Cloudflare is cancer. And the tumor is now too big.
They should have used a cookie or something else that does not require asking me every few minutes to prove once more that I am not a bot.
There was a time when Cloudflare had become less intrusive, but for the last months it has begun again to intervene almost each time when opening some pages.
There is no doubt that anti-bot protection can be implemented in a better way than Cloudflare does, but presumably the alternatives would consume more resources on their servers, so probably they choose whatever minimizes their costs, regardless if that ensures maximum discomfort for Internet users.
They're in the walls!
NO CARRIER
+CREG: 0,0> every uBlock filter enabled and Cookie Auto-delete
Hmm
It’s precisely because CloudFlare isn’t responding like other CDNs to reasonable demands to cut off pirate origin sites that this mess exists. If they reacted quickly to remove configurations that are obviously facilitating copyright infringement, Spain wouldn’t resort to full scale ASN blocking.
How do we know it’s CloudFlare? Because other CDNs like CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, etc. respond to takedown demands and aren’t being blocked. (Those also cost money and require customer identification.)
In an escalating war between the state and a corporation, the state will always prevail if they have the public’s backing. In Spain it’s clear that most people are happy to watch the match through legitimate channels even at the cost of blocking CloudFlare.
Apropos of anything else, CF is (reasonably) requiring a court order to remove offending material rather than just "well, company said so, so eh, just do as they say". La Liga complains that "oh, that's too slow for what we want" and just got a blanket ruling.
I am not a fan of CF but your argument seems to be "CF should just roll over any time someone says "hey, delete this", because, obviously, everyone knows it's problematic, right? Right?".
CloudFlare uses legal chicanery to try to subvert the DMCA by claiming that because they’re not the origin server, they’re not subject to takedown demands. So far no court has told them to knock it off. I expect that day will eventually come. Every lawsuit against them to date has ended in a settlement because CloudFlare would rather pay up than get an unfavorable ruling on the books.
CloudFlare has consistently treated loss of DMCA safe harbor protection as a material business risk; it’s been cited in every SEC filing from the 2019 IPO S-1 through the FY2025 10-K.
You'd think so, but no.
DMCA came into effect 28 years ago. All those decades, all those billions of takedowns, and you don't even need the fingers of one hand to count those who've been hit with perjury for a false takedown request, because the number is ... zero.
See 17 U.S.C. 512(c)(3)(A):
"(A) To be effective under this subsection, a notification of claimed infringement must be a written communication provided to the designated agent of a service provider that includes substantially the following: ...
"(vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
In other words: someone issuing a notice of infringement relating to a Disney work must declare under penalty of perjury that they represent Disney. They don't have to declare under penalty of perjury that the work is in fact a Disney work, that the title is correct, that the use in question is not fair use, etc.
This would explain why you're not seeing what you expect to see.
Both blanked IP blocking and creating single points of failure are bad.
I'm not from Spain and instead of Spanish ISP I get a block from CloudFlare.
Now take a wild guess: which one is bigger - some Spanish ISP or CF?