The "random guy" referred to in your allegation is, btw, not a random guy, but someone who was trying to help the US intelligence agencies imprison the owner of archive.is a la Snowden or Assange.
Well I kind of get why he really doesn't want to be identified, because of all those copyright infringements. The moment he steps in the West, he could be arrested.
But despite this I feel like what he did was very counterproductive to this goal. If he did nothing, people would just forget about it. Wikipedia would still use his service because they don't want to deal with copyright.
Besides if western intelligence really wants to find this guy, they could probably do it without the journalist's help.
The one-world government and the CIA are loving all this FUD being spread about archive.is. No, don't access information we don't want you to! Because of... uh... DDOS, that's it!
Look, I'm glad archive.is exists as a resource for preserving paywalled news but it wasn't the one world government that made him DDOS some random guy and tamper with archived content.
It was completely counter-productive too, several orders of magnitude more people learned about the blog post via the DDOS controversy than ever would have without it. And plants a seed of doubt that anything they archive could have been silently modified to satisfy a personal grievance.
I live in Spain and can still enjoy access this site. This is enforced by major ISPs (Vodafone among others), so anyone sane just opt for a local ISP (if they have a choice)
Nor on Vodafone for me, 3rd biggest ISP in the country. Guess that leaves us with Orange or possibly Digi as the second one that maybe actually has implemented the block?
Orange is not blocking it on my fiber yet but it is on my mobile connection.
The strange thing is I use the same DNS on both (which exits on my fiber connection, even when I'm on mobile), so they must be blocking it another way.
Digi is not blocking archive.today on fiber or mobile, I just tried it (Sept 21 ~11AM). However they do block a bunch of the libgen URLs, so I assume they'll eventually block this too, it's just a matter of time.
I have a major ISP and cannot access directly, but in the last few years an VPN has become part of my routine (otherwise I wouldn't even be able to work normally during football matches) so I just click some random country and it's fixed.
I use the default one from my carrier, but I've previously tried Google and other DNS servers to no avail. For some reason the site doesn't even open for me through a VPN.
Not a "beef", but rather some petty blogger spun up a campaign to dox the owner of archive.today, who you can imagine has their reasons not to publish their identity.
Since a few months archive.is is "unstable" from Spain. I thought the reason is the ISP but sometimes by just reloading it works...
Can anybody shed some light?
Since a few months archive.is is unstable regardless of where I connect from, Spain or not. Are others not seeing the same thing? Maybe 20% of the times I try to use it the servers aren't responding.
"Note: archive.org, or web.archive.org, run by the Internet Archive and the most-used web archive on Wikipedia, is uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today. Please keep using archive.org"
"those archive sites" could be read two ways, and I read it as "sites which automatically archive the Internet" the first time. This is compounded by the fact that archive.org is the only one I knew existed until now, and I kind of assumed these were alternate domains or something.
La liga isn't even necessary, in similar vain another site blockin
"Yout then filed an official appeal at Spain’s Supreme Court. Among other things, the site objected to the fact that it wasn’t in any way involved in the blocking lawsuit.
The Supreme Court denied hearing this appeal because Yout.com is not a party to the legal procedure. That was, ironically, one of the main reasons why the appeal was filed in the first place."
According to GDP per capita, Spain is below Italy, but above Portugal. Has its position changed much over the last century? I would be interested to see a measure of that, but how far back is it feasible to estimate GDP per capita?
I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.
Spain was isolated due to it's political Allignment in the 40's, things changed a lot from 1954 on wards when they realized they had a friend in there now that the enemy was the USSR.
Spain was voluntarely isolated after Civil War because Franco and the Falange (read fascists) were obsessed with being self sufficient (autarchy). The thing was so extreme that there was smuggling of metals by foot (iron, tin, cooper...) from Portugal and France. But the autarchy was from Franco, and not a pressure against him. You can read about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Spain_(1939%E2%80%9...
The "magical" event that happened mid/late 1950's was that autarchy was still not working and the other main faction of the government (called technocrats, mainly the Opus Dei) said "the national catholicism is cool and all, but we need to get profits and this autarchy shit isn't working". So the autarchy ended to the Falange dismay, and the country slowly opened economically and started catching up with Europe.
