Here, in Spain, internet access is cut off for many websites during football matches because La Liga, the association football league, is in war against cloudflare for not blocking their allegedly offending websites. Or something like that.
Today, I tried to look up a word on a dictionary and I got an error message. “There must be a football game going on right now”. I thought
This isn't a football problem, it's a "company has way too much power" problem. It's as if Coca-Cola were allowed to tell my water company to turn off my tap water for a few hours because I should be drinking their soda at lunchtime.
this literally happens in mexico, monterrey in 2022 during biggest drought in the century, public supply was shut down while coca-cola keep producing soft drink from that reservoir, they end-up give some percentage back after a protest.
If the area can’t support the factories water use then shut down the factory permanently. Wanting to hook up to its infrastructure is all about a lack of public infrastructure.
Many aquifers are over used, but that’s a long term problem and has nothing to do with a drought in a single year.
In this case, as bucket content aproaches 0 drops, 1 drop becomes infinitely more, at least in calculus.
Limits in calculus:
"When a real function can be expressed as a fraction whose denominator tends to zero, the output of the function becomes arbitrarily large, and is said to "tend to infinity" For example, the reciprocal function, f ( x ) = 1/x tends to infinity as x tends to 0.
You think it's possible for a bucket to contain a negative amount of water?
I should note that the product of zero and infinity being an indeterminate form is actually a result about the product of an infinitesimal (of small but indefinite magnitude) and an infinite value. If when you say "zero", you actually mean "zero", there is no ambiguity: zero is more infinitesimal than any infinite value is infinite, and the product of zero with anything, including an infinitely large value, is zero.
> You think it's possible for a bucket to contain a negative amount of water?
Irrelevant, the discontinuity occurs at 0 not a negative number.
The limit of f(X) = (X-2)/(X-2) as X approaches 2 is 1, that doesn’t mean the function has a defined value at 2. Limits seem easy because most students really don’t understand limits and thus misuse them.
Quantum physics tells us all particles are waves, so it’s possible that the amount of water will be negative in some point in time, as long as the average value is not negative. ;-)
Are you trying to make a point? The indeterminate forms are statements about limits. Those limits are statements about the possible range of certain operations on infinitesimal and infinite values. It's perfectly valid to multiply those values. And when zero is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product.
You might want to think about why two times infinity is not an indeterminate form.
If you extend your field to include infinity (e.g. the extended reals, or the extended positive reals), only then is it valid to multiply by infinity. One of the rules in such a system is that when infinity is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product. This gives us conflicting results for zero times infinity, therefore 0*∞ is an indeterminate form.
You do not appear to have the slightest idea what you're talking about. For example, the extended reals aren't a field.
But it's easy to extend the real numbers to a field that includes infinite and infinitesimal values. Limiting is then a projection from the hyperreals, which are a field, to the extended reals, which aren't. Instead of "lim", let's call this projection "f".
0·∞ is an indeterminate form because f(f⁻¹(0) · f⁻¹(∞)) is not well defined. f is a many-to-one function, and in this case the different possibilities that come up as we invert it interact differently. In contrast, 2·∞ is not an indeterminate form because, while f⁻¹(2) · f⁻¹(∞) might be any value that is greater than all real numbers, it must always be greater than all real numbers, and therefore f(f⁻¹(2) · f⁻¹(∞)) is always ∞.
> One of the rules in such a system is that when infinity is one of the multiplicands, it's also the product.
In the extended reals, this is a result, not a rule, and it doesn't always hold. Again, the extended reals aren't a field. But even ignoring the question we're actively discussing, you should have been able to think of e.g. -3 · ∞.
That's assuming that when you said "such a system", you meant the extended reals. If you meant a field that extends the reals to include infinite values, it's just meaningless noise - there is no value called "infinity" that would even let you evaluate the claim true or false. But in any multiplication of two values, any infinite value can only simultaneously be the product and one of the multiplicands if the other multiplicand is 1. When we say that 2·∞ = ∞, the ∞ on the left and the one on the right are both infinitely large, but they aren't the same value.
Its one of the reasons why I am a market based socialist.
The essentials of living should be state owned, and provided as inexpensively or freely as part of being here. And when that doesn't completely work, significant controls be put in place to prevent undue capitalization/financial ideation.
The next tier should be a middle ground of intermediate importance, that companies can fulfill, but with modest controls to allow suitable profit and growth.
The final tier is the new and not-required level. This is the new stuff, the crazy tech. Low/no laws, let everyone in this realm go crazy and experiment. The skies the limit.
But water? This is beyond the pale. And revolutions have gone on for this before.
> This isn't a football problem, it's a "company has way too much power" problem.
This isn't limited to just one company. The problem is how copyright has been abused and over-prioritized until it's become a threat to people's freedoms, to art, and to progress.
