Spain orders blocks on Archive.today and its mirrors | Hacker News Reader

Spain orders blocks on Archive.today and its mirrors

reclaimthenet.org

555 pointslatein436 comments

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https://archive.is/2YdN9

This is so funny.

An article about internet censorship of an archive site that requires an archive site to read!

That’s Brilliant! :D

I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet.

I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual Internet, literal and figuratively free internet, was always doomed from the start, just like AI is effectively doomed in terms of it being some kind of productivity tool or amazing thing you can use to build your own thing, because the logical conclusion is very bad for most people, including the technorati types here that think themselves above it and immune.

If you’re shocked and surprised by the way there Internet was maneuvered into the surveillance prison Flock made itself the poster child of at the hands of Mr Langley, take that trajectory and lay it over AI, but only at exponential rates. You don’t have to believe me, it won’t matter either way, it’s happening, short of the Soviet style implosion of the “American” empire.

Maybe once the planet has been made uninhabitable to biological life there will be an AI robot cybernetic splinter group trying to “reclaim humanity”.

How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that.

And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.

Chaotic coincidences,

because the empire is too large to control all of its interests.

Could have been avoided - too much money to be made in the various stages of it not being avoided.

The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.

Yes, we are unlikely to get to a point of an 1800s civil war, of course. But I mean, if things do get that bad, we cannot rule out a divided military as well. How that would work in practice, I'm not sure, since, as you mentioned, armed forces work these days differently as well, and defection like that might not even be feasible, I guess.

Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.

To your point: it takes 1-3% of a population to upend things…based on historical reference.

So, 3-10 million people or so for US.

Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.

It would also end the AI. Not to say it couldn’t happen though, if it thought an apocalypse could somehow instrumentally help it fill its monthly paperclip quota.

A war wont happen because Americans are too lazy. Just look how the cities are built, the vast majority simply refuses to walk. To control the population one only has to deny them fuel, and everything else freezes. In older times, everyone was a really hard worker, look at the American civil war, millions in both armies walked thousands of kms. Theres no way a fraction of Americans could or would do that.

"simply refuses to" is an odd way to spell "gets arrested if they"

Im sorry are you trying to tell me, that Americans get arrested if they walk down the road to buy an ice cream or coke ?

You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. So I don't think AI will lead to more centralization. Besides local models, the interface itself - prompt based steering - is eminently more open ended that apps or websites ever were. Cloud or local, you get more control now as a user.

It’s already fairly realistic to get 2022 era frontier models running on prosumer hardware, which is pretty good for freedom.

> You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model.

You can very much host websites on your machine (not the whole internet, but then again you can’t host the most powerful models either) and you can very much download a Wikipedia or Internet Archive.

But most people never will. This idea that everyone will soon be using local models while frolicking happily in the fields is a pipe dream. Besides, local or not, these models can already be harmful in ways the internet took decades to approach.

A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.

A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.

A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.

A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.

> A local model has more data than Wikipedia

You do understand that was an example, right? Did you know there are other websites you can download? Anna has one that is pretty big and full of information. I’m pretty sure the AI labs know about it too.

> the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.

The Internet Archive isn’t a single zip download. You understand you can pick and choose what you want to download, right? And also, that it was just another example of many?

But the Internet and IA aren't controlled by you. They may be censored or taken down without anyone going near you, but not the local model (as long as you have access to electricity and your hardware doesn't break before you have access to replacements).

It is possible that models are only the byproduct of what frontier labs are doing. In other words, what you call AI is just a log, a trace of what the real AI, for which only frontier labs have access to, did.

This is exactly why I believe LLMs are fundamentally divergent from the trajectory of internet service path we have been on. It allows us to create space and disconnection from an otherwise tethered experience.

But you cannot train an open weight model by yourself, and maybe there could some distributed training net ran by thousand of volunteers around the world in the future, but until we get there we will still be tied to BigCo (American, Chinese or wherever in the world) decisions.

You would need institutions to do this? What do we have besides global megacorps with the resources for this? Universities perhaps training models for their local catchment?

We'll probably see a few middle-tier countries like France or Japan training their own national LLMs that they can control. Even if it's expensive, this will eventually be just as critical to national sovereignty as having nuclear weapons. They don't want to be completely dependant on the USA or China.

I can see a pan European project like CERN or Airbus where sovereign nations with aligned values pool their resources, as being useful here

For a number of years, pc publications around these parts actually shipped snapshots of websites on the bundled CD-ROM.

You couldn’t snapshot all, but you could definitely get a taste :)

For decades, people ran word processors and graphics editors locally.

Now it’s in the cloud on a damn webpage.

With recent RAM and storage price disruptions, I feel like we’ll go to go back to an equivalent of everyone having a dumb Wyze terminal with the real “computer” in the cloud… Only difference is the dumb terminal will have color, be wireless, and portable.

And I really hope I’m wrong…

I’d like to think that people will move back to native, but sadly there’s only one viable platform for native app dev, Apple. I base that statement on the highly fragmented Linux ecosystem and the fact that Microsoft are appear to be actively hostile to windows users. I leave Android out of the picture because of the continual and legally proven trust breaches of the owner.

It does suck. Though Android’s owner does appear to be afraid of Graphene OS so maybe there’s hope.

Yep, this is because for decades Apple has looked for ways strong local clients can add value in the form of bespoke hardware and software capabilities, while Microsoft has looked for ways commoditised generic clients can extract value.

Fragmented doesn't mean you can't make native apps.

GTK, QT, FLTK or TK apps coexist peacefully on linux the same way apps made with Cocoa, JUCE or whatever own internal proprietary toolkit apps run and coexist on MacOS.

Linux is not really fragmented anymore, there is a lot of distros but they're all compatible with each other. Flatpak solved app distribution and systemd standardized the lower levels. If you build something on Ubuntu it will almost definitely work on Fedora and Arch with no code changes. 10 years ago that was impossible.

So a Chromebook?

In a zoo humanity lays protected. These beings used to roam earth as the apex predators and destroyers of their ecosystem and their species too.

I love the way people romanticise this hippie utopian idea of “The Internet” like it wasn’t originally built by, and for, the US Military

The tech and some of the infrastructure was, but the cultural phenomenon that people are nostalgic for was not, that sprang up organically.

ARPAnet definitely wasn't built "by" the military.

"For" the military is close enough, although "defense research" would probably be more accurate than "military" given that initial users were centered around large universities.

From the start the DoD had issues with the free and open culture from the userbase that skewed towards academic types, later splitting off into a restricted MILNET after a few years.

