Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | freetanga's commentslogin

All people affected should file a complaint with your ISP and with Oficina de Atención al Usuario de Telecomunicaciones claiming financial loss for arbitrary service censorship.

I've been filing complaints since a year ago, told others to do the same too, nothing happens. There been moments I've meant to deploy fixes to issues but I cannot, because some tooling goes offline.

I've claimed financial loss, claimed sanity loss and everything in-between, but I'm afraid unless something reaches the European/EU courts, Spain will continue to be in the pocket of the La Liga owners.

Straight up fucking censorship with wide collateral being completely accepted in a Western country in 2026, beyond comprehension how this is allowed.


Whenever I get a little down over how much power unelected corporations have in my country, I can at least cheer myself up a little by being thankful that something as stupid as football doesn't have enough power here to control whether or not I have internet access.

La Liga is basically operating like an "unelected corporation" as well.

The problem is probably just distributed responsibility. If I lived in Spain I'd set their website as my proxy for everything that doesn't work before I filed my complaints so they could directly address each problem..

Ignorance is a bliss, agree :) Sometimes we all need to force ourselves into that so we can get a bit more joy.

It would if it were bigger business in your country. Try torrenting an MCU movie and see what happens to your ISP account.

Someone in Texas torrenting an MCU slop doesn’t disconnect me from half the Internet.

In my experience, nothing...

Out of curiosity, what does happen?

Your ISP sends you a "strike" letter, and eventually cancels your service if you continue to receive them.

AFAIK not much in most of the world, in Germany you get a letter from lawyers wanting ~1000 EUR

In Australia the court ruled that they can only sue for the cost of renting the movie, so they don't bother trying to recoup their ten bucks

That's interesting. Do you have further reading? I've seen AFACT v iiNet, but that doesn't look to be the source of "cost of renting", just that the ISP isn't responsible for their users.

Yep, check out Dallas Buyers Club v iiNet

Here's some commentary on it:

> Justice Perram discussed the idea of speculative invoicing within Australia

> Representing to a consumer that they have a liability which they do not may well be misleading and deceptive conduct within the meaning of s 18 of the Australian Consumer Law and it may be equally misleading to represent to someone that their potential liability is much higher than it could ever realistically be. There may also be something to be said for the idea that speculative invoicing might be a species of unconscionable conduct within one or other of s 21 of the Australian Consumer Law or s 12CB of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 2001 (Cth).

> Further, even if speculative invoicing was deemed to be lawful within Australia, the damages that the individual may be liable to are often calculated differently to that of the United States. In Australia, damages are compensatory in nature, meaning to compensate the plaintiff for the loss suffered. One Intellectual Property Lawyer has been quoted as saying, ‘If a film costs $20, the damages would ordinarily be expected to be $20.’

https://www.kells.com.au/insights/business/dallas-buyers-clu...


Canada is capped at $5k for noncommercial infringement, and even at that amount it still isn't worth it for the copyright holder to go to court.

If anyone who’s capable in Spain set a petition or the relevant steps and put it on HN. I’m pretty sure any Spanish resident in HN would be more than happy to take part even if it means to send a Bizum for the cause.

(Sadly as living in Spain for about a year I’m still not in such place to raise this or understand the full steps needed)


If this is done at the DNS level, run your own DNS. If not, use a VPN. Taking this to the courts is a long term solution, but in the short term you want to act on your own to evade censorship and oppression.

> run your own DNS

Can you expand on that? How would you go about running your own DNS that wouldn't be affected by football leagues?


If it's purely DNS blocking (no IP redirection or blocking), your own recursive resolver (eg, unbound) shouldn't be affected, assuming the ISP doesn't also intercept unencrypted DNS queries. If there's also interception, encrypted DNS upstream might help (assuming they're not blocked entirely, repressive countries do this, so far not in EU)

I don't think any of them will help in Spain case though, I believe the ISP/court choose to block the IP range entirely, which hit Cloudflare customers. DNS hijinks won't solve those.


It’s football. I’m pretty sure there are a great many countries you could induce to do insane things if the populace could be made to believe that said insane things will help football.

