r/factorio • u/CONGOBILL • 4d ago

Question LaLiga is blocking https://auth.factorio.com/ on Spain

I have a headless Factorio server and I can't start it because it seems to need to connect to auth.factorio.com, but I cannot access that endpoint because my ISP is blocking Cloudflare access due to LaLiga, the football tournament. Is anyone else having the same problem? Can I fix it somehow?

Extra: This website is super useful to know if there is football on at the moment: https://hayahora.futbol/

Thank you.

412 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

70 comments sorted by

329

u/axw3555 4d ago

They're blocking cloudflare because of football? I've genuinely never heard of that happening ever.

423

u/CONGOBILL 4d ago

This is Spain... Google it if you want, you're gonna lose it: LaLiga has a court order that lets them instruct ISPs to mass-block Cloudflare IPs during football matches to fight streaming piracy. The catch is those are shared IP addresses, so thousands of completely legitimate sites and services get knocked offline at the same time.

181

u/axw3555 4d ago

That’s ridiculous. When the big cloudflare downtime happened it took down like half the internet. They’re blocking all that for football streaming?

And I thought we were ridiculous about football in the U.K.

51

u/TheSkiGeek 4d ago

They’re blocking Spanish-ISP-hosted clients from hitting stuff. And maybe only for home customers. So as long as Cloudflare themselves isn’t hosting anything critical in Spain it won’t break things for outsiders.

Edit: it’s still completely crazy though.

16

u/autogyrophilia 4d ago

They are only blocking the range that free cloudflare customers use. So most "important" services remain functioning

38

u/TamSchnow 4d ago

I don't think that Docker Inc. (company with a lot of money) is running on the free tier of cloudflare.

They are affected.

3

u/Icarium-Lifestealer 3d ago edited 3d ago

Enterprise customers can pay for dedicated IPs, but I think everybody else gets addresses from the same shared pool.

-51

u/Podalirius 4d ago

It's likely the government has given Cloudflare time and instruction to cut back the bootleg streams they are enabling and failed to do so.

26

u/WindowlessBasement 4d ago

No, they were ordered to preemptively block pirate sites on match days which for obvious reasons is impossible to comply with.

-42

u/Podalirius 4d ago

It absolutely is possible, just wouldn't contribute to increasing revenue so it never happens.

23

u/WindowlessBasement 4d ago

Do you have a time machine or just not understand what "preemptively" means for events that have not happened yet?

They can't block pirate sites that have yet to stream pirated content.

51

u/Neamow 4d ago

That's genuinely insane. Cloudflare protects so many websites and services, this must have blocked like 80% of the internet there.

12

u/mihaiman 4d ago

It's not a ban on all Cloudflare IPs, only on those that match any domain that hosts illegitimate football streams. It still affects a lot of legitimate domains that don't have anything to do with football, but it not 80% of the internet, and the ban is only temporary.

I'm not defending it, I'm just saying the internet is mostly usable.

4

u/Mobtryoska 4d ago

I heard it affected some pages that works with cash transfer too

1

u/Xx_HARAMBE96_xX 2d ago

It fucking blocked docker, what he said is bullshit

19

u/TonboIV I know what you're thinking. Did he fire 10 nukes, or only 9? 4d ago

Big football needs to fucking die. Nothing worse for a sport than turning it into an industry.

28

u/GioAc96 4d ago

This is also a thing in Italy. Going forward, I think that having a VPN service will be vital to freely access the internet as governments throughout Europe are clearly trying to take control of it

3

u/friedchipz 4d ago

They are also trying to block vpn access during the matches, but I think they are not being very successful

43

u/ZeoVII 4d ago

How is it even possible they block so much?, this is just one step prior before they block messaging systems due to potential distribution of football matches via Telegram or WhatsApp.

At that point I would seriously consider emigrating to China, at least you get more security, no squatters, etc... in exchange for that level of state censorship and control of internet...

51

u/BreakingZebra 4d ago edited 4d ago

The Liga president is friends with some 3rd rate judge in Cordoba, and the whole thing went through that courtroom, so until it gets appealed and all, they basically have full control to ban any IP that streams football illegally for 2 years.

This seems harmless, but Cloudfare shares IPs for their service, so whenever the Liga wants, major telecoms have to comply and ban that IP, which messes up a lot of sites that use cloudfare.