Sigh. Web. Not Internet. Why is this distinction so hard to make on a WEB site dedicated to technology?

The reason I keep repeating this whenever I see this is because I've seen idiotic mislabeling and mischaracterization materialize as idiotic legislature or idiotic activism based on the former. Someone invented the term "AI datacenter", and now there's a swiping movement of idiots fighting... datacenters. Same as with 5G before it.

Please. Please. Don't blame the Internet for something it has absolutely nothing to do with. Your misattributed criticism is going to be amplified by thousands of automatic and semi-automatic morons and, who knows, maybe people will start cutting cables or attack ISP crew as a result.

The same thing would happen on any platform. Social media diverged from the web a while ago - accessing it through web is like accessing Usenet through Google Groups. Its native environment is the corresponding non-web phone apps.

Not on any platform. The platform needs to have certain characteristics that enable it.

The platform needs to be a monopoly or an oligopoly. A highly distributed platform would be a lot more resilient to the problems created by modern social media because it would be too hard for a single organization to manipulate the news reported by thousands of independent publishers.

The platform needs to financially sustain itself in such a way that the users don't directly contribute to it, otherwise it would be way too easy for users to "vote with their wallet".

The platform use should be allowed (or even encouraged) by state or other important service providers, thus making its use mandatory for the holdouts / those who would normally not use it on conscientious grounds.

Perhaps there are other aspects that I've overlooked.

Phone apps are, in general, an even worse alternative than the original Web because of being either completely closed-source, or even if not, not really allowing simple viewing and modification of the program behavior by the users. The way they are created and distributed amplifies the monopoly aspect and the government / service provider sanctioning aspect.

But, I think, that the problems we see now in Web can be partially addressed technologically and partially legislatively. It doesn't have to be this bad.

On technological level, if social media was available as an Internet application, i.e. as an additional service from your ISP, which would remove the need to sustain it with ads, it would make it less interesting for companies like those that run modern social media platforms to manipulate it.

On legislative level, there should be some form of anti information monopoly laws that would make it illegal to have such an outsized effect for social media platforms and would allow the court to require that a platform is split into multiple platforms. The laws that assign responsibility for the published content and its distribution should also address the problem of mis- and disinformation proliferation through such platforms. Even up to the point that they make it impossible for such platforms to exist (today it's common to blame the lack of moderation on the poor quality of content).

> I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet.

That's the name of the site covering the block.

> you can use to build your own thing

AI helped me and thousandas of other people already to actually build their thing! :-)

I should hope you remember the Internet, it's still there. It may come as a surprise to you, but the whole reason the WWW works is because of the Internet, that's how you're able to see this web site!

Let me add a few more layers just for some fun and profit :-D

Here[0] is an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page which archives the original article about internet censorship of an archive site that might require an archive of an archive site to read (given that people of spain cant now view archive.is in the first place or might have some difficulties doing so)

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260920074416/https://serjaimel...

(If someone is perhaps interested and wants to see me talk more about what this is, then please read the blogpost that I had made for more info: https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-ca...)

"Temporarily Offline Internet Archive services are temporarily offline. " What did you DO

> "Temporarily Offline Internet Archive services are temporarily offline. " What did you DO

It seems that all of internet archive was down and I don't think that it was because of me (I hope), maybe just some other issues and some sort of just a chance that internet archive got offline at the exact same time that I had shared this thing here.

but when I had opened up hackernews and I read your comment, I genuinely felt myself also as what did I DO.

It is back again now for what its worth, whew what a relief but folks please remember to donate to internet archive for its posterity :-)

[ERROR] The number of receivers has reached limits.

Thanks, I will try to look more into this. I think it might be related to number of connections of piping servers but I am a little perplexed about it on how this is possible on an archived link.

Can you please tell me more details so that I can hopefully try to fix it in the future. Did you try to open up the archive.org link of the website or the website itself (which is just a gh page: https://serjaimelannister.github.io/htmlpipe/?https://ppng.i...)

I would like to know more so that I can hopefully fix that for the future, have a nice day :-D

Been using the archive page firefox extension for a year or two. Yet now it looks like a total war against this resource was waged and it's no longer a good resource for archiving.

Anyone know of any good reliable substitutes?

archive.is is the best substitute. For some reason people here won't accept that. They think the internet is still a calm cooperative place like the olden days.

My office's "net nanny" blocks archive.is as a "Russian site". However, archive.ph (use the same link across all the various sites) is not blocked (yet).

"Anyone know of any good reliable substitutes?"

For me, archive.today, archive.is, archive.md, archive.ph, etc. are _not reliable_ for a number of reasons

But some archive.today users who comment on HN cannot seem to accept that archive.today may not work for everybody else

NB. Archive.today is not a "substitute for archive.org". Archive.today does not do www crawls

As for archive.org, I know of a number of alternatives but each is generally less reliable and/or less comprehensive than archive.org

Comman Crawl, i.e., downloads from data.commoncrawl.org, is reasonably reliable but not as comprehensive as archive.org. CC is not a reasonable substitute for archive.org's CDX service. The CC CDX endpoint, index.commoncrawl.org, historically has been easily overwhelmed and unreliable

As for archive.today alternatives (no crawls, only user-submitted URLs), ghostarchive.org seems well-designed but not used much. No CAPTCHA, HTTPS and Javascript are optional and HAR files are provided. Whether it gets blocked like archive.today sites I do not know

NB. Archive.today users may be using archive.today not as an archive but as a lazy man's solution for "paywalls" (Javascript annoyances)

Where that's the case, comparsions to archive.org or other archives that are derived from crawls are inappropriate

> The CC CDX endpoint, index.commoncrawl.org, historically has been easily overwhelmed and unreliable

Use our Parquet index.

It's also worth noting that archive.org downloads all of our crawl data and adds it to the IA Wayback Machine.

Correction: WARC not HAR

* Common

Brilliant indeed!

We used to give presentations about the average life of pages on the internet before it 404ed. It was cited from a SciAm article which was offline at the time and the only way to get the stat was via. the mirror on the Wayback Machine.

"502 Bad Gateway" (I'm in Spain)

Works fine for me, also Spain, Vodafone as the ISP.

Edit: eeh, that's a different site than the one mentioned by the submission, why it wouldn't work?

Edit2: Also, the error is wrong and server-side. If your ISP is trying to block the website, you'll get either a tls error that the certificate isn't matching, or for non-https sites you get redirected to the scary "You're contributing to something illegal blah blah".

