Who exactly is blocking and on what legal base? If it's Spanish ISPs and they are massively over blocking, why are there no legal actions against them? (E.g. for not fulfilling their contracts)
On the one hand, you have money and famous footballers. On the other hand, you have a bunch of nerds whining about the internet being broken. The average voter (and politician) is out watching the soccer match, and doesn't care about the internet.
it's institutional corruption at all levels, legislative, executive and judicial. A systemic failure that favour abnormous private profits over basic rights of the citizens.
The effort required to change the situation is massive.
> In the Summer of 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council released a non-binding resolution condemning intentional disruption of internet access by governments. The resolution reaffirmed that "the same rights people have offline must also be protected online." [1]
> The football league would rather not have pirates livestream their ~90 minute games.
Funny enough, I work in IT and I've had to use a VPN to be able to do my job when soccer is on, but my two non-tech-savy family members that do watch soccer using pirate livestreams say that they've never had any issues with blocked streams.
I work in IT and have found that the issue impacts my work but not my ability to stream sports from sites of questionable legality. Of course, I don't pirate La Liga matches but that's primarily because I don't give a shit about soccer.
But the point is that the measure does more to block legitimate use than illegitimate (in my experience). And next they want to go after VPNs. Wonderful.
They don't even "lose a small amount of money." They simply gain less money than usual for a short period of time. Think of how rough that is for them.
I think it's even that they "gain less money than they could if everyone watching illegally would pay for it when they could not watch illegally" (that's usually how companies crying "piracy" calculate "losses" — "let's assume everyone watching illegally would certainly still watch it and pay the full price").
This isn't quite right either. It's "they gain less money than they might potentially gain if piracy weren't physically possible". If the piracy avenues didn't exist, how many people would actually pay full price to the legitimate sources, and how many people would simply go without?
Arguably they even gain more money in the long run, because more people have access to their entertainment and they have more opportunities to form life long connections with consumers.
In all fairness, the Spanish economy is a mine, a farm and a soccer league in a trenchcoat. Better than Ireland which is 2 tax shelters in a trenchcoat, but not by much. Not surprisingly, they are the 2 most left leaning countries in Europe. To be fair, they had an actual fascist government in Spain for several decades and there were atrocities committed.
Ireland, the country with 2 center right parties that differ with regards to patronage networks and political history from 1940, is one of the most left-wing leaning countries in Europe?
Eh, ireland is unique in that it has a centre-right coalition making it de facto one party. The main opposition, Sinn Fein, is about the same size as Fine Gael and Fianna Fail and might overtake Fine Gael at some point
Right. So, no left wing party, not even a center left party, has been in power in Ireland in its history. But I'm supposed to believe that it's one of the most left wing countries in Europe?
> Cloudflare would rather not block websites without a court order specifying the sites to be blocked.
why would they?
> squabble between two huge corporations
I think this is just LaLiga using it's cultural and economical power, don't think Cloudflare or the courts should be making exceptions just so they can control how people watch football
LaLiga isn't Cloudflare's customer. They have no relationship. So why would Cloudflare rework their infrastructure just to instrument rapid blocking at their own expense as a favor to LaLiga? And if they don't, ISPs just break the Internet for each soccer match? This is a kind of coercion that makes no sense. Cloudflare has no obligation like this to LaLiga (and neither would a Spanish domestic CDN!).
Cloudflare has not in fact refused to comply with any court orders! The very thing at issue is that LaLiga wants Cloudflare to do censorship on their behalf that Cloudflare, who has no contractual relationship with LaLiga, is not required to do by any legal framework in Spain or the US.
Cloudflare literally wasn't even a party to the ruling by which LaLiga has been compelling Spanish ISPs to do the IP-level blocking. They're just an affected third-party because the blocking scheme the courts have allowed LaLiga to impose on ISPs is on a per-IP basis.
Spain hasn't asked Cloudflare to do anything. Only LaLiga has acted like Cloudflare owes them a huge, expensive rework of their CDN's architecture for the purpose of censoring things for LaLiga purely as a favor to LaLiga. What LaLiga has over Cloudflare isn't a court order. It's a protection racket, or maybe a hostage situation, where court orders involving other parties are the gun held to the hostage's head.
> Cloudflare has not in fact refused to comply with any court orders!
Nor did I say they did.
The question was asked, "why would they [without an explicit order]" The answer is they probably shouldn't, but there's still an obvious incentive here.
I'm not sure why it shouldn't be cloudflare job to make sure they don't host illegal content. If my super market keeps distributing illegal goods, even if they remove it after a court order, they will end up having to close the whole market.
Either they should police the content they serve themselves or they accept the right holders to do it (which sucks for everyone).
Also they certainly willing take all their customers as hostage, as they could certainly split their network into legitimate customers and shaddy ones so the blocking is not so impactful, but I guess they prefer to make it as impactful as possible to be able to complain.
Anyone can report illegal content on Cloudflare and Cloudflare will remove it. The pirate streaming sites pop up only in or just before the first few moments of the game, and LaLiga insists they must be removed instantly in order to prevent their losses. So what they actually want is preemptive removal without meaningful human review or anything else that could take 10 minutes.
That involves more than being responsive when someone reports abusive content or dropping bad customers. That requires becoming a censorship machine that preemptively treats all new customers as criminals, and probably having some unaccountable AI drive the censorship process. (That latter seems to be what LaLiga is pushing Fastly to do.)