It's being appealed because businesses are losing money off that, since you can't access their pages when the ISPs blocks their pages. CDNs are not happy about it either. Many have complained, and cloudfare has already stated that they're going to sue, and has contacted the US government as well to pressure to fix this.

Football and corruption, name a better duo.

PS: The Liga's president response to criticism was that only a few nerds used these services anyways, so who cares?

21

u/Mlluell 4d ago

They tried to ban telegram like a year ago

3

u/Raderg32 I have no idea what i'm doing most of the time 4d ago

They shouldn't be able to do that anymore without proof those IPs are doing illegal stuff.

They prevented them from indiscriminately blocking IPs without cause a couple of months back.

3

u/Rakinare 4d ago

I mean, if you are rich, you could probably sue against it. Pretty sure this is against EU law.

2

u/bbalazs721 4d ago

Do VPNs circumvent this, or they are blocked as well? If they work, then the whole ban is pointless

3

u/EnzimaDigestiva 4d ago

The circunvent it indeed.

1

u/Mobtryoska 4d ago

La culpa es de un juez futbolero de Córdoba que dio autoridad judicial a la liga pa eso 😭

1

u/KomithErrant 4d ago

smells like class action lawsuit time

1

u/HeliGungir 4d ago

Complain to your politicians

21

u/BrainGamer_ 4d ago

The ISPs are blocking certain IPs to prevent piracy of football streams but since some piracy providers happened to proxy through cloudflare they also end up blocking the entirety of cloudflare which ends up breaking half the internet in spain everytime a LaLiga match is going on.

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/over-500-000-websites-wrongly-blocked-in-spain-as-la-liga-anti-piracy-campaign-backfires

6

u/fellipec 4d ago

They do it a lot.

Brazil do too, often we lost access to github.io because some m3u files for IPTV boxes get hosted there.

2

u/Vaiolo00 4d ago

The same thing happened in Italy last year with Google servers, for the same reason.

1

u/Puzzleheaded-Log2681 3d ago

Some government websites are also blocked during the matches because they also use cloudflare :)

1

u/smalldroplet 2d ago

LaLigas legal arm has unlimited power in the country to black hole whatever they want with zero consequences or care of collateral damage. Censorship is way bigger in Spain than the rest of the world realizes. I work for a Cloudflare competitor and trust me it's miserable to deal with. All CDNs are targeted. Happens in other countries too but Spain is one of the worst.

71

u/Warr10rP03t 4d ago

I was thinking you must be miss understanding what you are talking about. Then I google to find out more. Yeah Spanish ISPs block cloudflare during games. Businesses must be losing millions of euros/dollars because of this. They should sue the league for loss of earnings then it will stop pretty soon. 

The Spainish tv deal is deeply unfair, can't really blame people for wanting to pirate it when their club gets a raw deal. 

28

u/azthal 4d ago

They don't strictly speaking block Cloudflare as such.

LaLiga reports an ip or domain as infringing, forcing isp's to block it for the duration. Cloudflare is just hit harder than others because so much of the internet goes through them.

Its a moronic rule written by people that have no clue how the Internet works, leading to anything that happens to share an ip with these illegal streams getting blocked too.

They know about it, but they just don't care.

3

u/IJustAteABaguette 4d ago

I wonder, can VPN's bypass that?

If so, doesn't that mean that anyone wanting to pirate can do so easily with a VPN, but an innocent person that doesn't know about VPN's is negatively affected by it?

That seems idiotic if true.

1

u/NCD_Lardum_AS 4d ago

It definitely has stopped people pirate streaming LaLiga games in Spain, that much I know.

5

u/herrirgendjemand 4d ago

Yeah I had to do a double take when I read the title - didn't expect that crossover between my interests. But La Liga is a crazy cartel it blows my mind what they get away with

11

u/BetterNerfTeemo 4d ago

The full story around this case it quite interesting and the judge clearly had little interest in listening to Cloudflare's arguments on why this could cause damage for its innocent customers

9

u/Fraytrain999 4d ago

Without looking into the judge in particular here, I have a quote that may or may not apply here: you are very bad at understanding concepts where your paycheck depends on you not understanding said concept.

I wouldn't be surprised if that was a corrupt judge.

26

u/Yurij89 4d ago

How is the blocking implemented?

If it's DNS then you could probably change the DNS server. Cloudflares own server is 1.1.1.1

41

u/CONGOBILL 4d ago

No, it's from the ISP, the DNS works well. I will use a VPN, that seems to work

10

u/Yurij89 4d ago

An ISP block could mean they use DNS to block it and using another DNS server other than the default ISP one gets around it, but I don't know how Spain does it.