Sadly Falange is on the rise again (falangist Buxadé from Vox cleaned the party from capitalists in the last couple of years), and you can hear young people calling for closing and going "Spain first" again.
The biggest problem nowadays is the focus on low-value industries like agriculture and tourism.
The Civil War and subsequent dictatorship help explain how the country ended up in this situation but I think people often focus on them too much rather than how to improve for the future.
Spain did not got hit by WW2 cause it was absolutely destroyed by a civil war beginning 1936. After that a dictatorship of 40 years and when it opened all industry got hit cause it was heavily protected and could not compete in open markets, add to that most of the working industries were cheaply sold to friends of the dictatorship who were, and some of them still are, in power positions.
> a distant sixth in economic size behind even Russia.
By what metric? Because Spain is sixth also by population, and I have the feeling you are using total GDP as scale. Using that, China is the richest economy, and India is the third richest country in the world. Meanwhile Switzerland and Singapore (really rich in reallity) are below 30th, and below Nigeria or Pakistan.
By per capita GDP we Spain are not even 6th, because Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland... are above us and also above Germany, UK or France.
> I certainly would rather live places like Mallorca or Donostia than in many places that are ahead of Spain in the silly GDP game
If I was making as much money as I would in those countries that are ahead I wouldn’t mind living in Spain either. Otherwise good luck getting a place to live on a tiny salary if you don’t have your relatives to support you.
You can still get arrested in spain for saying a joke about Luis Carrero Blanco being Spain's first astronaut.
Luis Carrero Blanco, was the fascist dictator Francisco Franco's right hand man, his car war blown several stories into the air by ETA freedom fighters, hence the joke.
Calling them freedom fighters is not knowing anything about them. Their first actions were stealing from banks and most of the victims happened after the dictatorship was over.
Not much. Back then it constantly murdered civilians (of many magnitudes lesser importance than Blanco) and generally had no concerns about collateral damage. It continued this for years after Franco was gone..
This censorship mechanism comes from 2011, when it was created under the Spanish Socialist Party's government lead by Zapatero. There was a lot of backlash, but the Intellectual Property Comission (also known as "Comisión Sinde") was never dissolved under the next governments' rules.
Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar. Movistar used one of the subsidiaries to denounce themselves and other IPs so they would reach a friendly agreement (again, with themselves) that the judge considered enough to enforce the current Cloudflare blocks.
> Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar
It is maybe worth looking at the overlap between La Liga / Movistar directors, and former government officials. The Venn diagram has more overlap that one would like to see
And just to add some more context, the Second Section (Sección Segunda), which is part of the executive branch, was created because time after time judges concluded that downloading movies from the internet was perfectly legal[1]. So the PSOE's gov at the time (with Zapatero being president) created a law that just sidesteps judges altogether, and bans access from the executive branch.
As far as I know regarding La Liga's censorship it's due to a commercial court judge in Barcelona; meaning a single local Judge has given the green light to block the internet in a whole country.
It started around 2008 when they had one of the most permissive landscapes in Europe with pressure by the US using the Special 301 whatchlist. Then Obama increased the pressure with Zapatero and after a couple of tries the timeline you describe was set in motion.
I goddamn hate this constant bombardment on medias of this "They say it is to protect the kids".
I was talking with my 60+ and 80+ family and they were like "yes, this is bad, but it's needed to fight pedos or terrorists", but that's obviously nonsense because anybody who doesn't want to get caught can still run its own encryption trivially.
So no, any pedo or terror or crime ring nowadays knows how to encrypt their comms.
This only really ends up hurting the general public safety.
> They say it is to protect the kids, but likely it is to find out who watches La Liga without a premium subscription.
I think the most likely explanation however is that since Franco's death in 1975 things have only been moving very slowly.
In french we've got a saying for countries behaving like Spain, we say they are a "dictature d'opérette".
I take it "tin-pot dictatorship" would be close: it's totalitarian but also totally ridiculous.
Needing to find who watches La Liga without paying is pathetic. And not just because people aren't paying. That La Liga is so big is really already pathetic in itself.
I understand it to be a stand off between western special services on behalf of the media empires, and some random russian… criminals? their own intelligence or adjacent criminals? Just randos on a mission?
