Hacker News Reader

Comment by giorgioz | Hacker News Reader

I hosted a website on Cloudflare and I sent a link to it to a friend on a Sunday. The friend told me the website was down. Turns out Spain blocks IP addresses belonging to Cloudflare during big football matches because some pirate streaming websites are hosted on Cloudflare. https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1nm80wz/trying_to_u...

I decided to go back to AWS.

Frankly Cloudflare is choosing the wrong battle on defending pirate streaming websites. There are other gray areas that I apprecciate Cloudflare defending freedom of speech online, but pirate streaming websites aren't one of those.

View on HN

That's Spains issue. Spaniards should encourage their government to eliminate whatever nonsensical provision in the law that allows ranges of IPs to be blocked at the service provider level for soccer matches.

It can be thought of in reverse, that they are letting the traffic in when there isn't a soccer match, so as to let the public temporarily use things that might eventually be fully blocked, and thus be able to conduct business on non-compliant sites.

Also people in Spain are learning to use VPNs.

Regardless of my opinion of soccer pirates, I still hate copyright clowns more.

Cloudflare isn't defending the pirate streaming sites, they are simply living their principles of being neutral.

I'm still kinda confused as to how this works. Doesn't every cloud connected or IoT device just die during a football game in Spain?

Yes. And, who cares really? Maybe the users do, but the Spanish government certainly doesn't!

How cheap, I wonder, does a government have to be to sell itself out over ball game broadcasting rights? Could someone like Elon Musk just fly in there and acquire the entire government with some pocket change?

OK - well thanks for explaining that. Maybe this will motivate digital sovereignty at a personal level?

It's literally the mafia. Not metaphorically - I'm told the actual mafia basically owns football in Spain and Italy, which is why the government doesn't do anything about this stupidity.

As much as I'm skeptical of Cloudflare's dominant role, the problem here is not with Cloudflare but the politicians in Spain catering to LaLiga the football league. They're disrupting their country's public web infrastructure in favor of private money interests.

At first they came for the 4k bluray rips

Then they came for the Linux ISOs

I don't even think that case was from Cloudflare hosting, just providing DDOS protection.

And it wasn't a Spanish government policy, but rather a single judge's order.

"Major consequences M, because of an order by judge J" is not a situation which lasts...unless the government is relatively happy with M.

This is like suggesting the policy of the United States is set by "just a panel of less than 10 judges" and not the Federal government. Not only is SCOTUS part of the US government, it may actually be the most powerful part of the Federal government

Via a proxy? Or some other kind of DDOS protection? If it's a proxy, that should be considered hosting.

Cloudflare does provide APIs to look up security threats by IP addresses that could help with DDOS, and I wouldn't consider that hosting: https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/intel/subres...

judges are giving orders based on the law/policy of the country. so if a judge gives a bad order, then the cause is a bad policy/law, and the fix is not to replace the judge, but to change the law.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com