cloudflare R2, I believe the Docker hub is just (heh) a collateral.
When the La Liga match starts, everything that's proxied via CF (including zero access reverse tunnels) stops working.
There's even a website made for checking if the match is on: https://hayahora.futbol/
You can check if your host is affected: https://hayahora.futbol/#comprobador&domain=docker-images-pr...
Why do they do that? Sorry, I don't speak Spanish.
The football league would rather not have pirates livestream their ~90 minute games.
Pirates would rather not be blocked, so they create a new, disposable website for every game. Any blocking must happen fast.
Cloudflare would rather not block websites without a court order specifying the sites to be blocked.
The courts would rather not create a special fast lane through the courts, just to resolve a squabble between two huge corporations.
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Here's a good English-language article about it, with a timeline: https://daniel.es/blog/cloudflare-vs-la-liga/
Looks like same old regulatory capture.
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Because LaLiga and football in general is what is governing Spain really.
to stop people pirating football streams while matches are on. Insanity
The website has a language selector on the right just below the initial screen, just FYI.
to """"""""""prevent piracy""""""""""
Ah man, that shader in the background is like a rite of passage for people including a shader on their website.
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/lscczl
Ah the irony, I'm blocked from viewing that page by Cloudflare
Performing security verification
This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot. Incompatible browser extension or network configuration
This is a great example of why blanket IP blocking is such a terrible enforcement mechanism. Cloudflare hosts hundreds of thousands of services behind shared IP ranges — blocking one IP to stop a piracy stream takes out everything else on that IP, including Docker registries, API endpoints, and CDNs that have nothing to do with football.
> This is a great example of why blanket IP blocking is such a terrible enforcement mechanism
AFAIK, they're not doing "blanket IP blocking", they're intercepting requests based on DNS and IP, and try to serve their own certificates and their own content. Obviously, in most cases it fails, as the certificate doesn't match the site, so the browser rejects it, but as far as I can see and tell, there is no "blanket IP blocks", more like "DNS and IP interception".
The difference doesn't really matter in practice, sucks regardless, but I thought I'd clarify for the ones who are not experiencing these blocks themselves at least.
just wait until they block Azure as well so the official La Liga site also stops working
I wondered how they actually managed to have their own business to be unencumbered by that. At a certain corporate level, you have to have some piece of tech in your portfolio that relies on cloudflare. I hope one day there companion or "2nd screen" apps stops working during a game, because using cloudflare.
Hmmm. Don't they have a reporting form or something like that? Down with those filthy Azure pirates on IP 52.166.113.188.
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Dumb question but why don’t the pirate sites all host on Azure if Cloudflare is blocked and Azure isn’t?
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Sounds like the answer here is to host alt streams on Azure.
Barring an Internet giant suing them in court, it really feels like this is unlikely to change as most just don’t understand the why or the effect.
Someone needs to write a heist movie set in Spain where a key part of the plan is they steal something while La Liga is blocking some key security route.
This is far from the first time that I see on HN indignation on LaLiga blockings. Sadly all this rage does not seem to lead to any change.
I'd like to suggest some steps that might/should be followed, which I will not pursue personally but in my defense - I do not live in Spain and not affected.
1) (first! low-effort) Somebody should create any space on the internet, where such anecdotes might shared and probably people with common goals of fixing internet access in Spain will meet. E.g. telegram group, discord channel, subreddit...
2) probably create wiki with related research: legal framework and possible actions etc
3) Raise public awareness. Create a resource/website with schedule of past and future "semi-blackouts", simple explanation of possible effects a layman may notice etc
4) Explore legal actions that might be taken. How this issue might be forced to be discussed by politicians? For instance I know that Portugal has official mechanism to put forward petitions, that will be discussed in parliament if get enough votes [1]
Space of possible demands in such petitions is vast. For instance:
- Make LaLiga compensate partly price of internet access
- Force LaLiga to include education notice in the beginning and the of translation with title like "Start of reduced internet connectivity" / "End of reduced internet connectivity"
[1] https://participacao.parlamento.pt/initiatives/
This is the moral equivalent of shutting the water off for a whole city because one dude's house has a leak. The harms to society clearly and obviously outweigh any possible benefits to society. But if that one dude has the power to shut it all off, and doesn't care...
If you think that's even remotely close to the worst the Spanish government has done, don't look up "Catalunya".
https://int.assemblea.cat/civil-and-human-rights-abuses/tool...
