Comment by danirod
16 hours ago
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.
Those predecessor networks weren’t problem free. Many conversations to “interesting” places were monitored.
The counter-reaction to this era will include additional communication control.
this is teleological thinking. it's not necessarily the case that things get better over time.
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> But we had successful global networks before the Internet (the PSTN, telegraph)
These were ripe with espionage, wiretapping and sabotage. Access to it used to be highly restricted as well, up until the 90s for example you were only allowed to connect government-licensed modems to the German PSTN directly.
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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.
Whenever I get a little down over how much power unelected corporations have in my country, I can at least cheer myself up a little by being thankful that something as stupid as football doesn't have enough power here to control whether or not I have internet access.
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If anyone who’s capable in Spain set a petition or the relevant steps and put it on HN. I’m pretty sure any Spanish resident in HN would be more than happy to take part even if it means to send a Bizum for the cause.
(Sadly as living in Spain for about a year I’m still not in such place to raise this or understand the full steps needed)
If this is done at the DNS level, run your own DNS. If not, use a VPN. Taking this to the courts is a long term solution, but in the short term you want to act on your own to evade censorship and oppression.
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It’s football. I’m pretty sure there are a great many countries you could induce to do insane things if the populace could be made to believe that said insane things will help football.
I mean, didn’t El Salvador and Honduras go to war over football back in the 60’s? And I seem to recall there was a football match which helped precipitate the dissolution of Yugoslavia - national identities coalesced around football tribes.
how do you make claims, here: https://usuariosteleco.digital.gob.es/? Can't find a way of doing it with Cl@ve
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Because the EU as a whole is quite happy to censor and generally wield the same tricks as "non-Western" countries in their desires to combat misinformation (however our EU bureaucrats define it), child abuse materials (see Chat Control that thing is not going to go away), and hatred (oh boy).
We've never guaranteed the right to free speech and because we haven't it's a slippery slope all the way back down to the furnaces of autocracy we sprang from.
The Spanish president has come out on record saying we don't deserve anonymity on the internet.
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.
> 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.
This is a great idea, we definitively should make this happen! If people are curious on collaborating on something, reach out, email in profile (English or Spanish emails welcome!).
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.
Corruption at that level could mean organized crime. Is there a culture of betting through illegal bookies, are they fixing matches, or ¿porque no los dos?
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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.
Who cares if she can’t find her elderly father? A small price to pay to preserve the stratospheric prices on football TV rights!!!!
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.
>fundamental internet infrastructure
I'm not saying this situation isn't bullshit, but the bigger problem is that CloudFlare is now "fundamental internet infrastructure". This is precisely the situation that the internet was designed to prevent.
Yesterday I got stuck in endless CloudFlare CAPTCHA's, trying to access theretroweb.com. I had to give up. Many such cases. I hate CloudFlare so much, it's unreal.
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The only reason this happens is because Cloudflare's centralization makes precise censorship impossible. That's bad in this particular case (as it results in over-broad censorship), but good in general, as it makes censorship harder.
Without Cloudflare, you can censor whatever you want. If you have the support of an (undemocratic) government on your side, you can even DeDoS them, making sure that information critical of you cannot see the light of day.
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.
> 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".
Translation: go away kid, we're trying to make money here.
> 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.
Yeah the horribly designed alarm system that can't alert a central authority that something has gone wrong. Maybe we should just put huge air raid sirens on our homes instead?
Perhaps its time to put a VPN into all your CI jobs
You can't fight political issues with clever technical solutions
Yes you can. Fight with clever technical solutions and the politics will follow once the solution becomes common or displays its usefulness. It is in fact the most effective way to fight dumb political issues.
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It depends on what the political system is trying to do.
A VPN won't help against government blanket outages, where the target is complete control of communications, and attempts to circumvent may result in extreme penalty. In this case, where the government policy is to stop unauthorized streaming, and collatoral damage is acceptable, a VPN hosted in a more favorable location is likely to work enough. Afaik, I don't think Spain has the political appetite to block VPNs and such during football matches.
You can still fight the political issue with political means, but in the mean time, you can also get work done.
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That's actually part of rebellion modus operandi, so totally something realistic. But not within the frame of law and not in the sweet position of someone away from the "I'll die for the just cause" mindset.
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That became a popular refrain at some point but the truth of it varies. In fact many political issues are brought about by technical changes so obviously the reverse must be possible as well.
What technical solutions can't change is the underlying social dynamics.
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You totally can, that's why bittorrent still exists and works fine.