Copyright needs to be reined in so that no matter what the company is or what product they're pushing innocent people won't be negatively impacted just so that the industry can squeeze more profit from people while refusing to adapt.
Cloudflare isn't the company with too much power in the above scenario: La Liga is. CF isn't turning off access because they want to, it's because La Liga convinced a court that Cloudflare is promoting "piracy" with the various websites they host (some of which, constituting less than a rounding error of the overall sites they host, may host pirated soccer streams), and convinced a court to have Cloudflare blocked.
They were given those powers in court over Cloudflare via the Spanish government, with some help via a pressure campaign by US gov to protect US copyright globally.
That said, Cloudflare absolutely has too much power. Centralizing the internet makes it fragile and maximizes the collateral damage caused by draconian copyright enforcement.
the problem here isn't football. It's rampant censoreship and net blocks in the EU.
(same problem different methods in other EU countries. In germany theiy raid your home for harmless political satire)
Andy Grote comes to mind.
Someone tweeted "Du bist so 1 Pimmel" (something like "you are such a willy") at him. Got his house searched and everything for that.
Issue here being the fact that insulting someone is a criminial offense (hope that's the correct english terminology) in Germany.
those are the better k own examples. But its pretty common. Friend of mine got raided for posting a meme that contained a swastika in negative context.
Or, alternatively, we consider whether doing our communications via the same few huge American corporations is actually a good idea. The internet was literally designed to be resilient to enemy attack and look what we've done to it. Decades later, still on IPv4 and using ridiculous hacks to keep it all just barely working.
This has nothing to do with ipv4/ipv6 and the "ridiculous hacks" we do to keep ipv4 going. Those work just fine. This is a cultural problem, not a technological one.
If we want to use the internet as a communication network then we need peer-to-peer connectivity. We can't get than on IPv4. Resilience is pointless if everyone needs to connect to the same (few) middlemen before they can establish any kind of connection to a peer. It's no better than the old telephone system that needed an exclusive physical link between correspondents.
We almost had this in the early 2000s, but then we regressed. People were excited about meshnets, when was the last time someone mentioned those? Too many people have forgotten and now many have been raised in this current form of the Internet thinking it's the only way. We need to think bigger. We need to push for IPv6 and basic internet connectivity (meaning ability to connect to any peer in the world) as a human right. Otherwise we build our lives around something that can be taken away on a whim over something as silly as grown men kicking a bladder around a field.
The internet attack resilience isn't meant to keep a single node online. It is to keep a communication network active even if parts are destroyed. That part works.
There seems to be a problem starting new companies in the EU. It's hard to imagine the EU developing alternatives that people would want to use in such an environment.
The problem is not in starting a company. It's in the 20 to 100 million investment if needed: those do not exist here.
You'll get up to 10 million investment from whatever bank + state arrangement no problem. But when you want to scale up you're fucked if it requires money. So no "let's get 1 billion users and then think about milking them" way to do business, you have to be profitable a lot earlier. And you better not require too much R&D.
So why have European capital markets remained so inefficient for so long? I've heard a lot of facile explanations about risk averse culture but I'm not convinced that really explains anything. Culture becomes quite malleable when people have an opportunity to gain enormous amounts of wealth and power.
You say resilient to attack, yet it's also the opposite where it is very very easy for someone to attack someone to the point of removing their online presence. People will DDOS a site for the lulz. People will do it to cause problems for some perceived slight. Some will do it to hurt a competitor. It costs them pretty much nothing to have it happen. For those on the receiving end, it could be devastating. Their only affordable option is to use one of the megaCorp providers.
So it's a "this is why we can't have nice things" more than anything else. The assholes always ruin things in the end. So instead of some idealistic dream of a world, we get this shithole dystopian reality.
People getting riled up about soccer as a way to blow off steam and experience their tribalism is vastly superior to what we have in the USA -- a political environment that people treat like battling football clubs complete with lawless hooligans.
When a soccer team wins they don't get to ascend to power and leverage the state against their enemies.
Well typically a case is referred to them by law enforcement or a criminal complaint, then they review the evidence and decide whether or not to go to trial.
It's much rarer for a DA to say they want to find crimes a particular person committed and then direct others to go find evidence for whatever they can find evidence for.
Which DA went after a particular person without referral by law enforcement or a criminal complaint? If this was really such a breach of ethics, surely it would be trivial for the political party in question to first make a criminal complaint? It's not obvious to me that the complaint/referral matters much?
I don't know how much of this tribalism is confined to the stadium. Personal experience makes me feel like there is a big overlap between Ultras and actual nationalists, but I'd like to see a study.
If they’re blocking all of Cloudflare I would think they could also be able to block popular VPN gateways. It’s wild that a sports league has power to dictate to ISPs like this.
No, it's wild that any private entity has the legal censorship authority. My own country is catapulting into authoritarianism, but as far as I'm aware, we haven't gotten to the point yet where private entities are unilaterally disconnecting users from broad swaths of the Internet.