Just so everyone here has the full picture: the source linked — Assemblea Nacional Catalana — is not a human rights watchdog, an international observer, or a journalistic outlet. It is the main pro-independence criminal activist organization in Catalonia. Citing them as evidence of Spanish human rights abuses is a bit like citing the murderer's wife as an impartial witness.
For context, Spain is a full constitutional democracy, subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights, with a free(ish) press, independent judiciary, and regular elections — none of which Assemblea itself disputes, because it participates in all of them. The events OP is referencing (the 2017 independence referendum aftermath) were reviewed by European courts, and the outcomes were, shall we say, not quite the narrative Assemblea sells on its website.
If there are genuine, documented human rights concerns, I'd welcome impartial sources from the Supreme Court or the ECHR.
What I'd push back on is treating a political lobby's own press releases as neutral reporting. You should do better than that here, OP.
This is exactly why random corporations need to be gone from government. Or copyright needs to be abolished, one of the two. No corporation (no matter how beloved) should ever have this kind of power. IMO the more powerful an organization becomes, the deeper the scrutiny should be.
As a Spaniard, I would be very happy it cloudflare stops serving Spain. The situation is beyond stupid and I know without international pressure and shaming we're not getting rid of this abuse.
They should at least do a single "awareness day" during which they block the same IPs and sites they are ordered by court, as if there was a football match on. Ideally with a 7 days public notice announcement. Probably won't happen though, as their contractual obligation won't allow for voluntary suspension of services.
As a Spaniard I couldn't agree more. This situation is just absolutely ridiculous.
As a Spaniard, this also happens to me. You can either use a VPN or just switch DNS servers to one that doesn’t have anycast nodes in Spain.
Cloudflare’s authoritative DNS uses EDNS Client Subnet (ECS) to return different IP pools based on where the query originates. Spanish resolvers get IPs from a range that La Liga blocks. If your recursive resolver is physically outside Spain (or you use DoH/DoT to tunnel to one), Cloudflare returns a different, unblocked pool.
AdGuard DNS works well for this.
This behavior of blocking some domains and IP ranges during LaLiga games has become a routine by now. You might also want to check these similar submissions:
My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114235
Hah. I have had to use a US-based VPN to access GitHub pretty much every weekend lately. La Liga's efforts to curb pirate TV streams are basically undermining the internet itself at this point.
This is also not new behaviour - Theo posted a YouTube about it nearly a year ago[1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-geGEYEw7g
How is this cloudflares problem? This is on LaLiga.
It might not be Cloudflare's fault, but it is their problem. If their customers can't use their products sporadically, it doesn't really matter why. Cloudflare taking a principled approach hurts their users in the short term, so they have to make a business trade-off between pragmatism and principle. Currently they're choosing principle, so it's reasonable to be angry at them for the short term issues that causes.
This is why technology businesses and professionals need to take a little bit of an active role in local politics. Otherwise you get nonsense.
We also need more tech-savvy politicians in office. There are a lot of politicians who are expected to legislate on important technology issues that barely know how to use a cellphone.
That's an interesting euphenism for 'spend a massive amount of money on ~~corruption~~ lobbying',
not necesarilly, any government will make decisions, if there's no one to speak up and inform them why the decision is stupid, like the one from LaLiga, then we end up in this situation
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[Meta comment]
Humankind is not doing well with implementing new policies. We should really strive for each new policy (like in this case - blocking access to some parts of internet during soccer games):
- Consider running policy in small scale scenario (e.g. testing blocking in small parts of Spain before whole country rollout)
- Implement channels to gather info from those who are faced with results of policy implementation (in this case: the op got webpage with description why the page is blocked - a bit of sanity! It would be better if it was served with HTTP code 451)
- Policy instructions
- When deciding on policy put a date at which policy should be reconsidered and revised using data collected during the time when it was in effect
- ... and some more I have not thought about.
Let's strive to cultivate this principles in all life areas where we can affect how new policies are implemented.
(edit: linebreaks)
This is inexcusable. Just because sports right holders are worried about piracy doesn’t give them license to break normal internet operations. Spain, get your act together and put your equivalent of the content cartel in the penalty box.
Maybe it’s time to reflect upon the reliance on centralized services? Not long ago docker hub started rate limiting access and we all turned to blanket solutions like the GitLab registry cache. I wonder if the IPFS distributed docker registry thing still exists/works.