Russia doesn't produce content that anyone wants to pay for. So piracy is no economic loss for Putin. Secondly Russia's economy is going down the drain and the population definitely needs distraction from the war. Bread and circuses.
Access to information feels to me like a human right. Blocking that by any means (legal blockade, price unrealistic high) feels like an infringement on a Human Right.
I know this isn’t the way the world works yet, but a Human can dream.
Idealistically, I agree with access to information. But how do you square that (and I don’t have a solution) with the proliferation of misinformation used to manipulate the population or the access to dangerous information such as building bombs and bio weapons?
Who decides what is misinformation? The state? The ministry of truth? That is the problem with this sort of wishful thinking.
> used to manipulate the population
The media industry manipulates opinions via TV channels and newspapers and has done so for the last 50 years. Heck, some states have their own TV channels like the BBC, France Info (France) , SVT (Sweden) which is completely ironic since the state funds them and there is no way to know how neutral these are.
> dangerous information
Dangerous information is a misnomer. You could print out how to build an atom bomb and give the step-by-step instructions for free in entire neighborhoods and no one will be able to build it because you need the right expertise and the materials to create one.
Same with bio-weapons unless you think you can develop these in your kitchen after work?
Secondly, we are back to the same problem. Who decides what is "dangerous information" and how far would you be willing to go to contain it? Censor social media? Censor private messages? What about emails? Textbooks? Listening devices in all homes? Cameras that you can't turn off in your toilet in case you pass information to someone else while taking a crap?
I find your argument to be in extreme bad faith. Instead of steel manning the argument, you are repeatedly straw manning it.
Certainly you can understand that deliberately lying about, for example, areas where the science is overwhelming such as vaccines or climate change, is misinformation. I explicitly said I don’t have a solution, your introduction of a “ministry of truth”, “wishful thinking”, censorship and surveillance are your own fabrications, not part of my argument.
If access to information is a human right, as opposed to access to slop, then the best avenue to upholding it this decade is to block most of the internet.
It's beneficial, both practically and spiritually, to society if people can learn about the world around them. That is difficult using the internet we have now due to commercial slop, state-sponsored slop, populist slop, and AI slop.
Sorry but no, that's crazy, I grew up in Spain and free college is definitely a national pride, by both the left and the right. It's the same in most of Europe.
> Access to information feels to me like a human right.
Actually it is part of the declaration of universal human rights of the UN, article 19 to be specific.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right
includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive
and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of
frontiers.
Apparently all of south western europe blocks half the internet in the name of football. Besides Spain there's also Italy, France, Portugal and surprisingly the UK somewhat.
Your comment has got me genuinely intrigued. Would you care to elaborate how football has anything to do with the internet at all? (I'm writing this from northern Europe & as someone who has been avoiding football like the plague most of his life)
The UK’s premier league tv rights are worth a little bit over £1bn/yr. The rights holders are tv companies who also run most of the UK’s domestic telecoms, so they lobby incredibly hard and effectively to have pirate match streaming sites blocked.
At least in theory the blocking in EU has to go through a judge.
Blocking itself is ofcourse not at all controversial in Europe. Aside from some free speech maximalists people have no problem with shutting down criminal operations.
Comcast (an ISP) purchased NBC Universal in 2013, ATT (also an IPS) purchased Time Warner in 2018. But that was it, and both of those deals ended up being bad for the ISPs, with ATT already divested of Time Warner and Comcast trying to get rid of NBC Universal or whatever is left of it.
I do not think blocking websites was a goal in either of those mergers, they were just trying to become big like Apple/Amazon/etc and not just be a dumb pipe like ISPs should be.
It's been on HN a couple times. They block cloudflare during matches because most "pirate" live streams are on there. That means you can't do any work that depends on a legit site that uses cloudflare. Or watch non football content if it's hosted in the wrong place.
They block cloudflare during matches because at least one pirate livestream was on there at least once. These blocklists only ever grow, and rarely shrink. Obviously, pirate livestreams are not on there any more, since it's blocked and for-profit pirates aren't stupid.
There was a case at the highest court in Spain where LaLiga[0] sucessfully claimed that illegal streaming was causing hundereds of million of euros in damages. They essentially petitioned for mass blocking of IPTV, causing Cloudflare, NordVPN, ProtonVPN and a few others to get caught up in a sloppy and stupid dragnet. Whenever there is a football match on, a not-so-small chunk of the internet becomes unavailable. After the match is over, it works again.