There’s a whole network of “archive.<something>” sites under the “archive.today” umbrella. I’ve seen .is .ps .md .ph and .at, at least.

> "502 Bad Gateway" (I'm in Spain)

Here 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)

Same - 502 with Movistar

This is working fine for me in spain so far....

”archive dot is” is a part of the same DDoS network of sites. Don’t use them!

Feel free to link the whole article through a different site

https://unwall.app/reclaimthenet.org/spain-blocks-archive-to...

Unwall app is cool bot by far as not reliable as Arhicve.ph/.today, as I have seen over the last weeks

https://web.archive.org/web/20260920061809/https://reclaimth...

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

The funny thing is the blog is hosted on wordpress.com, so it's tantamount to trying to ddos Google.

Yeah, the archive guy should just leave the blog alone instead of triggering Streissand effect lol

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.

Given Wikipedia’s decline—people are reading AI-generated answers instead of Wikipedia, and they certainly aren’t clicking on the archived links in the articles’ references—and the rising cost of equipment, what do you see as the motivation for the archive to continue sponsoring Wikipedia in this risky way, which exposes the copyright issues far beyond niche communities like HN? The form of attention, that Wikipedia brings back (FBI, Finnish "bloggers" from WikiTravel, ...) is certainly undesirable, and no one would want to pay for it out of their own pocket.

The archive guy actually called Wikipedia on this lol.

Like if a very infamous site, KiwiFarms can have their own archiving engine, why cant multimillion dollar site like Wikipedia can't? He's absolutely correct that Wikipedia is a freeloader that doesnt want to deal with copyright.

However, I'm not sure if the archive guy is paying it out of his own pocket. It's a massive ad-free site servicing tons of requests everyday, and it has a very impressive technical abilities.

That has to be quite expensive, like he must've some seriously rich sponsors. And his sponsors might be okay with Wikipedia using the site, but this is all just my guess lol.

In the end, it's also perfectly valid for him to refuse servicing Wikipedia: it's his site.

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!

Thanks for confirming that archive.today is indeed an intelligence operation. The information you have publicly provided is very helpful. :)

archive.today and archive.is are alternative domains of the same website

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.

What happened? Link?

The guy is in no way "random", they planned to take over the archive

The guy archive.is supposedly targeted was trying to get the owner of archive.is killed. It's not some random guy.

I live in Spain and can still enjoy access to this site. This is enforced by major ISPs (Vodafone among others), so anyone sane just opts for a local ISP (if they have a choice)

How is it enforced? IP or DNS?

According to this site https://bandaancha.eu/articulos/gobierno-tiene-lista-web-ofi..., they use SNI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication)

Enabling ESNI in Firefox should be a countermeasure (encrypted SNI extension of the TLS so that hostname is no longer sent in plain text)

https://superuser.com/questions/1346634/modern-browser-with-...

It's not magic. archive.is has no HTTPS record, so ESNI cannot be used.

That superuser thread from 2018 (it's ECH now not ESNI) isn't much help

Although I do like the comment at the bottom that states the problem as disabling SNI not encrypting it. Encrypting SNI/ClientHello is over complicated, which is why ESNI was flawed and (allegedly) why Cloudflare disabled it. The solution to the plaintext SNI problem is to not send SNI (I don't send it unless necessary)

There is an alternative non-TLS method of encrypting traffic, per packet, that allows hosting multiple websites on the same IP. I use it in the homelab. It proves that TLS and SNI is not the only way

There's also a popular archive of www content that does not require SNI. It's older and larger than Cloudflare

The problem with software like Firefox is that it automatically sends SNI to every website no matter if SNI is required or not. The superuser thread mentions a Firefox add-on that no longer works. If Firefox is open source then why not just edit the code and recompile

Clearly, Mozilla is not going to provide a solution. It would rather add support for ESNI and then ECH as opposed to giving users an option to diable sending SNI

Mozilla is pro-surveillance advertising, Cloudflare is pro-surveillance advertising

Fortunately, not every HTTPS website is hosted on a shared IP, not every HTTPS website requires SNI. And popular web browsers derived from Mozilla and Google are not the only user agents

A couple of ways to not send SNI

1. Use an SSL client, e.g., openssl s_client, bssl client, etc.

2. Use a local forward proxy, e.g., stunnel, haproxy, etc.

Even if Cloudflare enables ECH across all the websites it controls, and we have been waiting for years, there is still the issue of SSL termination by Cloudflare. For many of those sites, all the TLS traffic, not just the SNI, is available as plaintext to Cloudflare and to whomever Cloudflare, a US corporation, may or must share it with

*disable

Why not put the IP address in your hosts file under a different name so that'll be the SNI?

It seems there are HN commenters who mistakenly believe SNI values can be controlled via the HOSTS file

Differs by the ISP you have, I've seen DNS manipulation, IP filtering, hostname filtering, and HTTPS interception so far. Obviously most websites use TLS today so it mostly "fails" so people see certificate errors rather than their scary "You're contributing to breaking the law blah blah blah". Sometimes just straight up timeouts, resets, or generic connection failures.

Browsers should change that page to say "someone is hacking your internet" with red background and giant warning sign, when certain certificates are received.

It also doesn't seem to be enforced on my Movistar connection, which means the single biggest ISP is opting out?

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.

It was blocked for me on O2, which is part of Movistar - have you tried it now?

The order only went through on Friday so presumably the ISPs will take some time to catch up.

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.

Yeah, I'm on O2, which I think is part of Movistar? And it's blocked.

Fortunately, I already have a VPN anyway :)

Since no court was involved, the accusation that the user is trying to access an illegal website is itself an illegal accusation.

This dude has blocked archive.is for the whole of Finland because he has a beef with a Finnish blogger. What a swell guy, but it's his project.

Ah, so that's why it never works for me.

Most likely is that you are using Cloudflare DNS: https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked

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.

example.com blocks Iran for nothing

It's a legal requirement, all US sites must block Iran due to sanctions.

HN does not

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.

You have wires crossed. It was owner of archive.today who was the asshole. Still is.

Fucker alters archive.today snapshots, uses the archive.today to do DDoS attacks.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-a...

The ddos was against the doxxer. My "wires" ain't "crossed", I guess we just have different priorities. Idk what I'd do if I had reasons to fear for my life, so I can't blame the archive.today owner and the site still works as intended.

Overall, the hate campaign against archive.today is based on them messing with a doxxer, and I cannot morally support doxxing of anyone. So please, serve me the evil ddos version of archive.today when I visit, and I'll turn a blind eye. :3

What reason does he have to fear for his life?