This isn't really about centralization. ISPs are blocking at the IP level, not Docker Hub specifically. You could self-host a registry behind Cloudflare and still run into the same thing.
Here in Brazil sometimes my ISP goes into a weird state where I can't SSH into a remote machune. Got two ISP links here and still sometimes I need to resort to Mullvad to get stable internet
I'm in Spain as well and it sucks a lot. What I do now is I go thorough Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 VPN (set up on my router). Fixes the issue and there is practically no latency or bandwidth impact.
You mean 1.1.1.1. DNS? Or do they also serve a VPN through that IP?
It's probably just DNS (port 53). It's the way Europeans tend to implement their censorship, with the ISPs as executors. It's trivial to bypass, but most non-technical users don't know how, so it's good enough to comply.
Interesting alternative. Cloudflare (market cap $58B) buys La liga (market value $5 billion), drops suit.
Real Madrid alone is more than $5B ? Maybe you mean to say league association is worth 5B ? That seems too high the association does not have lot of margins they pass through most of their revenue to the clubs .
The last domestic TV deal they signed recently was worth $6B for 5 seasons or so, which is what you are proposing they buy.
In enterprise value terms that $1B/year growing 6 %YoY is worth a lot more than $5B.
In contrast Cloudflare has a $2.5B revenue albeit growing much faster but also has much smaller earnings or free cash flow, I.e. money they are not spending to make their current revenue.
Here are RMs financials...https://www.realmadrid.com/en-US/news/club/latest-news/notic...
They make about $25m a year in profit. Cloudflair actually looses a small amount of money on 2.5x the revenue. However, Cloudflairs market cap is about 100x that of RM's and that's because they have a growing business, in a growing industry and can easily become profitable when needed. That's probably not possible for RM and their very pricey lineup of players.
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I'm not sure where that number comes from but I don't think it's right, and I don't think that's how La Liga is structured anyway. It's governed by an association of all of the teams in the top two flights of spanish football.
Right. The number is the result of Claude adding up the public information about the aggregate value of all those clubs plus the association. So it would mean buying all the clubs; or at least enough to have a controlling interest in the association. Clearly there are big challenges to that (e.g. clubs not being for sale for one). But I thought it was an interesting thought experiment. Of course if you're just trying to play the money = power card then it'd probably be cheaper to purchase the influence of some government officials.
Set an example. Buy them, fire everyone, shut it down and liquidate the property.
Less headaches, free futbol matches!
> instado por la Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional y por Telefónica Audiovisual Digital,
(The trial was initiated by LaLiga and Telefonica...).
"Telefonica" is the (exclusive) distributor for the rights of streaming the matches, and is only (of course?) the main consumer (and business) Telco in Spain: they are in a game they cannot lose. This is such an abuse and no government (this, past, whichever) has done anything about it.
It is also educational to look up the overlap between Telefonica directors, LaLiga directors, and the government officials who granted the defacto monopoly
What's the current state of the art for VPN'ing through deep packet inspection firewalls? I have imagined building something around TLS and Websockets that connects to a popular cloud provider which is "too big to block". Of course, if they'll block Cloudflare, or all connections outside of the country, maybe _nothing_ is too big to block. I remember some solutions to this in the 2010s, like obfsproxy and shadowsocks, but are there any newer or better options?
I don't even like televised sport but this makes me want to figure out how to pirate it at scale
I had to Google why this happens, blocking cloudflare during football games seems.. Arbitrary, to say the least. Maybe something to do with hooligans trashing entire cities when their team loses? I could almost get behind that, if I thought it would work..
But no, it's apparently to stop piracy!? Turning off half the internet, and mostly the legitimate parts at that (since when do pirates use cloudflare?) seems like probably the worst method to go about it.
Someone ought to start streaming those games illegally without using cloudflare just to demonstrate how stupid this policy is
> Someone ought to start streaming those games illegally without using cloudflare just to demonstrate how stupid this policy is
Oh, the icing on the cake is that they already do. While my whole dev stack gets shut off every weekend, my neighbour watches pirate futbol streams just fine - not only is it a stupid policy, it's an ineffective one, and the pirates bypassed the bans ages ago
Makes you wonder why they keep the ban up? Are more people watching more football now that everything else stops working during matches?
Talk about unfair business practices!
