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Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

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Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m gonna argue that piracy is the only thing keeping platforms somewhat in check to not get completely enshittified. I stopped pirating stuff when content platforms gave a compelling easy to use product, I’m back to pirating because it’s genuinely a better product compared to the endless hoops you have to jump through to use streaming services

What hoops? Payment? I pay to stream La Liga and it's about as easy as hitting 'Watch Live'

Say I want to watch some specific movie right now.

How would you go about accomplishing this?

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#82

I was unaware of this controversy so in brief: 1. La Liga (Spanish Football) finds pirates streaming their games objectionable 2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing. 3. They appear in court in Spain and get an ex-parte TRO blocking all Cloudflare IPs. (Ex parte TRO: restraining order granted without Cloudflare being summoned to court) 4. Based on t…

The EU should be sanctioning Spain the same way we're sanctioning Hungary for this sort of authoritarian behaviour. What's next, they're banning Google cause pirates use it to search for streams? I don't know how this doesn't count as a net neutrality violation.

[flagged]

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#83

Actually, this is a Cloudflare problem - simply take extra steps to ensure your clients paying for your services aren’t harmed by natural market forces. If you read between the lines, he’s claiming people will die because Cloudflare doesn’t want to take the time, effort, or money to fix the problem that they easily could by creating a separate system for critical services. This type of “tech hypochondria” should be a…

The "tech hypochondria" is downstream of tech's particularly warped understanding of free speech: i.e. "censorship is when packet loss".

If you define censorship as packet loss, then anything that drops packets is inherently evil, and your business (which ultimately boils down to sending packets along) is inherently good. Ergo anything you do is good and anything that questions or checks your power is evil.

This understanding of free speech didn't evolve in a vaccum, though. It was a response to the "copyright hypochondria" of the publishing industry outfits that have been insisting that "censorship is when free movies". One of the most irritating tenets of copyright maximalism is the idea that copyright somehow backstops free speech, because having an economic incentive to publish is supposed to make politicians think twice[0] about stupid censorship bullshit?

So we have two industries here that have both psyopped themselves into thinking their profit margins are a moral good, unwilling to compromise in any way that would allow legal websites to remain online. Or at least I'm assuming both sides are unwilling to compromise, because La Liga isn't saying anything, and Cloudflare is going to the public rather than the actual courts imposing this blocking order.

[0] The logic doesn't logic here, this is the same kind of thinking that gave us "capitalism has won" in the 1990s and "military alliances will make war impossible" a century prior. Politicians are ultimately polite brokers of violence, and economics is a tool they impose upon us to make us do things in lieu of guns to head. Not the other way around. Politicians will happily censor economically valuable art all day long.

I'm tempted to say "the master's tools can't destroy the master's house", but that saying is complete bullshit for different reasons.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#84
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the alternative solution? We also don’t want to have critical services DDoS’d or spammed.

Simple: Connect larger NICs and do "dumb" DDoS filtering at your fattest point. Consider an HTTP daemon serving static content on a physical server. If that physical server has a 10Gig NIC it will withstand 90%[0] of the real-world DDoS attacks which would affect the same server with a 1Gig NIC. "Dumb" DDoS filtering means blocking UDP and SYN floods, and other simple attacks. Your goal is essentially to block traffi…

> I made it up

I appreciate the honesty, at least

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#85

Football company has authority to block IP addresses?

NFL would absolutely do the same in the US if it were against a foreign ISP or network operator.

What’s the domestic piracy rate for NFL games?

They split the rights up in much more imaginative ways, like local channels can broadcast sold out local games and then the nfl itself or an rsn or major network can broadcast the remote half. I would guess that a lot of local games are over the air but if you follow a team somewhere else you might need a fairly inexpensive subscription

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#86

I was unaware of this controversy so in brief: 1. La Liga (Spanish Football) finds pirates streaming their games objectionable 2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing. 3. They appear in court in Spain and get an ex-parte TRO blocking all Cloudflare IPs. (Ex parte TRO: restraining order granted without Cloudflare being summoned to court) 4. Based on t…

There is a new factor in the equation: Rising anti-american sentiments. This ties in with point 5 especially. Forcing Spanish websites off Cloudflare could seem like an additional benefit.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#87

I was unaware of this controversy so in brief: 1. La Liga (Spanish Football) finds pirates streaming their games objectionable 2. They notice that many of these streamers use Cloudflare for something, presumably CDN and load balancing. 3. They appear in court in Spain and get an ex-parte TRO blocking all Cloudflare IPs. (Ex parte TRO: restraining order granted without Cloudflare being summoned to court) 4. Based on t…

The EU should be sanctioning Spain the same way we're sanctioning Hungary for this sort of authoritarian behaviour. What's next, they're banning Google cause pirates use it to search for streams? I don't know how this doesn't count as a net neutrality violation.

Look, I don't like these blocks, but comparing it to the situation in Hungary is hysterical and ignorant. And the EU going around sanctioning every member state at the drop of a hat if it does something the other member states don't like would mean the end of the EU, as support for this kind of EU is extremely thin.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#88
post #7

Why does CloudFlare have these problems and other CDNs like CloudFront and Akamai don’t?

Entire Amazon AS-numbers are sometimes blocked so CloudFront consumers have the same issue. The thing with CF is the scale. They are really big and that is why it gets noticed. When it comes to Akamai they don't have shady customers in general and the risk of a problem is less. They also have a better infrastructure.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the alternative solution? We also don’t want to have critical services DDoS’d or spammed.

Then maybe don’t put critical services on the open internet. I know most tech people would balk at such a possibility, but the status quo isn’t really compatible with either long-term goal: * If we want the internet to be a place of anonymity and free speech, then we shouldn’t be putting critical services on the public internet - or we need to stop using intermediaries like Cloudflare where a single court order could…

I think the status quo exists as a more-or-less stable equilibrium between those forces. (Plus another equilibrium of people wanting to get paid for content and the people who don't want to give cash but will sell their attention and privacy.)

It's more than just familiarity. It's what works.

If someone had a significantly better alternative I think the world would jump on it. But many have tried to disrupt this equilibrium and failed.

Re: Cloudflare CEO: Football piracy blocks will claim lives

#90
post #77
post #41

Of course it could claim lives. Hopefully Prince has considered people have also likely died as a result of Cloudflare's repeating captcha which holds the next page in front of you like a carrot on a stick, never letting you know that you will be clicking that box forever. I'm sure while someone's in the process of keeling over is the perfect time to arbitrarily scrutinize their connecting details. You need to contac…

As someone who implemented cloudflare because of a massive DDOS and bot problem, sorry, but I will cheerfully allow 1% of my visitors to find the site unusable rather than 100%. It sucks, but no sane business would be so invested in equality of experience that they’d allow it to be completely broken for everyone.

What website? I'm guessing it is not health related or a "critical resource" if you are cheery about 1% of users being blocked?

For people who put stuff online to help people as well as to extract pure profit, knowing the anguish of your users really helps look out for them.

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