One reason could be that they archive stuff that people want gone. Some of those people want their stuff gone more than the others.

Another reason could for example be tied to their identity, which we do not yet know, as they have not [yet] been doxxed.

(Also, idk what pronouns they use, some people in the thread seem to refer to them by "he", is that actually something they refer to themselves as on the record, or rather a typo or 'borken Engrish'?)

Two people can be assholes.

I was able to read this from Spain! A few days ago archive.ph/archive.is were blocked but now they're not somehow.

This link currently works in spain

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 TV rights holders for football matches want to block pirate streams by any means necessary. Spain appears to be the worst, people get arrested in the UK for profiting off streams (so far, but the communication is pretty aggressive towards consumers too), I don't know about the other countries mentioned.

Wow, that's insane! If TV right holders actually got their way, it would enable them to control how a match is framed, and manipulate how the match is perceived at a country-level. Surely everybody watching should be able to see the same match being played, regardless of who controls the camera? The situation you describe sounds like a recipe for corruption and exploitation!

Really struggling to tell if this is meant as satire or not.

Even if it is, it doesn't make sense for me. Pirate streams changing the… framing? The author tried to be sarcastic, but it didn't really work out.

I think they are writing how news censorship can be used to edit opinions, but changed news to sports streams.

Like how we all download hundreds of gigabytes of Linux ISOs.

I appreciate the attempt, but I'm still dumbfounded by that comment. After all, pirate streams are 1:1 copy of the official ones, and news censorship isn't about seeding newspaper scans…

They largely can't do anything against consumers in the UK. One of the largest ISPs gave up sending the threatening letters because everyone just ignored them. Occassionally one of the tabloid hacks will write a piece about how naughty you are for pirating the latest <TV series finale>.

Most people just set up a seedbox with a VPN connection (this is what I do) and I never worry about it.

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.

There was a movement in the US over the past decade or so for media companies to buy up ISPs for the sole purpose of being able to apply blocking.

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.

How do you know it's illegal if a judge hasn't ruled? In parts of Europe it's illegal to call someone's operations illegal if a judge hasn't ruled it.

In this case a judge who clearly does not use the internet for anything has ruled.

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.

[0] https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/news/official-statement-in-rela...

It doesn’t just last for a match, sometimes they start at 00:00 and take the entire day.

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?

Portugal only has DNS blocks on piracy sites, which are extremely easy to circumvent. I don't think that block is football-related.

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 benefits the “Federation française des jeux”, the state gaming company.

Officially this was done out of concern for the safety of the French citizens.

Gambling is quite regulated in France, it’s not new.

I mean... Righfully so. All those new "gambling" websites (who aren't even regulated as such) are an insider trader's dream.

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?

This isn't a slippery slope. They ban gambling. Polymarket is gambling. It gets banned.

It's a slippery slope giving the government the technical means to ban websites.

They just remove it from the ISP's DNS, changing your DNS server will bypass it. I don't really call that a ban personally, more like softly hiding

>Officially this was done out of concern for the safety of the French citizens.

Gambling regulations exist in most places in the world, including the US. With good reason.

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. There wasn't even a court involved at all.

This happens all over Europe. The citizens give their governments the power to block things, or mass surveillance in the name of "safety" and then they just take everything and EU citizens are left wondering why.

I don't rank "illegal" website blockage nearly in the same category as state surveillance.

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.

It was just a regulatory block, not an ISP-level government block which is what we're talking about here.

Because they didn't have to do an ISP block. If they had to, they would have.

No they wouldn't have, because that's illegal in the US.

If that's the case and they need to, they'll just make it legal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...

Lots of goal post moving here.

The US government cannot compel ISPs to block websites. The only time it was tried was in 2022 to block some Israeli piracy site, and the federal court dropped the block within weeks after being hammered with first amendment lawsuits.

What we are seeing happening in Spain, France, and all across the EU, is literally impossible in the US.

What they do instead is scoop up execs when they travel through the US.

Peter Dicks, David Carruthers

State violence is used to ensure compliance, so that companies self-censor.

Well that's pretty easily avoided then.

Don't travel through the US.

Any flight near the US can be diverted to the US. Russia uses this tactic too.

Here in France, while Polymarket is blocked, I was able to access Kalshi without any issue. But I didn't try to use Kalshi's services

Does the US also have a state-run betting monopoly that it grants excemptions to?

Some US states do!

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.

torrent some popular movies on an American home ISP and you may get some nasty letters too

every economy protects its crown jewels to a degree which seems excessive to its neighbors

It is no coincidence that a lot of piracy is now hosted in Russia.

Always has been

Russia protects its crown jewels by blocking anything of dissent, including youtube.

This has resulted in a lot of them blocking VPNs because Russia blocks VPNs at the backbone level.

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.

Not only Cloudflare. They block IP Ranges of many CDNs during the matches.

Which blocks docker hub images. You cant fetch an image during a match.

This is what happens when you let the crypto bros take over the industry. Wave a little cash and they won't say "no".

Upvote this.

Downvote this!

Typical Spain. Making the country less productive so the football billionaires can get richer.

for many months I could not access the Linux Mint website... because of this.

I guess net-neutrality doesn't exist in Spain?

the term "net neutrality" doesn't really mean anything anyway

Not really. There is EU regulation. But is not really well enforced and offers some interesting loopholes, like zero-rating.

Every single day, I find another reason to be ashamed of my country. We're on a speedrun to turn a modern democratic country into a corrupt shithole in every way imaginable.

We all feel like this in Europe. It's crazy. How are the politicians all like this?

Imagine living in the US then …

Maybe people are feeling confident to put their masks off with the stuff that’s happening in the US?

Because they're not terminally online and don't know why this is bad. But they do know that making the rich less rich is bad, just like in the US.

Europe retains more counterculture than the US does, but not enough.

How de we keep voting on the same group of people/ideas?

Europe has so many parties. But they all agree on this because to disagree would be to attract an aerial democracy delivery from the USA.

It never gets to that in countries already deeply aligned.