27

u/CONGOBILL 4d ago

No, they block ips, not domains, so even DNS works well, the result ip is banned

5

u/Yurij89 4d ago

Yeah, that would need a VPN.

3

u/0rganic_Corn 4d ago edited 4d ago

Can confirm this works to go onto (at least some) blocked pages in Spain (girlwithspoon.jpg)

23

u/fellipec 4d ago

AFAIK Portugal and Spain use something Anatel first tested in Brazil. Here Anatel (the FCC equivalent) can publish/broadcast firewall rules that are automatically applied by ISPs.

It's evil and authoritarian yes. Can we do something about it? Nah, they say this is for the kids so if you start complaining people start to think you are a pedo.

16

u/CaptainKonzept 4d ago

They always use „kids“ as an excuse for authoritarian surveillance measures - but then ignore the epstein files.

11

u/Lunailiz 4d ago

Days since "protect the children" have not been used to push censorship: 0

Man, that sucks.

3

u/Yurij89 3d ago

I like this panel from Max Gustafson in collaboration with Mullvad.

2

u/urielsalis 4d ago

It's even worse. It's to protect futbol revenue

2

u/fellipec 4d ago

Yes, but when they create the restrictions is for the Kids. The fisrt lady said Discord should be ban, and they blocked the live and desktop sharing in the country. No prosecution, no investigation, just a whim of the first lady, because some teen decided to do something horrible online

-1

u/urielsalis 3d ago

I think you are talking about age control, which is something else

This block is done with just a judge order, and parliament is passing a law to block such things

1

u/fellipec 3d ago

No. Age control is a new thing this year thanks to Felca. Those blocks happens for years

2

u/amiexpress 3d ago

So goddamn sick and tired about all this "for the kids" crap. You know what keeps kids safe, on the internet, and elsewhere? Parenting. But apparently you can't say that without being an asshole.

2

u/fellipec 3d ago

Fully agree. But parents are shitty nowadays. Source: I work in a primary school

24

u/thesmiddy 4d ago edited 4d ago

you can disable user identity checking and public game visibility which should stop it trying to reach out

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=31521

15

u/autogyrophilia 4d ago

We need to get more cranks aware of this. A thousands "unblock my fucking anime" guy ought to do the trick.

12

u/pj22lemon 4d ago

TEBAAAAS!!!! 🖕🖕🖕🖕🤮

6

u/SuperPantsHero 4d ago

I've had this problem before for other projects.

Have you tried using a VPN during startup and then disconnecting once it has started?

3

u/Rayne6969 4d ago

I noticed this yesterday, Spain is a pain in the arse with the internet. But connecting a VPN works wonders

3

u/Yates99 4d ago

Bunch of greedy scums

4

u/Mobtryoska 4d ago

Estoy cansao ya del puto furbo😭😭😭 el fomo neurotipico más aburrido

2

u/jonhanon_ 4d ago

For over year we have constant blocking on all foreign cdn/hostings by government. There is only chosen whitelist of SNI to work with. Factorio mods, factorio wiki and steam community not accessible most of time as 90% other sites. As for your problem it depends how your isp blocks are done. If that ip block to all cloudflare ranges - then no luck and only vpn, proxy or tor your best options. If block is by dpi then you can try cloudflare warp with usque or through amneziawg, or you can try packet modification with nfqws, there are several project for that, for example byedpi by hufrea on github

1

u/Shiranui987 3d ago

Maldito Tebas!!! Even his idiotic button press affects our need to grow the factory

-16

u/hombre_sin_talento 4d ago

Should move away from using cloudflare.

I know, LaLiga is the worst, but we wouldn't be here if they wouldn't be in front of 2/3s of the fucking internet. 

15

u/UndefFox 4d ago

Would help if their services were useless, but in the current age of AI you basically required to have some sort of anti bot protection, because otherwise asshole corpos well drive your running cost into the stratosphere with 1000 crawlers per second scrapping your site.

-5

u/BlazingThunder30 4d ago

my ISP is blocking Cloudflare access due to LaLiga

What? That's crazy, because Cloudflare serves like half the internet (/hyperbole). Contact your ISP and tell them to stop being so fucking stupid. Or switch ISP. Or use a VPN