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Posted by akyuu 9 hours ago

Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times(bandaancha.eu)
398 points | 395 commentspage 3
amarant 8 hours ago|
Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates!

So half the internet goes down, but pirates just.. Don't use cloudflare anymore.. Or use a proxy... Or use tor...

These policies cause nothing but collateral damage, and now apparently they've decided to cause some more of it!

Good job Spain.

otterley 8 hours ago||
CloudFlare loves pirates so much that they disclose loss of DMCA safe harbor protections as a material business risk on all their SEC filings. Piracy friendliness is key to their business model. It’s a risky position that no other large-scale CDN is willing to take.

Forcing piracy consumers to use Tor or other proxies is unlikely to be popular. They’ll still be used, for sure, but so long as CF makes pirated content easily accessible over the Internet, this is just going to keep happening. It’s just too damned convenient.

I don’t believe CF is going to win here, long term. If Spain and other countries block their ASNs, enough of their legitimate paying customers may start abandoning ship, and CF will have to get serious about unplugging notorious proxy configurations for piracy origin servers.

calgoo 7 hours ago|||
But cloudflare has no issue blocking the content if they receive a court order. The issue here is that La Liga wants to be able to get content blocked because they say so, and it has to be done right now.

I also don't support these organizations that destroy the sports that people love, force you to subscribe to different services as each game and "liga" has made their own deals to make as much money as possible. Until we remove the stupid amount of money that is involved in these sport events nothing will change. And now they are talking about other events like movies, series and live entertainment show. Hopefully they come for the VPNs next and break every business VPN tunnel whenever they want. Hopefully that will cause enough backlash that they finally fix this BS once and for all.

otterley 7 hours ago||
DMCA notices (and whatever the EU equivalents are) are designed to avoid the need for court orders. Every service provider that sends content is obligated by law to cease sending the content upon receipt of that notification. CF ignores them because they believe (mistakenly in my view) that the law doesn’t apply to them.

And every time they are sued for facilitating piracy, instead of letting the case to proceed to trial, they settle out of court.

iamzenitraM 5 hours ago||
Cloudflare famously ignores DMCA themselves for content they don't host, with their point of view that since they're a proxy and not a host they are not forced to comply, only pass the DMCA claim to the upstream.

https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/abuse-approach/

Other than that, the legal situation on Spain is pretty dire for LaLiga. The Supreme Court already ruled in Spain that, as per the current writing of the law, football transmissions are _not_ works subject to copyright as they're not works of "art, literature and science": https://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/ca/Poder-Judicial/Tribunal...

So it's likely that, if LaLiga sued Cloudflare or they made them party on any actual litigation, Cloudflare would defend themselves and possibly win. Therefore... they just don't sue them, only sue ISPs that have an incentive to just comply to any LaLiga request (as.. legal compliance and collaboration is one of the requirements for being able to buy rights to LaLiga matches in Spain. Yeah, no kidding, you can look it up in their public documentation).

Well, I lie. In a legal twist, they ended up suing Cloudflare for "participation in criminal activities", but not through the same avenue they sued the ISPs on (penal vs commerce court), with some interesting twists as accusations of "facilitating services to avoid the execution of a court order" - which doesn't make a lot of sense, as they're not even direct parties to that court order and they were denied taking part on it. https://okdiario.com/economia/empresas/justicia-imputa-ceo-c...

otterley 5 hours ago||
I’m aware of how they rationalize it, and it’s bullshit. They compare themselves to a router that passes through packets unmolested. But that argument is trivially refuted by the fact that their IPs are what their customers' DNS queries resolve to, and the fact that without being explicitly configured to do so, their proxies will not serve content on behalf of an origin. L3 routers simply copy packets between interfaces. A CDN is significantly more complicated than that.
amarant 1 hour ago|||
There's still just bit torrent though. No need for cloudflare, no need for proxies, no tor. And it's like, easier than Netflix!
prmoustache 5 hours ago||
> Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates!