That's beyond the legal obligations of infrastructure platforms, bad for the reliability of their service, and just a slice of what they'd have to do to rework their architecture to support this kind of preemptive censorship.
> ” what they actually want is preemptive removal without meaningful human review or anything else that could take 10 minutes.”
Yet this would actually be a better solution for everyone (except the pirates).
10 minutes seems like a reasonable response time that would allow a chance for human review. No football fan wants to have their viewing interrupted because they used a dodgy pirate site to watch it. Currently, pirates can simply use a VPN to get around the IP-level block while the huge collateral damage affects legitimate Cloudflare users.
Plenty of companies proactively take action against shady users, even if not 100% required under law. Youtube has content id, social media companies have "community guidelines", and ISPs have AUPs.
technically, LaLiga themselves doesn't even do the blocking. They have a court order from some years ago that allows them to compel all the individual ISPs to block any IP addresses they specify, with no oversight or review
This must negatively impact a huge number of businesses. Is there no move for them to all get together to take legal action against LaLiga to stop them doing this?
This is the country that takes a 2 hour nap every day. They also have a sleeping contest every year with a winner and everything. And Spain isn't hot like Mexico where folks take 2 hours off in the topically heat and make it up for it in the evening because that's more efficient.
Calling on JD Vance and Elon as if they're known for a principled respect for free speech is crazy. It just reads as unnecessary propaganda or a poorly-disguised threat from powerful friends. I'm generally inclined to agree with Cloudflare here and the post makes me question that.
There are some sites that stream a pirate signal of the football matches, and they stream through Cloudflare proxied IPs. They share the IP with thousands if not millions of other sites.
When the match starts, Movistar (a big ISP, but also a TV platform that streams legally football matches) sues itself in the following terms: "we, Movistar TV, demand that Movistar ISP blocks the following IPs that are being used to stream our matches illegally", on a special and urgent procedure. The judge tells Movistar-ISP to block the IP, which they do in seconds. Now replace Movistar with the biggest ISPs in Spain, and you have more than 80% of the country with Internet capped for hours (except if you know how to use some kind of tunneling)
As the pirates share the IP with so many sites, because the IP is actually a Cloudflare proxy, a big chunk of the internet goes down. Users complains, and Movistar ask Cloudflare to block the real IP and spare the rest. Cloudflare says that they cannot legally do that as no judge actually told them to.
Our Spanish judges are historically inept when talking about copyright, internet, file sharing and similar stuff. Some of them might be more updated, but there has been cases that they ordered some publications to surrender their lithographic plates, because a cover has to be retired as late as 2007 (https://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2007/07/20/espana/1184937587....). So I don't think they understand much more about what is an IP other than "a IP is a number assigned to a computer". And Movistar is quite happy with that.
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
I worked for ByteDance in Singapore. People would show up for work between 10 and 11am, lunch would start around 11:45am or 12, then people would nap until 2pm at their desk. A good, focused engineer could produce the same output as these engineers while only working in the morning
Yep - I put that rule at the bottom so that everything I want elsewhere is sorted by some preceding rule. That's how unfuck works too, though.
My ruleset looks like this now:
To: (tix|orders)@domain | From: orders@* | Subject contains (pedido|order|sipariş|confirma) -> something I bought, to Orders
To: tix@domain -> to Tickets
To: travel@domain | Subject contains (tickets|billete) -> to Travel
(some specific mailing lists by sender) -> to Reads - those are the newsletters I want to read
From: *@(domains of banks I have) -> to Banks - obviously
From: *@linkedin.com -> to Linkedin; it's noisy but sometimes useful
Header list-unsubscribe exists -> to Ads
That's about it. I don't remember the last time something I didn't want reached my inbox, however I go to the ads and do a mass unsubscription every couple of months.
The easiest way I can think of is for you to join the Discord server.
Top right corner of the website (I'm aware that's not the best icon for it - addressed it to the team).
Shouldn't take long until Linux is up there, tho. I know the team started managing the build process.
Jfyi, I'm doing exactly this (and more) in a platform library; it covers the issues I've encountered during the last 8+ years I've been working with Go highload apps. During this time developing/improving the platform and rolling was a hobby of mine in every company :)
It (will) cover the stuff like "sync the logs"/"wait for ingresses to catch up with the liveness handler"/etc.
The docs are sparse and some things aren't covered yet; however I'm planning to do the first release once I'm back from a holiday.
In the end, this will be a meta-platform (carefully crafted building blocks), and a reference platform library, covering a typical k8s/otel/grpc+http infrastructure.
I'll check this out, thanks for sharing. I think all of us golang infra/platform people probably have had to write our own similar libraries. Thanks for sharing yours!
https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX looks promising - I'm hacking away on an always-on transcriber for my notes for later search&recall. It has support for diarization (the speaker detection you're looking for).
But overall it's pretty simple to do after you wrangle the Python dependencies - all you need is a sink for the text files (for example, create a new file for every Teams meeting, but that's another story...)
Any good solutions for capturing the audio streams and piping them where they're needed? (I.e both microphone and speakers. I was wondering if I needed to mess with pulseaudio and/or jack (I mean pipewire under the hood, but I think those APIs sit on top and might be clearer))
Never mind, played around a little, and pulseaudio's cli API makes it easy enough to sling some loopback/virtual devices around that you can then read from easily enough.
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...
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