Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

#291

Post by xp84 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:05 AM UTC

danirod wrote: post #30

Heh, lucky you, at least you get a message. My ISP just drops traffic to the affected IPs. No ping, no traceroute, just a spinner in the browser until it says "page not found". Every response and comment from LaLiga, the football organization responsible for this, has been so far that this is a minor issue that only affects a few bunch of nerds who talk about "docker images" or "github repositories" or "whatever that…

Who cares if she can’t find her elderly father? A small price to pay to preserve the stratospheric prices on football TV rights!!!!

Re: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

#292

Post by Dibby053 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:10 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #201

Dibby053 wrote: post #130

Going to play devil's advocate here but I suspect if Cloudflare had been more cooperative about taking down illegal content, LaLiga would not have resorted to blanket blocking individual IPs. I would really like to understand more about the process that they should follow but didn't / followed but didn't satisfy them / doesn't exist, in order to remove infringing websites quickly from CloudFlare.

LaLiga wanted the right to tell Cloudflare to block specific sites without going through a court. Cloudflare, rightfully, said that was ridiculous and unreasonable. A Spanish court, wrongfully, decided to let LaLiga block all of Cloudflare.

I assume the problem is Cloudflare wants a court order that mentions the specific infringing domain name. The problem is: what's faster, spinning up a new frontend for a livestream or getting an order from a court?

Courts orders are, rightfully, slow. A court order is a serious thing and we shouldn't be wasting judges' time and resources to determine if hundreds of domains in CloudFlare, during every single match, are infringing on LaLiga. This is why the Spanish ISPs have a fast-lane with LaLiga to block infringing websites quickly. Why is it ridiculous and unreasonable? If LaLiga starts abusing this power to attack competitors or do anything malicious they will lose that power instantly.

Fastly understood the problem and will start running detection software to ban infringing livestreams in real time. https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/fastly-and-laliga-team-up-...

What's CF's solution?

Re: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

#293

Post by pxc » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:20 AM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #216

echoangle wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t really need to block all, you just need to annoy the users enough that paying is easier. And I think there are enough games to use up the IP reserve pretty quickly and getting new ones every time is pretty annoying.

I can provision a new VPS in about 5s of active work. I'd probably fully automate spinning up new servers and failing over because automatically detecting which got blocked is trivial. Bonus points if you use providers that let you attach multiple IPs to each VPS for cheap. Use some censorship resistant decentralized protocols to provide the next couple IPs to your client software and you're good. And then they still…

> No country ever won this fight short of total shutdown/disconnects.

Some countries also throttle pretty effectively. So you can connect but if you're trying to do more than read Hacker News it's not very usable.

Re: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

#294

Post by Dibby053 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:24 AM UTC

integralid wrote: post #220

Dibby053 wrote: post #130

Going to play devil's advocate here but I suspect if Cloudflare had been more cooperative about taking down illegal content, LaLiga would not have resorted to blanket blocking individual IPs. I would really like to understand more about the process that they should follow but didn't / followed but didn't satisfy them / doesn't exist, in order to remove infringing websites quickly from CloudFlare.

I work with actually malicious content (things that make people lose their life savings) and Cloudflare abuse is relatively helpful (compared to most ISPs who just don't care). They just refuse to take down random things that some media company representatives send their way, without a court order or any oversight. And this is a good thing.

Can you qualify "relatively helpful"? If you send them a ransomware site, a person looks at it, and still demand a court order... A company like them should know the scale at which these things are run, and that courts can't keep up with the speed.

>And this is a good thing.

Disagree. Demanding a court order for every single clear-cut case of infringement reported by the rightful owner of ephemeral content that is a infringed upon hundreds of times every day, causing nearly a billion dollar of losses per year... This is what the ISPs were trying to do and LaLiga successfully sued them, creating the modern fast-lane that CloudFlare complains about. Furthermore, unlike CloudFlare, the ISPs were not even profiting from the illegal content! This is a huge difference in the Spanish legal system. This will not end up good for them or for the open Internet they claim to defend (presumably as an excuse for taking their cut from cybercrime.)