Correction: they use the pirate excuse to make life of clients choosing competitors (like cloudflare) impossible. There is an overlap between some Cloudflare and Telefónica services.

swiftcoder 6 hours ago||
Look, I'd be more supportive of this sort of thing if it worked - pirated futbol streams are rampant despite the blocking.

And the blast radius often is the entire devstack. Last weekend they blocked Cloudflare and GitHub simultaneously.

hollow-moe 8 hours ago||
I'm starting to thing the final goal is just to stop "the world" so watching the advertisements with a side of sports is the only thing left to do lmao, wonder how they'll justify banning reading during matches.
VenezuelaFree 8 hours ago||
Should also block themselves from dubbing stuff into spanish, they are horrible, thanks god southamerica has many talented spanish dubbers
rapnie 8 hours ago||
Once you dub, you can't stop. I'm glad Netherlands doesn't do dubbing. Helps general foreign language profiency, I suppose, and near every Dutch person speaks English quite reasonably.
Paratoner 8 hours ago||
I never understood this attitude from native speakers towards their own language. I am a fresh NL citizen, and have struggled SO MUCH to assimilate into society largely due to this prevalent mentality of "dutch sux actually, we can all speak english amirite guys??" its so bafflingly self-destructive to your own culture. But go off I guess.
tverbeure 8 hours ago|||
You've probably never watched Indiana Jones speak French... I was forced to when staying for 2 weeks in the south of Belgium as part of a French immersion program. It's unbearable.

When I watch an American movie, I want to hear it the way the director intended it to be. I don't want every villain in every movie have the same voice. If I want to hear Dutch in a movie, I watch a Dutch movie. It's not that deep.

The fact that it helps kids learn a different language is a very nice fringe benefit.

I remember watching an English movie with an incorrect subtitle in school when I was 12, well before my first English class. The whole auditorium laughed because everyone caught the error.

loloquwowndueo 7 hours ago|||
> I don't want every villain in every movie have the same voice.

Sounds like your problem is with crappy, cheap dubbing, not dubbing in general.

Look at Disney animation for dubbing done right (and more so in the 20th century - these days I’m not so sure).

tverbeure 7 hours ago|||
Yeah, because I totally have control over who’s dubbing movies in France.
pessimizer 6 hours ago|||
A cartoon is the worst possible example.
loloquwowndueo 4 hours ago||
Tell us more.
numpad0 7 hours ago|||
I don't think that generalize to dubs as concept itself, I know for the fact that Japanese dub of Commando(1985)[1] is quite something.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commando_(1985_film)

mihaelm 8 hours ago||||
I didn't understand him that way. It's more that it helps if people can more easily pick up a foreign language, or solidify their skills, along the way through media. Doubly so when it's a lingua franca like English.

Though for you, I understand you might have been peeved if people kept switching to English when you just wanted to practice Dutch.

rapnie 1 hour ago||
Yes, I meant it that way. And yes, Dutch people too easily switch to English when someone they encountered is not very proficient in Dutch. It is a kind of 'helpfulness' which is not so helpful for foreigners who want to learn Dutch, and I agree that more Dutch people should make the effort and not the easy language switch.
rapnie 1 hour ago||||
It is 'destructive' to Dutch culture if you don't dub a movie in a foreign language? I claim the opposite. Doesn't pretend everything happens in your own culture, feels more like a kind cultural erasure of sorts. There's still more than enough TV content in native language. What I also noticed often in dubbed material is that the dubbed voice has inaccurate translation, subtle reformulations, or skips spoken words entirely, which in more autoritarian countries gives wriggle room to subtle media manipulation. The Dutch get it straight from the horse's mouth at least.
Aaargh20318 7 hours ago||||
I’m a Dutch native and if it were up to me we’d switch to English. I think it’s dumb that small country like us feels the need to maintain its own language.