They all agree on this because it will be a hidden sticking point for some others, If that's not an impediment some lobyists will make it so. If that doesn't work us ambassadors, state departments and/or USTR will pressure or even put you on a trade watchlist. If that doesn't work some 3 letter agency folks will land on a domestic airfield and have some talks. If that doesn't work some media might peculiarly shift it's tone. etc

Like how you never stab your enemies because you'd go to jail, even though it never gets to jail because you don't stab your enemies because you'd go to jail

Indeed tho we of course also have rare examples of what happens when someone does stab someone which keeps the memory fresh and spain did get the state department and USTR pressure in the past, sweden nearly ended up on the 301 Watchlist. The cia did both use foreign/multinational media for it's goals and defended it's interests, etc

I don't know about the rest of Europe, but in Spain, this happens because people are extremely dependent on government handouts. Most people dislike the government's policies, but they are afraid of having to work, so they don't want to rock the boat.

In Spain, half a million more people depend on getting money from the government than work in the private sector: https://theobjective.com/economia/macroeconomia/2024-09-16/a...

How is this possible? It cant be sustainable to have more people live off of welfare than work.

Civil servants don't live off of welfare. They work and receive a salary in exchange.

It isn't. But reform would a political suicide, because all of these people are voters. So the status quo continues, and for now everyone can feel great about how caring the society is.

That's a crazy stat. In the UK, 53% of people are net recipients - about 2M people! (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personal...)

State dependents - either benefits/welfare or employed - have a very different experience of the economy than others; the disconnected work/pay relationship.

The disconnect between income and effort is causing people to have warped priorities, which, ultimately, results in inflationary economics and impoverishment.

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.

Sounds like IPTV streaming

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.

> tyranny

Previous comment was about people trying to watch football paying a few euros to shady business, who knows where that money lands, rather than the official offer from people who spent a lot to get the rights to broadcast.

I really don't like the implementation but I wouldn't call that tyranny. Blocking archive is much more concerning.

> Blocking archive is much more concerning.

Yes. That is an example of the tyranny I speak of.

It's worth considering that the Spanish football league has successfully lobbied to implement widespread Cloudflare IP blocks during matches that affect websites totally unrelated to football (or to any kind of piracy). I don't watch football at all, but when there are matches I often find my normal work or home browsing activity disrupted by the blocks and have to turn on the VPN.

Considering this, I strongly believe that the ethical way to watch football in Spain is piracy. People who watch it legally are funding a mafia-like organization that harms society.

There is no ethical way to watch football. It's always funding a (or multiple) mafia-like organization.

Authorities tried to work with that provider but it required a process that doesn't scale to live events. They do not want to preemptively disallow abuses on their platform. If you leverage their shared IPs to expose your service, your traffic cannot be distinguished from abuses by traffic filtering solutions. I think they provide BYOIP, if you think your service is important enough to justify not being mixed with non-legit things. Or you can rework your architecture, this provider is not the full web.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like it and would vote against IP-filtering if I was asked that specific question. I don't consider it tyrannical. Criteria for blocking IPs is clear and limited, even if blocking IPs is dumb. VPN are allowed.

Oh no! They won't implement censorship without a court decision? How tragic!

Blocking illegal football streaming is not censorship.

Of course it's censorship. It's the government blocking certain content from the internet, without a trial. How do you define censorship?

By this logic removing CSAM also is censorship. This definition of censorship is valid but it doesn't convey much moral value. Removing some content, even without a trial, can be a good thing.

Yes it's censorship.

It's escalated to tyranny - blocking half the internet - in an alleged attempt to block petty football piracy. If your country installed cameras everywhere to "deter kidnapping" wouldn't you feel that was tyrannical?

I imagine those devices are same as Superboxes that were plaguing the USA recently

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.

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?

That knowledge is already available and generally people don’t build bombs or bioweapons. Otherwise they could still go to university and learn all that if they so wish

It is available, and searching for it is a good way to end up on a list. It is hilarious how you gave “go to university” as an option, as if all universities were accessible to anyone and taught classes on this.

I also couldn’t help but notice you completely glossed over the much more important point of misinformation for manipulation.

Almost everyone is on many lists. Has it helped?

Misinformation is unfortunately also available. And contrary to "information to build bombs and bioweapons", it's doing actual harm. To societies, economies and above all, to individuals.

Societies don’t have the right to decide what is and isn’t false information and prevent people from accessing or spreading it. (They think they do, and that’s a problem.)

Fighting misinformation has to happen through establishing and maintaining trust, and providing trusted counters to misinformation. Establishing trust requires alignment with the people you want to trust you.

Interference (as opposed to participation) in the free flow of information and the process by which truth is determined is a great evil.

We tried that, it didn't work.

You mean it wasn't profitable enough for the elite.

No, I mean it didn't work.

The greatest harmful misinformation at all is that the government should be the arbiter of truth.

The purpose of a democratic government is to reflect the will of the people, not the other way around.

Ok but what about "being directly interfered with by foreign actors"?

This is what's happening right now in Spain. Foreign interference (Ceuta, Dept. Of Homeland evidence...), followed up by foreign social media manipulation campaigns.

Currently, it looks like these campaigns will replace the current government.

This is a direct threat to democracy.

Is it a threat to democracy if citizens gather facts from foreign actors when their domestic government attempts to suppress those facts? On a general level, not speaking to this situation in particular. Just curious.

Weird way to frame this argument as a question.

The domestic government holding a monopoly on information is a threat, and foreign information can be a relief, yes.

Foreign misinformation is also a threat, and domestic government shutting it out can also be a relief.

So you have to ask yourself, where are we? Is Spain (or any European country that is not currently bootlicking, for that matter) a dictatorship that needs Freedom messages in a bottle from the USA, or is the USA directly subverting their democracies with espionage?

Why did the USA give millions to Morocco earlier this summer? Why did the Dept. of Homeland (so espionage) produce decade old evidence of corruption in a former administration that would be linked to the current one, at this precise time? Just asking questions here.

All nations are under pressure to hide information from their citizens, whether it’s for covering up political scandals or suppressing political opposition. If you give them the tools, they will eventually use them. So you can’t give them the tools.

The democratic way to fight misinformation is with public trust, a well educated population, and by publishing true information to counter misinformation. Anything less treats citizens as children who can’t be trusted to form their own opinions.

Beautiful on paper, in practice you surrender national security to foreign actors.

I agree on the philosophical part, letting our governments act opaquely under the veil of national security, inevitably leads them to turn on their citizens. But total transparency will be exploited by foreign powers (likely with domestic cooperation), until those that once defended it are removed from power.

Who decides what is allowed to be covered up? Surely not the public, if your goal is to hide those same “dangerous” things from the public.

Historically, this kind of control has always been a favored tool of the corrupt. If you build an apparatus of censorship, it will be used to harm the public.

Yes. But if you give up all intel, then you have no intel at all, and soon this model of government will be undermined by the foreign actors.