I think I should add that Cloudflare (based on USA) doesn't refuse to block those IPTV, but they require the block mandate to come through a United States court.
La Liga believes that this is pointless, by the time that has happened the match would have been over weeks ago. So they asked a Spanish judge to allow them to compile a list of IPs and send them to the Spanish ISPs to block them. Of course the ISPs are forced to comply.
Well, behind these Cloudflare's IPs is not just IPTV, but a lot of legitimate webpages.
> Well, behind these Cloudflare's IPs is not just IPTV, but a lot of legitimate webpages.
Which was horrible and had lots of collateral damage when these blocks were initially implemented, but when you were affected, you wrote a complaint that the website been collaterally blocked, and the next time they did the "match blocks", the website was no longer blocked.
Now years after, nothing of value is blocked during the games, at least for me on Vodafone, I don't even notice the blocks anymore (besides hearing the neighbors screaming during the matches themselves).
It's a horrible idea in general, and clearly against both our "European Values" and Spanish constitution, as we should have access to a free internet which clearly isn't true. But on the other hand, it's important to reflect the situation as it is right now, in the real world, rather than lamenting about what was.
Official docker registry, Kagi image search, and several blogs that I read were still blocked for me the last few nights at least. I'm using a local ISP, but I think they in turn operate over Orange.
Sadly I don't care at all about football. So I can't even boycott the football league that should not be named to make any difference...
I don't care about football but even I admit the impact is limited due to the scheduling of the actual football games. I am either rarely using the internet at those times or the websites/business that need to be open outside of office hours knows better but to use cloudflare.
I think the elephant in the room is that Movistar, who own TV rights for Laliga and asked the judge for the blockage, offer CDN and anti-DDoS services that are competing with Cloudflare on the Spanish market. I believe it was a twisted way for them to protect their position in the spanish market.
"but when you were affected, you wrote a complaint that the website been collaterally blocked, and the next time they did the "match blocks", the website was no longer blocked."
Care to elaborate? They block by IP, that's not granular at all. What complaint mechanisms are you talking about?
France has blocked Polymarket since the World Cup in June.
This was requested by the state gaming license authority, which sanction the betting business in France. Most of the business profits the state gaming company named “Federation française des jeux”.
Officially this was done out of concern for safety of its citizens.
A lot of trust in the government to only ban websites which are actively unhealthy for citizens and not websites which are critical or unfavorable to said government.
I do wonder, was Polymarket given a chance to prevent itself from being accessed/used from Spain? They seem to be a-okay with blocking usage from US states that have asked them to cease operation, so I don't see why they would try to actively defy countries that have (legally) asked them to not do business there?
The US doesn't block websites. Occasionally the FBI will seize a domain after a court order, but that's it.
French people were already forbidden from transacting on Polymarket and Kalshi, and the services themselves were forbidden to take any market orders. Nobody disagrees with the regulations.
But apparently the French government still thought it was so dangerous that they needed to block the websites completely to protect the French people from themselves. This is where the line is crossed.
This happens all over Europe. The citizens give their governments the power to block things, or surveillance in the name of "safety" and then they just take everything and EU citizens are left wondering why.
The US already blocked Polymarket long ago and replaced it with a neutered US version. They know everyone uses VPNs to get around this, so they're trying to force the US version to be the only worldwide version.
Entirely different situation. Polymarket is a gambling website and is subject to regulation. In Italy and (I think) Spain, they may shut down connections to a Google Cloud or AWS server _at the IP level_ if they have a _suspect_ it's hosting an illegal streaming service. This may effectively black out entirely legitimate Web sites with _no_ correlation to sports.
Polymarket isn't blocked in France, at least the website works, one can check that with a VPN set to France. Now whether a french person can register and spend money on it is another issue.
Fun fact I learned in Spain recently. They block Cloudflare Edge IPs during soccer games. Took me a long time to figure out why I was having intermittent outages.
"net neutrality" also wasn't about fighting government control of the internet or pushing back on anti-piracy measures, it was calling for governments to block a potential ISP business model concept: tier billing based on usage. And even in places without net neutrality laws almost none of the ISPs did it or were even attempting to do tiered billing.