Re: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

#295

Post by fireant » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:26 AM UTC

joquarky wrote: post #208

ryandrake wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 once remember reading an article about shareholders selling off a stock because the rate of increase in profit had slowed.

There is nothing wrong with that. Stock price is based on perceived future value , not current company profits.

Re: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

#296

Post by JoshTriplett » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:30 AM UTC

Dibby053 wrote: post #292

JoshTriplett wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LaLiga wanted the right to tell Cloudflare to block specific sites without going through a court. Cloudflare, rightfully, said that was ridiculous and unreasonable. A Spanish court, wrongfully, decided to let LaLiga block all of Cloudflare.

I assume the problem is Cloudflare wants a court order that mentions the specific infringing domain name. The problem is: what's faster, spinning up a new frontend for a livestream or getting an order from a court? Courts orders are, rightfully, slow. A court order is a serious thing and we shouldn't be wasting judges' time and resources to determine if hundreds of domains in CloudFlare, during every single match, ar…

> If LaLiga starts abusing this power to attack competitors or do anything malicious they will lose that power instantly.

Because everything demonstrated so far has suggested that LaLiga is reasonable and measured? Courts exist for many reasons, among them that we do not trust plaintiffs to always be right or reasonable.

By way of demonstrating that such power is unacceptable, it sounds like LaLiga is also trying to get Spanish ISPs to block all VPNs whenever a game is on.

This is not an entity that can be trusted with power. This is an entity that rightfully should take its whining to a court who can keep its abuses in check. (Unfortunately, the Spanish courts also don't seem willing to keep its abuses in check, which brings us back to the collateral damage problem.)

> Fastly understood the problem

No, Fastly accepted the blackmail that Cloudflare refused.

Re: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

#297

Post by fireant » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:32 AM UTC

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #204

tom1337 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just wait until they block Azure as well so the official La Liga site also stops working

Dumb question but why don’t the pirate sites all host on Azure if Cloudflare is blocked and Azure isn’t?

Besides the reasons already listed, Cloudflare is free, Azure is not. As a pirate site owner I imagine you don't want you payment information with your name associated with your pirate site. You can pay for hosting and dns with crypto.

Re: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

#298

Post by mlyle » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:45 AM UTC

pxc wrote: post #281

mlyle wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why entities comply with the wishes of courts is because there's consequences if they don't. Consequences like being filtered.

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.…

> 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.

Re: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

#299

Post by micw » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:51 AM UTC

utrack wrote: post #4

They block the whole of Cloudflare R2, I believe the Docker hub is just (heh) a collateral. 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...

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)

Re: Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block

#300

Post by Dibby053 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 4:54 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #296

Dibby053 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the problem is Cloudflare wants a court order that mentions the specific infringing domain name. The problem is: what's faster, spinning up a new frontend for a livestream or getting an order from a court? Courts orders are, rightfully, slow. A court order is a serious thing and we shouldn't be wasting judges' time and resources to determine if hundreds of domains in CloudFlare, during every single match, ar…

> If LaLiga starts abusing this power to attack competitors or do anything malicious they will lose that power instantly. Because everything demonstrated so far has suggested that LaLiga is reasonable and measured? Courts exist for many reasons, among them that we do not trust plaintiffs to always be right or reasonable. By way of demonstrating that such power is unacceptable, it sounds like LaLiga is also trying to…

>By way of demonstrating that such power is unacceptable, it sounds like LaLiga is also trying to get Spanish ISPs to block all VPNs whenever a game is on.

What LaLiga did was get some VPN providers (NordVPN and ProtonVPN) to start blocking pirate streaming websites. They're not trying to block VPNs themselves unless there's other news I didn't find.