Pirates use cloudflare because it solves their biggest problem, DOS attacks. Rights owners figured out that they can shut down these sites by DDOSing them which bypasses the courts and can be done instantly, so the pirates put their sites behind cloudflare ddos protection.
This is a know issue and it is completely fucked up: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/cloudflar...
What Spain does is basically censorship and it's very poorly executed. The docker image registry is only one out of the many collateral victims of this stupid law.
> What Spain does is basically censorship and it's very poorly executed
Basically? It is censorship, with huge collateral damage and regardless of how much we complain or share evidence that the blocks are actually financially harming us, no one seems to care as long as La Liga gets to freely block whatever hoster of websites as they wish.
It's just like the Great Firewall of China, except in service of football profits instead of political ideology. I don't know which one is dumber and more disgraceful.
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Just to confirm it is true. This is LaLiga bringing down essential country-wide infrastructure on soccer hours if your internet access is through main ISPs.
POSSIBLE FIX:
I think changing your default DNS servers to Google 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 might bypass the spanish sunday ban on Cloudlflare.
macOS + Cloudlfare 1.1.1.1 https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/setup/macos/
Google 8.8.8.8 https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using
I don’t think it’s a DNS ban, it looks like they actually ban connections to the IP range.
But you can just use a VPN.
Nope, it’s IP ban. At least for Vodafone and Telefónica.
Ah, so that's why my site is "down" there:
https://hayahora.futbol/#sobre-los-bloqueos&domain=taoofmac....
They're blocking the CDN too, not just R2.
LOL this is so hilarious, blocking a portion of a web infra for a football match
It is somewhat funny until you realize the amount of power some copyright mafia knuckleheads have over the (local) internet.
It isn't even an authoritative regime censoring something, but much more silly.
It's a disgrace, but apparently all relevant forces still consider soccer the most important thing in the country.
Time to use a VPN in your docker pipelines ;) Or run your systems outside of Spain.
Or can this be avoided by using an alternate DNS?
They are planning to also block VPN providers during football matches, see https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/la-liga-w...
They are not "planning" to block VPNs. A technologically illiterate judge has ordered it, but there are no plans nor mechanisms to enforce it.
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When talking about VPNs, it doesn't have to mean "third party VPN". You can host your own on any VPN service outside of Spain.
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"A _Sanish_ Court has ordered NordVPN and Proton VPN to block IPs transmitting illegal football streams" [emphasis added], that is inspain.
Alternate DNS doesn't help, they block at IP level.
Yes, they block IPs belonging to CDNs (CF including R2, BunnyCDN, CDN77, Fastly, Alibaba, Akamai even)...
> run your systems outside of Spain
So much for digital sovereignty :-)
It is not a DNS based block, but on the IP level. Once I knew what caused the issue, I figured I use one of my Hetzner vServers as an exit node in tailscale.
But come on, this can't be true. I wonder how many other people in IT wasted hours on issues and tickets to find out it is due to a football match taking place. Admittedly, chances are low, as football matches are usually outside of office hours.
Why are you working instead of watching the match?
That's what crossed my mind too: It's like a nationally-mandated break to watch football.
I found out about this a month ago when a confused Spanish user showed me all downloads on https://apkmirror.com (powered by Cloudflare R2) are blocked in Spain during LaLiga soccer matches https://x.com/i/status/2030361569691898237. It was so idiotic, I couldn't believe it. Glad it's getting more attention now.
Going to play devil's advocate here but I suspect if Cloudflare had been more cooperative about taking down illegal content, LaLiga would not have resorted to blanket blocking individual IPs.
I would really like to understand more about the process that they should follow but didn't / followed but didn't satisfy them / doesn't exist, in order to remove infringing websites quickly from CloudFlare.
I work with actually malicious content (things that make people lose their life savings) and Cloudflare abuse is relatively helpful (compared to most ISPs who just don't care).
They just refuse to take down random things that some media company representatives send their way, without a court order or any oversight. And this is a good thing.
LaLiga wanted the right to tell Cloudflare to block specific sites without going through a court.
Cloudflare, rightfully, said that was ridiculous and unreasonable.
A Spanish court, wrongfully, decided to let LaLiga block all of Cloudflare.
They will take down anything you get a judge to agree with.
Thankfully, Adamo hasn’t implemented the blockade yet (if ever).