It was mostly just a fear that they could do that, mostly when Netflix was getting popular.
Personally, I welcome this. Archive.today has been blocking my country from using the site for years and for no good reason. Maybe if enough countries block the site, someone more reasonable will build an alternative.
Decent people don't become billionaires because they recognize they already have enough money to cover everything they and everyone in their family for the next 100+ years could ever want or need.
Spaniard here, it's interesting that I haven't noticed any disruption with archive.is in the last weeks. Just checked today and though that it might be iCloud relay, but i don't have it enabled. I'm only using Google's DNS and am too lazy to try with my ISP ones.
Compare this to the absolute mayhem with the soccer matches blocking that will bring down an inordinate amount of legitimate sites during a match.
Not sure what are the technical measures they are deploying in one case or the other but I suspect that when Telefonica is involved they bring the big guns.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit we can trace back to real people, while archive.today is owned by who-knows-who and they have engaged in DDoS attacks and tampering with archives. They have revealed themselves untrustworthy.
Unwall looks nice, and I hope they stick around. There’s been a number of these paywall bypass apps over the years, but only archive.is has survived over time.
Not sure what they are doing, but I am in Spain; most non tech people friends who like football have a little 'device' they get from their local friendly 'internet installer' which gives them free(-ish; they pay a few Euro per month, I guess for the VPN?) football (+ any other tv/movies/etc). And this is non tech friends who wouldn't know what a VPN is for the 1 million$ question on that show. So clearly it's all kind of useless (we know).
And so far Starlink (I cannot get anything else on my farm) seems to not have joined in the fun; I can reach anything still; probably not a big enough target.
yeah, is 100% an IPTV app loaded into a firestick or a shady Android box ( most likely with some botnet installed or a backdoor); you can also get it by downloading the app directly to you TV. This are resellers of the big providers, they buy accounts in bulk, then pay a second service to filter all the non spanish channel, generate the playlist and add a markup.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make their laws. We make technology that completely nullifies their laws. They need to increase their tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end state is either a totalitarian government or an uncontrollable population.
Getting around these silly blocks feels good, but these governments really don't like it when we do that. I used to think that we'd find some kind of equilibrium along the way, that we'd eventually discover the government's limits: some principle they refuse to break, some line they refuse to cross... But the truth is these tyrants have zero limits. They really don't like losing their power over us, and will react with the most orwellian mesures imaginable, and they'll tell us it's all justified.
Could be; I just notice that literally everyone has them and calls them 'our free tv' etc; it seems also to have some pirated netflix and other streamer stuff as when I recommend something, they usually have it there.
232 comments
[ 0.12 ms ] story [ 25.2 ms ] threadHere you go, this should work: https://web.archive.org/web/20260920074416/https://serjaimel...
(an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page, might take some time to load though)
(this uses htmlpipe, something I have made :-D)
Vs
https://archive.is/2YdN9
One has paywall, one doesn't...
Sorry man, people will keep DDoSing some random guy's blog. It's a service problem lol
But despite this I feel like what he did was very counterproductive to this goal. If he did nothing, people would just forget about it. Wikipedia would still use his service because they don't want to deal with copyright.
Besides if western intelligence really wants to find this guy, they could probably do it without the journalist's help.
It was completely counter-productive too, several orders of magnitude more people learned about the blog post via the DDOS controversy than ever would have without it. And plants a seed of doubt that anything they archive could have been silently modified to satisfy a personal grievance.
The strange thing is I use the same DNS on both (which exits on my fiber connection, even when I'm on mobile), so they must be blocking it another way.
Fortunately, I already have a VPN anyway :)
https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/burned-out-and...
Error: Invalid InterceptionId.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
"Note: archive.org, or web.archive.org, run by the Internet Archive and the most-used web archive on Wikipedia, is uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today. Please keep using archive.org"
My ISP blocks both and I’m not even in Spain.
"Yout then filed an official appeal at Spain’s Supreme Court. Among other things, the site objected to the fact that it wasn’t in any way involved in the blocking lawsuit.
The Supreme Court denied hearing this appeal because Yout.com is not a party to the legal procedure. That was, ironically, one of the main reasons why the appeal was filed in the first place."
https://torrentfreak.com/yout-com-challenges-site-blocking-i...