I mean, didn’t El Salvador and Honduras go to war over football back in the 60’s? And I seem to recall there was a football match which helped precipitate the dissolution of Yugoslavia - national identities coalesced around football tribes.


these things need to be brought to an international court who would require the government to act. Otherwise nothing happens, because institutions are completely corrupt.

It takes time, money and a strong legal team, but maybe IT companies maybe can put this together?


how do you make claims, here: https://usuariosteleco.digital.gob.es/? Can't find a way of doing it with Cl@ve

I've used this: https://usuariosteleco.digital.gob.es/reclamaciones/telefoni...

Used my digital certificate (which is installed in the browser), but AFAIK, you can use Cl@ve on that page above too.

In the past, I've cited BOE-A-2022-10757 (https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2022-10757), done a reclamació for the repeated loss of lawful access on my connection, and a denúncia about a broader overblocking practice affecting access to lawful services.

Also, supposedly, we should be able to make claims to CNMC as well, but haven't figured out how. Also of course, been complaining to my ISP every time it happens too.



Because the EU as a whole is quite happy to censor and generally wield the same tricks as "non-Western" countries in their desires to combat misinformation (however our EU bureaucrats define it), child abuse materials (see Chat Control that thing is not going to go away), and hatred (oh boy).

We've never guaranteed the right to free speech and because we haven't it's a slippery slope all the way back down to the furnaces of autocracy we sprang from.

The Spanish president has come out on record saying we don't deserve anonymity on the internet.


Not sure why you get downvoted. EU censors quite a bit. I can't read about 10 Telegram channels that I could access just 3 years ago, and the list is growing. All due to "vioalted laws of [my country]". (said near-east related channels have nothing to do with my country, government just doesn't want me to read them)

Some people deemed "russian assets" are not just censored, but stripped of ability to leave EU and prevented from being able to live in EU at the same time by financial sanctions, etc. Of course this doesn't happen to actual politicians in power, for whatever reason those never get sanctioned by EC, despite doing more "damage" than random blabberheads on twitter.

It's a mess.


> EU censors quite a bit

"EU" doesn't censor anything, there isn't even any authority nor infrastructure that could do that.

Individual countries, like Spain, does have a bunch of censorship though, this is pretty clear and evident already. But I think if you want to share something useful or even informative, you need to add what country this experience of yours is about, because it's not true in any/every EU country.


EU censors centrally: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=uriserv:...

Other ways EU censors centrally are EU wide travel bans that individual countries can issue to prevent political speech by foreigners, under the guise of preventing "incitement" and preserving "stability". Doctor Ghassan Abu Sitta from UK is one prominent example.

Yet other way EU censors centrally are EC sanctions on individual journalists or "journalists" to prevent them from any economic activity within EU, incl. publishing.

Other way EU censors centrally is via DSA, which results in seemingly random bans of channels on "social media" like Telegram, under the guise of fighting "terrorism". Basically this way it tries to silence people it otherwise supports killing without due process.


Sadly, it won't accomplish anything. La Liga seems to have enough political power in the country to bury all of that. Probably bribing everyone involved.

Corruption at that level could mean organized crime. Is there a culture of betting through illegal bookies, are they fixing matches, or ¿porque no los dos?

No, its worse than that. If you wish, learn about FIFA and how it works. At least the mafia fears the government somewhat...FIFA doesn't.

FIFA makes the mafia look like a bake sale committee

Well, I think when the organized crime is registered as proper businesses and they have the judges on their side even if the law isn't, I think we just call that "for-profit capitalism" nowadays.

penalti para el real madrid!

real vardrid

It would be great if there was a webpage with clear instructions on how to do this, maybe fill out a few questions and get a printable pdf you can mail, or at least telling you how to file an online complaint. Making complaints very low friction will lead to more of those and perhaps more attention to the issue.

Snail mail uses up physical space so it might get more attention, it would be hilarious to see news reports of truckloads of complaint mail being dumped in front of the whatever office.


> It would be great if there was a webpage with clear instructions on how to do this, maybe fill out a few questions and get a printable pdf you can mail, or at least telling you how to file an online complaint. Making complaints very low friction will lead to more of those and perhaps more attention to the issue.

