[matteason]

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...

[evilmonkey19]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

What would it look like if you sued La Liga for using their lawful blocking power in a way that injured you?

[bobthepanda]

I don’t know that this would work that well given Spain is civil law, not common law

[nhatcher]

(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

[brendoelfrendo]

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.

[t0mas88]

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.

[eggprices]

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.

[brendoelfrendo]

A very expensive lawsuit that, even if successful, will result in a difficult to enforce judgment?

[thaumasiotes]

What's difficult about enforcing a judgment against La Liga? They're as public as it's possible to be.

[ornornor]

They have deep pockets for dragging this on much longer than you can afford it.

[ndsipa_pomu]

I doubt that will work outside of the U.S.A.

[brookst]

Might they appeal?

[PeterStuer]

The legal system in many countries is very, very different from that is the US (or UK).

[embedding-shape]

> No notification

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?

[brian-armstrong]

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.

[lukan]

Erm, where is the danger in a mismatched certificate, if all I want is to get some noncritical information from a blog or something?

[eggprices]

Local privilege escalation in your browser is a danger. They can also abuse any privileges you gave to the website, such as camera and microphone.

[lukan]

Why would I give a "random blog" access to my camera or microphon?

And how can a wrong certificate lead to local privilege escalation?

[embedding-shape]

Why wouldn't you? Your computer is not gonna be hijacked by it, and you want to see what shit your ISP is now up to.

Obviously I don't do my banking like that...

[tomnipotent]

Presumes you're using the ISP's DNS and not custom servers or DoH.

[embedding-shape]

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.

[mzajc]

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.

[embedding-shape]

> 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.

[devmor]

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.

[pjc50]

Maybe someone can explain, but I don't understand why such an order isn't applied to cloudflare themselves?

[martin8412]

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.

[dbbk]

Cloudflare said they created a dedicated hotline for LaLiga, and apparently it wasn't enough for them

[pavon]

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.

[tshaddox]

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.

[embedding-shape]

> 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.

[TheCoelacanth]

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.

[tshaddox]

Do you have an English word you can recommend that refers to what (in American English) I call the entire government of a nation?

[leadingthenet]

The state.

“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.

[tomnipotent]

> went to the judges

Which are part of the Spanish government.

[embedding-shape]

> Which are part of the Spanish government.

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.

[tomnipotent]

The judiciary is part of the government. Being an independent branch doesn't change that. Government doesn't just mean legislative.

[benhurmarcel]

In many countries, the word “government” only refers to the executive branch

[SenHeng]

The rest are often called civil servants.

[AtNightWeCode]

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.

[petcat]

> But people should stop whining and use a better service if needed.

A better service that the Spanish government will also block?

Cloudflare is not the bad actor here. The Spanish government is.

[halJordan]

The state hasn't setup processes to enable that. It will happen

[madduci]

In Italy, Serie A got the approval of Government to do so, which is even worse

[inglor_cz]

I fervently hope that no one manages to obtain a similar judgment at the pan-EU level, that would be a disaster.

[arlort]

I don't think there's an injunction mechanism like that at the EU level

And even if there were I doubt the legal basis in EU law exists for such an injunction

[gizajob]

yet

[dmitrygr]

I actually hope they do. this will force a proper reckoning about the situation and maybe a proper fix.

[estebank]

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?

[thaumasiotes]

Well, this very article is describing how popular outrage in Spain is forcing the legislature to take action against La Liga.

(Yes, the action described in the article is explictly not legally binding. That was also true of the Brexit vote.)

[ben_w]

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.

[ndsipa_pomu]

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.

[dmitrygr]

Eventually, some apparatchik will try to access pornhub during a sports match and fail, it'll resolve the issue quickly

[babypuncher]

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.

Accelerationism was always a terrible idea.

[AnthonyMouse]

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:

https://projects.propublica.org/sopa/pipa.html

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.

[guelo]

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.

[WhyNotHugo]

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.

[squigz]

If they compelled Cloudflare to do so, what makes you think they couldn't compel whatever provider those customers then switch to?

[dylan604]

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?

[prmoustache]

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.

[booi]

To say that Telefonica offers even remotely the same services and features that Cloudflare does is a lie at best.

[prmoustache]

The keyword was "some".

[kevin_thibedeau]

Akamai is the OG Cloudflare, just not as cool.

[miohtama]

And costs 1000x more

[richwater]

Yes, trusting Cloudflare to be the arbiter of the internet will work out great.

Just as trying to make social media be the arbiter of speech...

[basisword]

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.