BT used to block the entire streamable.com site during football matches
Off topic but I wonder when Cloudflare is going to launch their own Docker registry as a product.
It's pretty easy to write your own. I made this one a while ago: https://github.com/chainguard-dev/crow-registry
https://github.com/cloudflare/serverless-registry
I've seen it but it's buggy and lacking in features. Feels like an afterthought instead of a real product
Well, Cloudflare does not launch anything. They acquire to build products. Look into all their recent product launches. They acquired a relatively small company and converted the founding team to a product team.
So, if you want them to build stuff, ask yourself, are there any "Docker Registry" startups out there. If jsdelivr/globalping is not keeping you busy enough... there is an idea
Yes, actually, there are. I've built https://clipper.dev. I'm somewhat focused on robotics/edge device use cases right now (handling large images in bandwidth constrained environments), but my storage costs are also 1/7th of DockerHub. It also enables device to device content sharing much easier than base Docker, will be much easier to do antivirus/vuln scans, some other side benefits.
If there's something you'd want out of a registry that you think the market would want, I'm all ears.
Honestly I would build it if I knew how to properly market it to quickly get users.
Globalping and jsDelivr took years to gain a meaningful user base
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What would the business case be?
Capture developers and funnel them to the Workers platform
Could you bypass this with a VPN?
Yes, and all of Spain is learning how to use VPNs
Welcome to the club, buddies! Here, in Russia, the government doesn't care about collateral damage at all when shutting down whole Internet in cities. They turn on white list mode, when only approved sites and IPs work. Businesses stop working and start losing money? They don't care. Important IT systems stop working? They don't care. People can't communicate with each other? Don't care. And seems like it will happen everywhere else. Sad to see the whole world goes down apart.
I think perhaps there's a difference in expectations between wartime versus a country at peace going after pirates.
I wanted to say that Internet freedom dismantlement is a global trend.
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same thing happens in italy
Yeah, I know. Welcome to the club :(
https://x.com/ahachete/status/2035783292549755228
CF could just sue LaLiga and the judge as interrupting and intercepting telecomms it's a really serious crime in Spain. Call the AEPD too because of consumers' right against both ISP and LaLiga's snooping. Another huge fine.
This is not an issue under the civil code (civilian issues), but something to be dealt under penal (criminal) code.
In Spanish
https://www.fiscal.es/memorias/memoria2020/FISCALIA_SITE/rec...
Oh, and BTW, LaLiga has just partnered with a CF rival.
Now CF can just sue both like hell because of unfair competition:
https://nitter.tiekoetter.com/xataka/status/2042658662850724...
Looks like they already tried to appeal the block, and lost:
https://x.com/jaumepons/status/1904906677335245294
They could potentially file the suit against Spain in European Court of Human Rights if they have exhausted national remedies. ECtHR has previously ruled some blocks to be illegal, but generally in the context where country sought the ban. Of course in both cases Court is the one that actually orders the ban.
One relevant would be Yildirim v. Turkey where court ordered blocking access to all Google sites because there was one that where someone insulted the memory of Atatürk. This was due to request from Telecommunications Directorate. This then caused the appellant's website to get blocked as well.
Another one would be Vladimir Kharitonov v. Russia.
I think they are doing it already.
Yea, La Liga it's crapping out as always. Docker needs either some I2P gateway, or a Tor service.
The pirate streams need an I2P service that way LaLiga might give up.
Just use a VPN
Cloudflare could resolve this without negatively impacting fundamental services... just place all newly registered sites (e.g. <30 days) on a dedicated block of IP addresses. That way, Spain's government-ordered censorship could be limited to (mostly) pirate sites. Or they could invest money in vetting customers properly.
But of course, Cloudflare rather prefers to hold their actual large customers (who don't have much of an alternative to CF) and everyday Spaniard users hostage.
What would prevent a pirate site operator from registering a domain a few months in advance and sitting on it in the meantime?
How do you propose customers ought to be vetted? Why should a host be expected to take on the duties of a hall monitor? Isn't that the judiciary's job?
I think it is actually Spain using their residents as hostages in an attempt to extort Cloudflare and other large providers. The current situation is best described as blatantly corrupt regulatory capture.
> What would prevent a pirate site operator from registering a domain a few months in advance and sitting on it in the meantime?
It's driving up the cost and expenses. Operators of legitimate sites don't have to worry during that probation time about anything with the exception of customers in Spain during LL match hours.
