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My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

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Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#171

Post by swiftcoder »

iamzenitraM wrote: post #31

Some of us are tracking their blocking over at: https://hayahora.futbol https://tinyuptime.sconde.net It's not only Cloudflare, but also other not so tiny CDNs are being blocked - currently an entire Backblaze B2 region is blocked in 3 out of 5 ISPs (!). Particularly hurtful, the entire Cloudflare R2 is blocked during football matches so you can't pull Docker images or Ollama models.

You should probably check Github as well. We have consistent problems connecting to github during football matches

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#172

Post by progbits »

moduspol wrote: post #123
eightysixfour wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe that's what OP is asking, they mean to ask about the following scenario: 1. Someone sitting next to you in a bar is playing a match on their phone, but the bar is not. 2. Your phone has the app installed and hears the match. 3. La Liga sues the bar?

Presumably then La Liga investigates the bar in-person. Or waits until X reports have occurred over Y duration and THEN have someone investigate in-person.

You are giving them a lot more credit than their behavior deserves.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#173

Post by dmitrygr »

hyperman1 wrote: post #120

I see 2 nasties here: On one hand, this is a clear overreach of the courts: They gave a private party the right to censor random sources without judicial oversight. On the other hand, the courts still need to judicate in their respective countries. If cloudflare says: We're in another country so the courts cant make us block illegal things, well, the courts have to overblock or they lose the ability to enforce their…

Some decisions do not need to be possible. No amount of court judgements will make pigs fly. Perhaps it is about time we took the decisions of what may or may not be on the internet outside the reach of idiots.

We. You, me, readers here, are the people who are in charge of design decisions for future systems and networks. When designing them, favor reliability, resilience, decentralization! Make it impossible to take things down! Let them pass useless judgements and make toothless rules. Design so that those judgements and rules apply no more to the internet of tomorrow than they do to the sun, moon, and stars.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#174

Post by saghm »

hearsathought wrote: post #156
saghm wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about other sports, but for the MLB, there are some very strange policies that make it difficult to watch games even if you want to pay for it, mostly stemming from the local broadcasters of the games. Even if you sign up for the subscription service to stream games, they'll "black out" the games that they expect you to be able to watch by getting a cable subscription, which not only is ridiculous (since…

Why doesn't he just save himself the time, money and hassle and just watch the highlights or highlight clips. I understand why the NFL is going the stream route given how popular it is already. They can afford to inconvenience people. But MLB has been stagnant or declining for so long. You'd think they'd make their content more accessible to grow the fan base.

I think he enjoys having the entire game on in the background. He's partially switched over to listening to the radio broadcasts for games, which apparently are often provided online as well (which makes sense, given nothing really needs to change in terms of how they make money to provide it online instead of via a radio station).

What's weird to me is that the MLB does seem to genuinely be trying to make changes in terms of gameplay to try to keep relevant (especially around reviews for on-field calls, but also in terms of some of the changes in recent years that were controversial but seem to have produced meaningful results in reversing some of the creep in how long it takes for games to finish), and my understanding is that they basically were the first major sports league in the US to invest in streaming technology, to the point where I remember reading that the NHL app (and maybe some of the others) were originally developed and maintained by MLB's programmers as well. I'm not sure how they've managed to fall so far behind in terms of streaming experience; the most apparent difference is that the baseball season is over ten times as many games, which presumably could have some sort of effect on things, but my naive expectation would be that it would incentive having a stable infrastructure for this even more. Maybe it's just a matter of them being able to get away with blocking some games because there are still so many others that don't get blocked during the rest of the season? With only 16 games in a regular season, blocking even one of them might just be something viewers are less willing to put up with.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#175

Post by fragmede »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #169
piltdownman wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the bar pays something like 10x the price of a normal subscription to be able to publicly show live Sports as a draw for their customers. In UK/Ireland you can easily identify if the venue in question is paying for the commercial package as it will intermittently display a pint glass symbol in a bottom corner of the screen. Indeed, Sky investigators, who do spot checks, use it to quickly ensure that the pub has a…

>In UK/Ireland you can easily identify if the venue in question is paying for the commercial package as it will intermittently display a pint glass symbol in a bottom corner of the screen. Indeed, Sky investigators, who do spot checks, use it to quickly ensure that the pub has a valid pub contract and not a residential contract. That seems as if it would be so easy to fake...