There is a gray line somewhere between surveillance state and revealing all intel, which can serve national security and also diplomacy.

Traditionally military, diplomacy, and intelligence are the three areas where it may be okay to keep some things hidden.

The problem is that this typically ends up shifting corruption towards these sectors, which ends up hollowing out national security.

Things like overclassification are a serious problem.

> Beautiful on paper, in practice you surrender national security to foreign actors. > But total transparency will be exploited by foreign powers (likely with domestic cooperation), until those that once defended it are removed from power.

You know, democracy obviously has its downsides. Should we abolish democracy because of that?

We already have. These foreign misinformation actors we're talking about have already convinced a majority of the voting population that democracy is bad, and they have voted to end democracy, and now democracy is in the process of ending.

This could have been prevented by blocking foreign misinformation.

So basically your solution to foreign interests undermining democracy is to undermine it yourself first.

You misunderstood. I'm not arguing for authoritarianism.

How so? Aren't you advocating for the state censorship that literally intended to prevent citizens to vote "wrong"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

> "the essential democratic freedom – freedom of expression – is both ingrained in and potentially harmful to democracy."

But in case of the democracy there is no paradox. Democracy is about will of people defining the government. When it is the other way around (the government defines the will of people), it is called authoritarianism.

So basically you are arguing for the authoritarianism against the democracy. It is just so you seemingly does not like the word authoritarianism and like the word democracy, and are trying to justify the discrepancy by some kind of paradox (which there is none).

Even IF you are right about people will destroy the democracy by their will if that will does not formed by the government, there is still no paradox and that is still called the authoritarianism. By that, you simply point out one of the weakness of the democracy, and suggest the authoritarianism as a better alternative (even if you are refusing to use the correct definitions).

> When it is the other way around (the government defines the will of people), it is called authoritarianism.

Not the definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

You should really read those Wikipedia articles. Creating and explaining your own definitions and circular logic make you sound like a fool.

Right now, there are foreign actors helping right-extremist campaigns in Europe. Those parties' goal is ultimately converting to Authoritarianism. You can connect the dots yourself now.

Looks like democracy is voting to end.

> "being directly interfered with by foreign actors"? > This is a direct threat to democracy.

You mean those foreign actors who force themselves across Spain's border? It is not a threat to democracy, it is one of the problem that democracy solving (by replacing the government that allow that to happen)

> Currently, it looks like these campaigns will replace the current government.

I mean yeah, democracy is doing it's job.

I'm not sure if you're aware but Spain is part of the Schengen free travel area.

Yes, that is what makes Spains lax border controls a problem for the rest of Europe.

> misinformation

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.

“The memo says we have to work to make the facts meet the false charges to pull the wool over the eyes of the filthy masses”

Censorship can be used to monopolize the spread of misinformation.

He speaks like someone who is in possession of a great deal of misinformed beliefs that he knows are misinformed and is not willing to change.

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.

The Western world currently views free college education as bad “socialism,” so I am not hopeful.

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.

Sounds like I need to head East and get a better education

> 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.

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

We’ll wait a minute here! Why not call it LLM-archive.today??? Obviously we’re not trying to hurt someone’s copyright!!! We’re making a derivative work from it!!! An LLM! So Europe can be cool too!! Oh but you’re saying downloading the entire internet in the process violates someone’s copyright?? Well now, don’t be dramatic, what if we fall behind China?? Surely a little copyright can be violated for that. /rant that I have in my head whenever someone complains to the government about copyright. Either charge LLM providers for copyright violations, or be done with it, and declare copyright dead. Can’t have it both ways, or sooner or later people will figure out a loophole to it anyways.

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.

I am blocked, now need to access it through VPN. Using pepephone/orange.

Isn’t that site the one the maintainer is known for altering pages or something?

Yes. It's not allowed on Wikipedia after that was found out.

They also used their visitors to DoS other sites, Cloudflare's malware blocking resolver (1.1.1.2) blocks their domains: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47474255

Modern Spain is having patchy record with digital age. Earlier:

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.

What happened to Spain? They didn’t get hit by WW2 and yet…are a distant sixth in economic size behind even Russia.

PSOE happened

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

But then again, discussing politics hardly ever gets less divisive here or elsewhere.

The fault in that comment is to be unsupported by arguments.

Otherwise, there would be no divisiveness in fairly assessing measures in Economics.

I was been there. I mean socialist fantasy and everyone was equally poor except party members. It is astonishing to watch this shit happening in different countries with different cultures during long period of time. But with same end. And it is not prosperity. This time in Berlin as recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-election-housing-cris...

Why are the protesters in Berlin holding signs in English?

Because they want to have the eyes of global press on Germany

Instead of the eyes of their own politicians? Are their goals to actually effect change in Germany or to disparage Germany in the eyes of the global press?

Almost every German politician, most of the police and half the population of Germany speaks English, even though it shouldn't be used for official business. It's no barrier.

Language is also a cultural signifier. English might not be a barrier, but protesting in English certainly communicates that the protesters care not for German culture.

Isolating itself from the world isn't part of German culture either

> Instead of the eyes of their own politicians?

Politicians? It is messages for the voters, and they are leftist politics (so their voters doesn't understand German)

Half of everyone in Germany can speak English. It's mandatory to learn in schools. In Berlin that percentage is even higher. So it's no obstacle. And they don't want to limit the visibility of the protest to only Germany.

Germany is one of the more native-language-enforcing countries in Europe. I've been to Slovenia and half of everything is actually written in English, unlike Germany or France where everything's written in the local language.

Since the end of the Civil War in 1939, Spain has spent roughly 65% of the time under Right/Far-Right rule and 35% under Left/Center-Left rule.

Since 1978 Spain has spent 100% of the time under left rule.

By my count 30 years out of 48 are not nearly 100%. If you consider Suarez, Calvo-Sotelo, Aznar and Rajoy leftists you might be a bit too much out there.

You mean Spain the fastest growing European country by many metrics? Not sure, we're here, been chilling all summer, time to get back to work now :) What happened to the country you live in?

Spain’s youth unemployment is the highest in Europe. I hope it’s improving, but economically Spain has not recovered post-2008 in line with others in the EU.

Don't worry. Finland has taken over with the highest unemployment and will likely soon have the highest youth unemployment.

Probably because in Finland you are provided housing and money even if you don't work.

No, that's not it. Instead it's the right-wing "geniuses" running the government that have been a major cause of this. The NCP and Finns Party keep making a mess of things in the name of their ideology.