It is a massive disadvantage. It means that we’re always late with new stuff because the Dutch market is so small no one wants to make the effort of building Dutch versions.

embedding-shape 7 hours ago|||
I'm a native Swede and I've said the same about Swedish to, don't really care if it's Mandarin, English or Spanish, just that as many countries as possible go together and unify under one language. Obviously both for Netherlands and Sweden, English would be the way to go, but imagine if you could learn just 3 languages and speak with 90% of the world's population? I thought globalism would take us there eventually somehow, but seems the pendulum started swinging the other way instead.
numpad0 6 hours ago|||
FWIW, Mandarin is not the universal spoken language of China. It's just the lingua franca of China as the region. They actually have something like a dozen major groups of dialects with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.

The place read as Shang-hai in Mandarin is apparently read Zan-he in the local "dialect" spoken there. I think one could say Koln and Cologne sound closer together.

pessimizer 5 hours ago||
Did anyone say that Mandarin is the "universal spoken language" of China? IIRC, >90% of Chinese people speak Mandarin as either a 1st or 2nd language.

I don't think as many did 20 years ago, but China is consciously Mandarinizing, and English has lost its spot as the standard second language with the vastly increasing hostility from the West.

bluecalm 7 hours ago|||
Yup, there is a lot of value in having universal language and English is the only one with a chance (in Western world anyway). Imo EU should mandate English as 2nd official language for all business dealings and bureaucracy. Having many languages and obligatory translations is a huge disadvantage we have in comparison to USA (or China).
Pay08 7 hours ago|||
Language is the biggest thing that defines culture. Do you want the Netherlands to perform some sort of countrywide assimilation into British or American culture?
Aaargh20318 6 hours ago|||
Yes, I’m a huge proponent of global unification. It’s ridiculous that we have different cultures, languages and laws based on between which imaginary lines on a map you live.

Countries make no sense to me. Look at the current situation in Iran. Everyone on the planet is affected by the actions of a president we didn’t vote for. Earth should be a single country.

lentil_soup 6 hours ago||
What a sad world where we all have the same culture and language. There's many concepts that don't translate from one language to the next, they form a way of looking at the world. What about foods, and stories and music, nah, sounds terrible.

I also want one big world for all but definitely not a single culture or language

LinXitoW 4 hours ago||
So there's only one single culture in all english speaking countries? A unified language does not in any way imply a boring or "assimilated" culture. Dutch people can still ask their closest friend to Venmo them 2 bucks for the fries they took earlier, germans can still make and drink objectively better beer, and the french can still be black and white and smoking a cigarette. But just in english instead.
lentil_soup 4 hours ago||
OP literally advocated for having a single culture.

And you missed the part I said about how different human concepts don't exist in all languages, do we just not have those? Language is an integral part of different cultures, not the only one, but a pretty big one. Can't believe I'm having to defend this.

embedding-shape 7 hours ago||||
> Language is the biggest thing that defines culture

Lots of countries would disagree with this. Do you not think Peru and Spain has distinct cultures for example? Why/why not?

mihaelm 7 hours ago|||
Small countries are already doing this through the Internet since so much of the consumed content is in English.
pdntspa 7 hours ago|||
It's really not that hard. I lived in NL for a year and assimilated Dutch just about as well as my flatmate (a German who was taking a taking a Dutch language class)

Go out and pay attention to your surroundings. Read everything. Make dutch friends. Spend some time outside the large cities.

Dutch is already like half English just spelled and pronounced way differently.

debugnik 7 hours ago|||
Vice versa for most Spaniard opinions on South American Spanish dubs.

Being objective, both sides of the pond have produced many shitty Spanish dubs and some good ones, and unless there's too much difference for a given series we all just prefer our native dub.

mihaelm 8 hours ago|||
Subtitles all the way. Only advantages of dubbing I can see is accessibility for vision impaired and employment opportunities for local VA talent.