1. Blocked Telegram with a court order, reinstituted after public backslash
2. Blocks Internet and Cloudflare during La Liga matches
3. Prime minister Pedro Sanchez from Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has demanded the end of anonymity in Internet
They say it is to protect the kids, but likely it is to find out who watches La Liga without a premium subscription.
I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.
The "magical" event that happened mid/late 1950's was that autarchy was still not working and the other main faction of the government (called technocrats, mainly the Opus Dei) said "the national catholicism is cool and all, but we need to get profits and this autarchy shit isn't working". So the autarchy ended to the Falange dismay, and the country slowly opened economically and started catching up with Europe.
Sadly Falange is on the rise again (falangist Buxadé from Vox cleaned the party from capitalists in the last couple of years), and you can hear young people calling for closing and going "Spain first" again.
The Civil War and subsequent dictatorship help explain how the country ended up in this situation but I think people often focus on them too much rather than how to improve for the future.
That is completely false.
By what metric? Because Spain is sixth also by population, and I have the feeling you are using total GDP as scale. Using that, China is the richest economy, and India is the third richest country in the world. Meanwhile Switzerland and Singapore (really rich in reallity) are below 30th, and below Nigeria or Pakistan.
By per capita GDP we Spain are not even 6th, because Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland... are above us and also above Germany, UK or France.
I certainly would rather live places like Mallorca or Donostia than in many places that are ahead of Spain in the silly GDP game.
Speaking of low IQ, it's pretty amusing to read that someone thinks that Spain came out unscathed from the events of 1930s and 1940s.
If I was making as much money as I would in those countries that are ahead I wouldn’t mind living in Spain either. Otherwise good luck getting a place to live on a tiny salary if you don’t have your relatives to support you.
Luis Carrero Blanco, was the fascist dictator Francisco Franco's right hand man, his car war blown several stories into the air by ETA freedom fighters, hence the joke.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Asesinatos_cometidos_por...
For instance the IRA was very mild and moderate by ETA standards.
I think things start to go wrong for the Spain somewhere after the 16th century
Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar. Movistar used one of the subsidiaries to denounce themselves and other IPs so they would reach a friendly agreement (again, with themselves) that the judge considered enough to enforce the current Cloudflare blocks.
It is maybe worth looking at the overlap between La Liga / Movistar directors, and former government officials. The Venn diagram has more overlap that one would like to see
[1] See also: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada
Thanks MPAA and RIAA as usual.
Spain and the EU have always been perfectly capable and willing to do this kind of internet blocking and censorship without USA telling them to.
You notice how nothing even remotely close to this kind of forced ISP blocking happens in the US? It is wildly illegal.
I was talking with my 60+ and 80+ family and they were like "yes, this is bad, but it's needed to fight pedos or terrorists", but that's obviously nonsense because anybody who doesn't want to get caught can still run its own encryption trivially.
So no, any pedo or terror or crime ring nowadays knows how to encrypt their comms.
This only really ends up hurting the general public safety.
I think the most likely explanation however is that since Franco's death in 1975 things have only been moving very slowly.
In french we've got a saying for countries behaving like Spain, we say they are a "dictature d'opérette".
I take it "tin-pot dictatorship" would be close: it's totalitarian but also totally ridiculous.
Needing to find who watches La Liga without paying is pathetic. And not just because people aren't paying. That La Liga is so big is really already pathetic in itself.
https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-ca...
This could perhaps be used for this purpose.
I have submitted it on hackernews once again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49773417
(Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47574562)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
I know this isn’t the way the world works yet, but a Human can dream.
Who decides what is misinformation? The state? The ministry of truth? That is the problem with this sort of wishful thinking.
> used to manipulate the population
The media industry manipulates opinions via TV channels and newspapers and has done so for the last 50 years. Heck, some states have their own TV channels like the BBC, France Info (France) , SVT (Sweden) which is completely ironic since the state funds them and there is no way to know how neutral these are.
> dangerous information
Dangerous information is a misnomer. You could print out how to build an atom bomb and give the step-by-step instructions for free in entire neighborhoods and no one will be able to build it because you need the right expertise and the materials to create one.
Same with bio-weapons unless you think you can develop these in your kitchen after work?