> fastest growing European country by many metrics

Countries grow in secondary matters and the primary ones (civilization) remain unattended.

And by the way, when something "grows fast", do not misunderstand the indicator... Ethiopia had a 13% annual growth recently; Guyana has a 16% annual growth at this time: you are not thinking that "life is good there" and "Miami videoclip vibes everywhere", right?

> Countries grow in secondary matters and the primary ones (civilization) remain unattended.

However this has not been the case for Spain. Spain is deemed a full democracy by all objective and independent metrics. I am debating whether to even post this reply since your point to compare it to Ethiopia is so absurd you're likely not going to agree with facts. And yes, "life is good there", by also topping some, albeit, not objective quality of life metrics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#...

https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map?type=fiw&year=2026

https://www.internations.org/expat-insider/2026/quality-of-l...

> [civilization unattended] not been the case for Spain

We have just mentioned in the page that its federal administration tried to end cash and online anonimity. For example.

> a full democracy

And?! That very certainly does not equate with civilization.

> compare it to Ethiopia

You failed in understanding the post.

> [expats]

And since when an unvetted group could be taken as having judgement?

What is your definition of "civilization"? Arguing that cash payments equate to being "civilized" is honestly, very weird. Nordic countries got rid of cash payments for the most part, do you view those as uncivilized, then?

> What is your definition of "civilization"

In context, the amount of awareness, and related cultivation, distributed in the population.

Among the signs I would check the perceived and tolerated pollution: light pollution, sound pollution etc. For example, the awareness of the importance of rest is basic (the awareness of the importance of health even more), so the perception and condemnation of background noise, especially in the night, is telling. A civilized country is one in which librarians speak with a proportionate, quiet voice, not one in which they chat loudly or speak loudly on loud ringing phones.

Around these parts in Europe (that the magazine The Atlantic revealed extend to the Americas) people are increasingly driving using blinding headlights: that is not just infra-human, but infra-animal: dogs are supposed to recognize a foul smell, birds are supposed to recognize disturbing noises, and if vision-based primates cannot recognize a bothersome light, they are spoilt and wasted.

Then of course you have the higher levels of awareness (good luck). For example, the awareness of what is licence vs what is freedom, the awareness that judgement requires extra steps in thought. People who act as liabilities because "they directly adopt the behaviour that requires less effort", etc. - that is "uncivilized".

Awareness comes before the cultivation that is supposed to create it - before Borges' enraged "¡No saben lo que es un centauro!".

More complete theoretical and operational definitions could be given - but not here and now.

> Nordic countries got rid of cash payments for the most part, do you view those as uncivilized, then

Yes, certainly, absolutely. Things that evaluate as normal and acceptable to have their daily transactions recorded are clearly alien to developmental basics. It is unawareness of the sense of Dignity first, then of prudence (etc.) - and above them of the absurd.

> weird

"Weird" is "what happens", and what happens is that people live expressing larger and larger lacks of awareness about what is proper and what is not.

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.

My grandparents would routinely call the 40s "The years of hunger" so you can guess which way it went.

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.

Did you even read the page you linked?

>Shortly before the end of World War II and the later beginning of the Marshall Plan, President Roosevelt ordered the American ambassador in Madrid to inform Franco that any "political or economic aid" from the United States would be "impossible" as long as the dictator remained in power.

>The decision was ratified in August 1945 by a joint declaration of Stalin, Truman and Attlee. In February of the following year, France closed its border with Spain, leaving the country completely isolated. The UN asked all its members in December 1946 to retire their ambassadors from Spanish territory, and did not revoke its condemnatory declaration until 1950. Spain joined the UN in 1955

[...]

>The government protested against the isolation, stating that Spain had "the right to buy on international markets", and criticized the international community for sabotaging the country's "right to live according to its spiritual values"

>The Spanish international reputation would begin to improve gradually in the late 1940s and early 1950s, after the consolidation of the Cold War, due to the explicit interest of the United States in promoting anti-communist governments in Western Europe. The diplomatic displays of approval by the American government helped to strengthen the regime and stabilize its economy, which would eventually lead to the liberalization policies that marked the 1960s

Which is exactly what I said in my previous reply. Isolation FORCED by the international community (Franco fought against the USSR and Cold War wasn't established yet), they embraced it sure because they had no other choice. They could trade with Argentina (Franco-Peron protocol, signed in 1946)

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.

>most of the working industries were cheaply sold to friends of the dictatorship

That is completely false.

> 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.

Is being 9th in (nominal) GDP rating now is mentioned as "even"? 90% of the world is behind Russia.

Which just proves GDP is a low IQ metric to measure how good a country is to live in.

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.

> 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.

ETA terrorists*

You're calling murdering Hitler an act of terrorism?

Calling ETA freedom fighters in 2026, disgusting.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anexo:Asesinatos_cometidos_por...

And yet they were the only ones blowing up fascists. Every time it's not the moderate progressive democrats who lead the resistance. Shame that.

Also they continued blowing up people after the transition from fascism. Even before that they constantly murdered civilians.

For instance the IRA was very mild and moderate by ETA standards.

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.

I was referring to the people who sent Blanco to space as freedom fighters. I don't know what modern day ETA is up to.

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..

They were the same people.

Arrest him

They did make a good launching pad for him.

Russia low GDP is actually not true. In real terms is bigger than Germany's.

GDP just measures how expensive things are.

PPP is a misunderstood, distorted and often semi meaningless metric

What makes you think economic size is a measure of Quality of Life ?

> They didn’t get hit by WW2

I think things start to go wrong for the Spain somewhere after the 16th century

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.

Right. First case was performed by the executive branch of the State. Second one by the justice branch.

> 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

Telefónica is what we call a "cementerio de políticos".

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.

Thanks MPAA and RIAA as usual.

The attempts to end anonimity and to end cash flow are ideological and pretty surely did not come from the USA.

USA had nothing to do with this.

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.

Explain the 301 watch list pressure.

Both can be true

Both can't be true when they are lying about the US having nothing to do with it. The reporting is widely available.

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.

4. Spain is a major supporter of Chat Control and encryption backdoors.

The full list of webs blocked by copyright issues can be downloaded from the web of the Spanish government here:

https://www.cultura.gob.es/dam/jcr:919c6bd2-17b2-43d1-98f5-d...

Incredibly helpful of the Spanish government to compile a list of free media sites :D

Though that doesn't contain the millions of sites and IP addresses that get blocked everything there is a football match happening.