LL has ~10 matches / weekend (Fri/Sat/Sun/Mon), that means pirates have to have about 40 domains/CF integrations per month plus more in standby - and more, for longer probation periods.
> How do you propose customers ought to be vetted?
I dunno... stuff like basic KYC measures would be a good start. Copies of ID cards. Government business licenses. Private entities (credit bureaus). Even phone number verification is a serious hurdle for malicious actors, and it ties activities to real world identities that can be held accountable.
Dangerous stuff (e.g. streaming) could only be made available upon a security deposit.
> Why should a host be expected to take on the duties of a hall monitor? Isn't that the judiciary's job?
No, and that we let ISPs get away with ignoring abuse@ emails is part of why the Internet is such a nasty place these days. You need a license to drive a car on public roads, you need an expensive license to fly a small plane, and you need a goddamn massively expensive license to fly a widebody aircraft. So why shouldn't you need to pass some set of verification before you get access to inarguably the Internet's most powerful data pipes?
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The last sentence of this submission makes no sense. You are in Spain. Allegedly, the country has a representative government. That means that you should have a way to influence the government to fix this idiocy. If, in fact, you don’t, then it is not a representative government and …ahem… further steps may be warranted to remind the government whom they work for.
Vote early, vote often
Spain is a failing country. Their economy is in shambles and the government has ceded internet control to a private corporation who runs football games.
>Their economy is in shambles
But it's among the fastest growing in the EU? Granted, part of this is starting from a low base, but it's hardly "in shambles"
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locat...
They are doing this by artificially inflating the numbers, destroying the country forever: https://i.imgur.com/0MAeFaF.jpg
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Spain isn't a perfect country, I don't think any is. But the economy isn't in shambles, only someone who doesn't know what they're talking about would say anything like that. It does suck that La Liga can wield so much power, agree, but this is not related to the economy at all...
Sorry, but this isn't true. The Spanish economy shrank by 8% in 2023. So all those gains in the last couple of years are just catching up to 2023 and not actual growth. Add in inflation and the average Spaniard has lost 10% of their income over that period (2023-now). The median citizen losing 10% of their income in real economic terms does qualify for the vaunted "shambles" title.
Are you spanish and never went to another country? I only heard such things from never-stop complaining locals that never traveled anywhere. Yeah La Liga is a religion here, but Spain is one of the worlds top of life quality mate
To note that this isn't the executive or legislative but the judiciary doing the bidding.
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It's not just docker and tech. Plenty of people depend on tools that use Cloudflare.
And when you are on your deathbed you will say “I wish I had spent more time on Cloudflare-based products”? I doubt it. No peer-reviewed research has shown people say that.
Telling someone what to do is even more American, let people do whatever they want, at the times they want, as long as they don't hurt others, this is the Spanish way.
Touché. Or should I say “me has tocado señor”. Probably not but it would be funny.
This comment has some "you should smile more" energy
Smile more. Touch grease. Roll coal.
Good. Cloudflare is the next evil entity on the internet.
Cloudflare is cancer. And the tumor is now too big.
You've got it backwards. Spain's ISPs are blocking Cloudflare and other CDNs because of LaLiga/football piracy. CloudFlare isn't doing anything here.
You are correct, but Cloudflare is still a cancer on the Internet.
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I know this is an unpopular opinion among freedom maximalists, but:
It’s precisely because CloudFlare isn’t responding like other CDNs to reasonable demands to cut off pirate origin sites that this mess exists. If they reacted quickly to remove configurations that are obviously facilitating copyright infringement, Spain wouldn’t resort to full scale ASN blocking.
How do we know it’s CloudFlare? Because other CDNs like CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, etc. respond to takedown demands and aren’t being blocked. (Those also cost money and require customer identification.)
In an escalating war between the state and a corporation, the state will always prevail if they have the public’s backing. In Spain it’s clear that most people are happy to watch the match through legitimate channels even at the cost of blocking CloudFlare.
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cf is failing to comply with Spanish law and as a result is being blocked in Spain
I can agree on how much power on the global traffic they have, but this blocks affect many other CDNs like Fastly, Akamai, CDN77, BunnyCDN, Alibaba...
Spain is mandating their ISPs block cloudflare to stop people from illegally streaming soccer games. Cloudflare isn't the one doing the blocking.
You made a few typos in "LaLiga"
How so?