Secondly, we are back to the same problem. Who decides what is "dangerous information" and how far would you be willing to go to contain it? Censor social media? Censor private messages? What about emails? Textbooks? Listening devices in all homes? Cameras that you can't turn off in your toilet in case you pass information to someone else while taking a crap?
Certainly you can understand that deliberately lying about, for example, areas where the science is overwhelming such as vaccines or climate change, is misinformation. I explicitly said I don’t have a solution, your introduction of a “ministry of truth”, “wishful thinking”, censorship and surveillance are your own fabrications, not part of my argument.
It's beneficial, both practically and spiritually, to society if people can learn about the world around them. That is difficult using the internet we have now due to commercial slop, state-sponsored slop, populist slop, and AI slop.
Actually it is part of the declaration of universal human rights of the UN, article 19 to be specific.
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...Blocking itself is ofcourse not at all controversial in Europe. Aside from some free speech maximalists people have no problem with shutting down criminal operations.
I do not think blocking websites was a goal in either of those mergers, they were just trying to become big like Apple/Amazon/etc and not just be a dumb pipe like ISPs should be.
[0] https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela...
Which was horrible and had lots of collateral damage when these blocks were initially implemented, but when you were affected, you wrote a complaint that the website been collaterally blocked, and the next time they did the "match blocks", the website was no longer blocked.
Now years after, nothing of value is blocked during the games, at least for me on Vodafone, I don't even notice the blocks anymore (besides hearing the neighbors screaming during the matches themselves).
It's a horrible idea in general, and clearly against both our "European Values" and Spanish constitution, as we should have access to a free internet which clearly isn't true. But on the other hand, it's important to reflect the situation as it is right now, in the real world, rather than lamenting about what was.
Sadly I don't care at all about football. So I can't even boycott the football league that should not be named to make any difference...
I think the elephant in the room is that Movistar, who own TV rights for Laliga and asked the judge for the blockage, offer CDN and anti-DDoS services that are competing with Cloudflare on the Spanish market. I believe it was a twisted way for them to protect their position in the spanish market.
Care to elaborate? They block by IP, that's not granular at all. What complaint mechanisms are you talking about?
This was requested by the state gaming license authority, which sanction the betting business in France. Most of the business profits the state gaming company named “Federation française des jeux”. Officially this was done out of concern for safety of its citizens.
I do wonder, was Polymarket given a chance to prevent itself from being accessed/used from Spain? They seem to be a-okay with blocking usage from US states that have asked them to cease operation, so I don't see why they would try to actively defy countries that have (legally) asked them to not do business there?
Gambling regulations exist in most places in the world, including the US. With good reason.
French people were already forbidden from transacting on Polymarket and Kalshi, and the services themselves were forbidden to take any market orders. Nobody disagrees with the regulations.
But apparently the French government still thought it was so dangerous that they needed to block the websites completely to protect the French people from themselves. This is where the line is crossed.
This happens all over Europe. The citizens give their governments the power to block things, or surveillance in the name of "safety" and then they just take everything and EU citizens are left wondering why.
every economy protects its crown jewels to a degree which seems excessive to its neighbors
It was mostly just a fear that they could do that, mostly when Netflix was getting popular.
https://www.cultura.gob.es/dam/jcr:919c6bd2-17b2-43d1-98f5-d...
Edit: why is it that Billionaires just fund fake news. Are there no "white hat" billionaires that could fund an opposition to that?
Compare this to the absolute mayhem with the soccer matches blocking that will bring down an inordinate amount of legitimate sites during a match.
Not sure what are the technical measures they are deploying in one case or the other but I suspect that when Telefonica is involved they bring the big guns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...
Hard to do when they're streaming sports in the same domain..
Time to fix that by running a real DNS and not just a forwarder though.
https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked
And so far Starlink (I cannot get anything else on my farm) seems to not have joined in the fun; I can reach anything still; probably not a big enough target.
Getting around these silly blocks feels good, but these governments really don't like it when we do that. I used to think that we'd find some kind of equilibrium along the way, that we'd eventually discover the government's limits: some principle they refuse to break, some line they refuse to cross... But the truth is these tyrants have zero limits. They really don't like losing their power over us, and will react with the most orwellian mesures imaginable, and they'll tell us it's all justified.