Did they find a La Liga game on it or something?

I feel like archive.today is as important as webarchive is. Not only for uptime redundancy, but also redundancy in what they capture.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#2026_attack_on_G...

IA doesn’t bypass paywalls when archiving, so it’s the only option we have for that, imperfect as it is.

Regardless, they are not “as important” and you should exercise caution. In addition, they are not the only option, there is also https://unwall.app.

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.

> I hope they stick around

Hard to do when they're streaming sports in the same domain..

Thanks for that. It works really well for me ATM; long may it thrive.

Does archive.is have problems? I tried this article with it and it didn't work:

https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/burned-out-and...

Error: Invalid InterceptionId.

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.

Avoid those archive sites like the plague. They are not trustworthy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...

They are the only reliable way for me to read proper news in Economist / FT / WSJ / WashingtonPost etc...

Well except paying $300 a month I guess.

> They are the only reliable way for me to read proper news in Economist / FT / WSJ / WashingtonPost etc...

> Well except paying $300 a month

It looks like the WSJ is available for $2/mo or the WaPo for $2.50 mo. You probably don’t need all of them simultaneously as they frequently cover the same topics, including pretty much all of the big news stories - subscribe to one for a year then switch to another. And even if you aren’t subscribed to all of them you are still contributing in a small way to keeping good journalism alive.

I am already subscribed to 2 papers in my own country at ~$50 total since one comes in print once a week.

Just a matter of priorities.

My reply was to help the grandparent commenter who said "They are the only reliable way for me to read proper news". If you already have multiple paid news subscriptions that are working great for you, you can ignore my suggestions. Edit: Ah, you were the grandparent commenter who said "They are the only reliable way for me to read proper news."

its under 15$ a month...

Each. For over 20 of them.

Is that sarcasm, or do you really need 20 of them? I'm an avid news reader, and there is no way I could get through even a fraction of that number of news sources daily.

And isn't most major news covered by every one of the biggest news sources - one great source can accommodate the vast majority of news topics for someone, especially if they are on a tight budget.

How do you know which ones Hacker News is going to link to?

> do you really need 20 of them ... no way I could get through even a fraction of that

We actually kind of need more than that. It is like here: we collectively select through ranking a number of pieces - but they are scattered (on a.com and b.org and c.info...).

I would also like to read through the whole of the Economist and the FT etc. - what we do instead is select what we read, and what we pick will come from many sources.

Except you cannot know if the system has tampered with the content you think is genuinely from those sites.

Fucking sucks, what's the alternative for people without money or people who the papers/businesses don't allow them to do subscribe because of the country they're from/in?

Use sources such as PBS, NPR, etc. - they are available globally, and there are non-US-based sources if readers prefer.

Tried searching for the submission article or even a mention of this event on their websites but I found nothing. Are you sure these are actually faithful replacements of everything that archive.is/.today unlocks for people? It's a lot of paywalls they remove, lots of stuff isn't reported elsewhere.

Sources that.... don't post the things people are trying to read?

Besides, if it's free, you're the product.

At the bottom of that page FYI -

"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"

What’s your point? archive.is and archive.today are the same service.

My ISP blocks both and I’m not even in Spain.

"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.

You get the right to say this when you make a better one. Otherwise, you're just telling people to stop accessing information.

Corruption hates archives.

I'd built something which can allow people to archive archive.is pages on archive.org.

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)

File a complaint about chatgpt? I assume they’ve slurped up all of archive.org’s content

Archive.org is not archive.today.

Guess my `archive.today` bookmarks are going to need a VPN now. So much for preserving web history without extra hoops.

This and the soccer schedule internet blocking, the government just completely taken over by IP lobbyists?

Dictatorship.

It's quite interesting to see how all these fake-democracies resort to willy-nilly censosrhip. Usually USA under Trump is the biggest hypocrite, but it is amazing how many EU countries are not that much better really. We need a global colour-map based on objective factors with regards to censorship. And then we need to replace the lobbyists that act as decoy politicians establishing censorship such as the one shown here. That's clearly a corrupt clique working.

Why does Cloudflare Warp block archive.today? Did they just get strong-armed by publishers or ISPs or some other reason?

archive.today (etc) does not properly serve dns results to cloudflare dns servers, because they do not include EDNS subnet information in the query

https://jarv.is/notes/cloudflare-dns-archive-is-blocked

Oh interesting, thanks

Lies are for free, while the truth is behind paywalls. This is not going to end well.

Edit: why is it that Billionaires just fund fake news. Are there no "white hat" billionaires that could fund an opposition to that?

> Lies are for free, while the truth is behind paywalls. This is not going to end well.

Not just paywalls - sites have also tried ads, although those don’t have great results either. But I agree with your overall point.

White hat people aren't allowed to become billionaires.

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.

That is stupid.

Ahhh crap. I noticed that earlier today. Archive.today blocks some DNS providers like CloudFlare and I thought I had ended up on the wrong DNS again.

Time to fix that by running a real DNS and not just a forwarder though.

Edit: Hmm it seems like they are not just blocking at DNS level :(

State Capture.

This will not make the news in Norway even though it's much more egregious that just about everything Trump has done (not said, but done).

Guess I'll be spinning up my own proxy to access old links now. Good luck blocking the internet, Spain; that'll work.

very socialist from them!

This is a welcome development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...

That's not a reason to censor it at the state level.

Why not?

Why is it? You don't get to censor important sources of information and then literally just cite "why not?" as the reason.

The linked wiki page lists the reasons. You can't just say these are not good reasons without saying why

Which one of them justifies the government putting you in prison for accessing the information?

“Protecting democracy” or something Orwellian like that

archive.is protects democracy and that's why it must be illegal to access?

I mean that’s probably what they believe, the idea is to shape favored outcomes by denying their voters access to information.

Unironically, yes.

Censorship is bad, also it is always slippery slope.

Additionally it is against Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the UN. And Article 20 of the Spanish Constitution.

> including the site using editors' and readers' computers to run a denial-of-service attack

This seems like sufficient justification not only to censor it at a state level, but to criminally prosecute any individual who visits the site after finding out about it - and thus knowingly joins in DDOS attacks.

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.

Russia exports a huge amount of content (from cartoons to AI), which is why it did not withdraw from copyright treaties in 2022, as Belarus did

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.

Brilliant! I cannot have this service, so I am happy that others cannot have it as well. You make me sick.

If it's an unreliable and untrustworthy site (which it is) then it's not of value to much of anyone. Archiving requires both of those things

Where's your better site?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com