This is a great idea, we definitively should make this happen! If people are curious on collaborating on something, reach out, email in profile (English or Spanish emails welcome!).


It's Spain man. Nothing will happen, maybe they will call their buddies in La Liga to ask what's up if the complains pile up and then will ignore all of them if they are assured everything works as expected.

Yep, flood them with complaints.

At this point the protests should be against the matches themselves. But let's be honest: nobody cares anymore.

Also Fastmail user for many years, with custom domain. I use specific email addresses per service with Bitwarden’s recent feature (by hand before this). My personal address is shared with few people.

I set up specific folders based on aliases. Thanks to GDPR I have found a few companies that have shared / sold my data illegally (the company-assigned address popped up somewhere else) and managed to have them delete my data right away.

I fret losing my domain, and that my recovery addresses are Gmail and Outlook - which could be lost at any time.

I would like to see government issue a lifetime inbox in the same way they issue you a SSN, a passport or driver license so I can have that as last line recovery.

But on the other hand, if we had that politicians would likely enforce mandatory identification across all web services…


Some Latin American cities were designed as grids (100m x 100m squares), and numbering of blocks spans a hundred per block (first block is 0 to 100 house numbers).

So if you are at 200s in one street and are looking for a house at 1200s, you know you are a kilometer away.

This with numbered streets is awesome to navigate. Buenos Aires has the first, but named streets. La Plata in Argentina has both.

If you are into maps see an air pic of La Plata.

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2X59727/detailed-map-of-la-plata-c...


Chicago is like this, there are numbered streets on the south side, but all the streets on the north and west sides are named, however they're very good about putting the grid numbers on the named street signs, so it's easy to figure out where you are. 100 addresses per block, 8 blocks to a mile, so if I'm at Western and Belmont, that's 2400W 3200N, so 3 miles west and 4 miles north of downtown. All the Metro stations list the grid numbers on the signs at the exits too


I bought two office phones for 30 euros each (Yealink) and set up a VOIP plan with voip.ms for my 8 and 9 YO kids.

I recently got divorced, so there is a phone at each house in case they want to reach out to the other parent directly. Ex and I did not want the kids to feel their right to reach the other parent needed to ask for permission

Family has Softphone in their mobiles, so the full family is a speed dial away.

I also whitelist numbers they can dial out.

So far it’s working like a charm, they love it.


That’s beautiful and I respect your and your ex’s commitment to be good co-parents.


Most fund managers have an IQ of 50. And they get paid by fees. They will put your pension money into OpenAI without a doubt, as it’s easier to participate, crash and shrug that stay out.

“Nobody got fired for hiring McKinsey” in the PE bros era.


Delisting and going private is always an option if you want to go at your own pace and talk to your investors 1:1.


They would not be allowed to do so - too many shareholders. That’s why e.g. SpaceX will be going public even though Elon Musk would want to keep it private


Musk wants liquidity. And SpaceX wants more cash right now than can be raised privately. Which is a pretty shocking amount of cash.


Musk absolutely does not want SpaceX to stay private


Lame. I was expecting Elmo to crack cold fusion in a ketamine-infused weekend and solve power constraints for the world.

Guess he is not as bright as he thinks he is.


Not morally reprehensible? Do you tell your coworkers “hey, last night I sketched you nude, but it’s cool, it’s in my bedside drawer…”


I would personally not tell them because not everyone likes to know what/that others think about them. But I do not see the moral issue if I don't tell them.

What if I only thought about it? Still morally reprehensible? Or only if I tell others I think about them? Then you could argue it's sexual harassment.


I've had a coworker tell me something very close to that before. I could have been morally outraged but instead I just propositioned them for a date.

Personally I think it's just embarrassing, not immoral.


Seems quite dangerous. In my country, this was the norm for local flights - usually smaller planes, 1-2hr flights. It was common that if you could not attend a meeting, a colleague would go with your ticket. Nobody cared.

Then one plane crashed. And some passengers weren't insured, as they were not officially on the plane. Those families could not get a body back, nor any compensation, as the company said that they could not prove they were on the plane.

I don't read the small print of IATA when getting a ticket, maybe I should someday.


2013 MacBook Air on Linux Mint is fantastic


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: