Comment by swiftcoder
1 day ago
> “Inside Spain, the consequences of indiscriminate IP blocking have become almost impossible to ignore,” NordVPN writes
Too fucking right. It is beyond tiresome to fire up the laptop and wonder whether I'll need a VPN to access GitHub today
I just permanently live on a US VPN these days. [0] Not Spanish, but my own country has started overregulating the web, and it seems prudent to develop a long track record of appearing as a US based user to the various online fiefdoms, rather than needing to do it all at once once they pass some digital ID mandate or other nonsense.
Not that there's any complete guarantee that the US web will forever remain open and free (no such guarantee is possible), but it's significantly more likely there than here. The state of the open web worldwide is pretty depressing. :(
[0] Mullvad, not the bad ones. Though with mandatory ISP-level retention of browser history here, pretty much anything is an improvement for privacy.
> Though with mandatory ISP-level retention of browser history here
Huh, how would that even work? At most they get the host, at least unless you're still mostly using http sites, only the Host header should be visible to your ISP.
Yes, I mean hosts, not literal browser history. I should've been clearer.
Mullvad is Swedish, right?
I believe so! Though with a healthy set of global endpoints to route through, naturally.
I hope there is a secondary effect to all this - that websites, operators and web apps look for alternatives instead of always using Cloudflare (who themselves are a kind of LaLiga just in a different vertical).
The blocks been going on for around/almost two years now, the ones who cared about remaining online for their users during the La Liga matches they do the blocks (not all of them anymore it seems) already moved, the only ones left on Cloudflare seems to be some people that refuse to move away regardless of how their users are impacted by it.
I think it's the same group of people who experience AWS downtime while having all their infrastructure there then go "Well, we're tried nothing and we're all out of ideas, guess we'll blame upstream".
When the blocks happen, does it take GitHub with it for you? I'm on Vodafone (in Spain) and it's just a few Cloudflare IPs that get blocked during the matches, never had GitHub unavailable, as Microsoft doesn't use Cloudflare for GitHub, AFAIK.
Cloudflare seems to be the most common victim, but I've seen Fastly get banned out as well (which seems to be what GitHub uses as their CDN in the EU)
AFAIK, it's literally exclusively Cloudflare for me, never seen anything else (IP) banned, just the good old DNS-based blocking for some other crap, but maybe it's because of my ISP. What ISP are you on? They all seem to be responding and doing this differently.
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I do not say it is not true because too many cases pop up here, however, I live in Spain and so does my company and we had this 0 times. Provider dependent? We have domestic fiber in Malaga.
Possibly. I'm on Orange fiber and I haven't noticed anything weird either.
However all my torrent traffic already goes through VPN and I don't watch football or any kind of live Spanish TV, I have zero interest in any sport.