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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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