Does it cost more less time/effort for the bar to fake it though? The price of 200€/month above seems low enough to just pay it.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#176

Post by fluoridation »

gloosx wrote: post #168
fluoridation wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you're going to consider indirect transactions too, eventually every part of the economy ends up affecting every other part. That money that goes into those projects doesn't just vanish, it gets spent and flows back out into the economy.

From a wider perspective it does vanish in terms of productive value: billions go into inflated transfers and club losses that generate little beyond spectacle, instead of going into things that improve lives (cheap energy, infrastructure, innovation, public goods)

I honestly don't understand what you mean.

>billions go into inflated transfers and club losses that generate little beyond spectacle

"Club losses"? If you pay a football player 100k to play a match, even if the point of the match is nothing but spectacle, that money doesn't evaporate. The player will spend it on the economy. What else could he possibly do with it besides spending it or tossing it in a fire? If a club spends 10M on something entirely frivolous -- say, a giant concrete football -- that money also doesn't simply disappear, it's used to pay the people who will make the raw materials and the people who will design and build the thing. Only individuals and distinct entities lose money. An economy never does.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#177

Post by kwanbix »

ta12653421 wrote: post #147
kwanbix wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most leagues face the same issue: just one to three wealthy clubs dominate, winning around 70–80% of the time, which makes the competition less exciting. The German Bundesliga is one of the starkest examples: Bayern Munich has taken 16 of the last 20 titles.

haha, andy why is that? Because of ridiculous transfer rules & markets - if these would be killed, there would be much more competition, and it was that way, 20-30+ years ago....

You can see this in most everything: 5 companies dominate IT, 3 companies dominate sodas, 3 companies dominate credit cards, etc. I think it is a byproduct of the way our current system works.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#179

Post by DangitBobby »

next_xibalba wrote: post #105
dabeeeenster wrote: post #65

Related (7 years ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/8q1j0o/la_liga_uses... - Bars, pubs and other public establishments have to pay around 200€/month in order to show football on their TVs while the household package goes between 10 and 30€/month. - The official app, with over 10 million downloads, asks you for microphone and GPS permissions. - La Liga remotely activates the microphone and tries to detect…

I would never agree to this. But it doesn't strike me as particularly unethical, either. So long as both parties understand what they're agreeing to, this seems perfectly fine. If, for example, the NFL ever did this, I would just not watch.

And this is how free markets result in dystopia.

Re: My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on

#180

Post by array_key_first »

PlotCitizen wrote: post #109
pmontra wrote: post #3

Yes, we know. Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches. It would be more interesting to know if something is getting done about this. Other businesses must work, people must communicate, the very same Spanish state must keep working. Is there any protest with at least a slight amount of hope?

> Internet does not work in Spain when there are football matches. There's a distinction between the above statement and the truth, which is that CloudFlare and other large CDNs do not work in Spain when there are football matches. Yes, it's not CloudFlare's fault in this instance, since I believe CloudFlare is not being notified to take action in real time. The blocking needs to happen quickly to block access to ill…

I think moving away from cloudflare is not a solution because:

1. You need CDNs for reasonable web performance, especially on mobile. Hitting your dedicated server for every static asset like images is going to bring latency through the roof.

2. Many companies don't have a physical presence in Europe, but are still able to achieve adequate performance because of CDNs.

3. If everyone just moves off of cloudflare, the blocking would just increase. Nothing would be solved if even bigger ranges are blocked, and probably even more stuff would break.

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