But dubbed live action media is such a horrid experience for me.

thefifthsetpin 7 hours ago|||
I mean, I also prefer to consume subtitled content, but sometimes it's nice to have the option to look away from the screen and not miss dialog. Some video content can even be consumed as audio-only content and not much will be missed.
loloquwowndueo 7 hours ago|||
Dubbed content is ok for young children I guess.
embedding-shape 7 hours ago||
I'd probably say that most of my early English was learnt by reading subtitles and listening to American cartoons and shows on TV while eating breakfast before school. If it was dubbed, probably once I got my first computer I'd have a way harder time understanding at least the tiny bits I did understand.
loloquwowndueo 7 hours ago||
> reading subtitles

So you were already reading. What about younger children?

That said - I fully agree, I’m surprised I don’t speak with a Star Trek accent given where I had most of my early exposure to English.

embedding-shape 7 hours ago||
I dunno, younger than 5-6 I think most children don't really understand plot lines or whatever anyways so it matters less, a cartoon in English is probably as fun and engaging as one in the native language.
loloquwowndueo 7 hours ago|||
> younger than 5-6 I think most children don't really understand plot lines or whatever

My experience has been the opposite :) but hey.

pessimizer 5 hours ago|||
The only reason not to dub a cartoon is that you're an adult who cares about quality and the dubbing is usually done for a smaller audience so it is going to be worse.

There's no reason not to be dubbing cartoons for kids. That's a dorky debate for grown-ass adults playing animu purists.

anthk 8 hours ago|||
Don't let me start on your 'neutral' dub where everything reminds me on either Cantinflas or El Chavo.
loloquwowndueo 7 hours ago||
Regional accents are a thing and stuff like Argentinian Candy Candy or Cuban Mazinger Z are totally childhood-defining.
anthk 7 hours ago||
Ironically I never watched Dragon Ball in Castillian Spanish but for the OVA's. I've watched the series in Basque long before the Spanish dub ever existed (the Basque one was from 1990) and yes, the manga was a perfect 100% translation, so most of the Latin American memes about dubs don't apply to me.
nslsm 7 hours ago|||
Yes yes, Spain sucks a lot. Please stay in Venezuela, well away of our awfulness.
applfanboysbgon 8 hours ago||
File "selling out your country's communication infrastructure to people filming other people kicking a ball around" under things science fiction writers failed to predict about capitalist dystopias.
smallmancontrov 8 hours ago||
Hey, that FIFA Peace Prize won't pay for itself!
amarant 8 hours ago||
I hear la liga wants to do a prize too!
wiml 7 hours ago|||
You may enjoy the 1952 novel The Space Merchants by Pohl & Kornbluth.
rwyinuse 8 hours ago||
If I ever start watching football, I'll make sure to pirate every match. FIFA, La Liga, they all seem utterly rotten to me.
krelian 8 hours ago||
It will take years before the effect will be felt but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.
embedding-shape 7 hours ago||
> but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.

Every now and then we go out to watch some of the finals for the national (Spanish) team, and the audience most of the time lean young still today in 2026, although of course it's very mixed more depending on the bar/restaurant you go to rather than the football itself. Even if the subscription prices are expensive today, affording 4 EUR for two beers during a game in a bar is affordable even to teenagers.

lostlogin 7 hours ago||
If you think FIFA is rotten, remember their Peace Prize.

‘Rotten’ isn’t a strong enough insult.

krzyk 5 hours ago||
Any summary in English? My translation service doesn't give good results.
messh 6 hours ago||
It doesn't solve recording and uploading later... say a movie. So how does it even make sense?
fluoridation 4 hours ago|
Games are time-sensitive events. Most people who care don't want to watch the game once it's finished, they want to watch it live.
danayfm 6 hours ago||
You can bypass this censorship with Starlink. Starlink does not block access like spanish ISPs
Cider9986 6 hours ago|
Or a VPN for a tenth of the price.
ronsor 6 hours ago|
"Spain to block the internet 24/7"

Please do. I want to see the result on the GDP.

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