VPNs would not make sense if the actual ISP if blocking you.
Apart from something like starlink and even then they're not playing nice with geographical access most of the time based on politics, whims of a narcissist, or just business.
> VPNs would not make sense if the actual ISP if blocking you.
Unless they are outright blocking your entire connection. That is precisely why one would use a vpn. A vpn most definitely can help get around blocking key words.
you can't solve political issues with technological solutions. Sure you can use VPN, but they always can block more. As the last resort they will have a whitelist of government-approved IPs you can connect to
> you can't solve political issues with technological solutions. Sure you can use VPN, but they always can block more. As the last resort they will have a whitelist of government-approved IPs you can connect to
You are in a thread specifically talking about blocking swaths of the internet because of football games.
Not true at all, Elon Musk has already cut off access for Ukraine because of his own personal views[1]. There's a reason why he's currently hated in most of Europe.
That article is heavily slanted, while providing the facts hidden in the text: Starlink was never enabled in Sevastopol. Musk simply denied an informal request to enable it to be used in a first strike, and deferred that decision to the DoD, which he contacted.
Which is the correct thing to do when random people ask private companies to go to war.
Did anyone actually ever attempt the faxing a piece of black construction paper on an old sheet fed fax machine where you tape the top to the bottom prank? Was that even possible, or just urban legend?
I've never heard of anyone making a paper roll with tape but I've definitely seen pranksters fax sheet after sheet of full black to waste paper and ink.
Why would it? That's a network in space. Could the Spanish league force a US company to block specific satellites covering some part of Spain and some part of not Spain? Seems a stretch.
Why do you think it's a stretch? If Starlink wants to legally operate in a country as an ISP then it has to comply with the laws of that country. Just because it's using satellites instead of locally deployed physical infrastructure doesn't absolve it from ISP and general telecomunications regulations of a country.
So if the Spanish government were to make a law saying all ISPs must block the following domains for whatever reason, then Starlink must also comply in that jurisdiction or face fines or get booted out, and I don't know many businesses that take pleasure in being in contempt of the courts.
Out of curiosity, is there anything technical the Spanish authorities could do to block Starlink (i.e jamming)? Or are legal/bureaucratic measures the only solution?
Starlink terminals are jammable, but the jamming source will need to be in it's FOV and it uses quite a focused beam. Not particularly viable for an entire nation.
The ground stations would be a lot more vulnerable, but cutting the cable would be a lot easier than flying a Ku/Ka band jammer overhead.
Booted out of the market. Payments, banking, interconnection, contractual agreements.
Businesses exist solely at the pleasure of the state. The state runs the courts; they can invalidate your ability to enforce contracts.
Until and unless they smuggle the dishes into the country like bricks of cocaine and allow subscription payments in bitcoin, local governments can and will regulate Starlink service and users.
Booted out of the country mate. Why are you acting daft? Do you think Starlink could operate in Spain without a regional/EU branch that serves Spanish customers, collects payments, pays Spanish/EU taxes and can be summoned to court if it doesn't follow Spanish laws?
That's why Starlink has geofencing in place so they can ensure it operates only in regions they're legally autorized to, it's not some pirate HAM network that can just freely operate while evading local laws willy nilly.
How many ibuprofen pirates are there in Europe? None, because it's easy enough to get it without a cartel operation.
Making wanted goods and services illegal just hands profits to the black market, it doesn't stop them. If Spain bans the internet there will be pirate ISPs tomorrow.
Yeah? Where are the pirate ISPs of North Korea then?
Mate, you're fighting with ghosts here. There are legit ISPs in EU, you don't need pirate ones. And there are legit VPNs to bypass whatever soft government restrictions are in place. There's no point arguing about endless made up hypotheticals.
Do we suspect there's significant demand for internet in North Korea? Market potential, sure. But I'm guessing if you asked North Korea what information distribution they wanted, they would say they just want a more honest newspaper.
>Do we suspect there's significant demand for internet in North Korea?
Why not? They literally throw USB sticks and optical media over the border. After my country broke away from communism, content consumption of foreign media was the highest priority.
> How many ibuprofen pirates are there in Europe? None, because it's easy enough to get it without a cartel operation.
In a lot of Europe, you can only buy a handful at a time (like 16), at a relatively hefty per-tablet price and only from a pharmacy (good luck on sunday in a lot of places).
I imagine that the blocking is semi-voluntary by the local ISPs, not at a transit or peering level.
Anyhow, I flicked through the tables for Starlink's Spain IP address blocks and they directly peer with Cloudflare, so short of Starlink agreeing to perform similar blocking itself or worse yet de peering with Cloudflare, I'd expect availability through them.
Satellite internet isn't a philanthropy project. Whoever's selling it is operating a retail front in the client's country, running payment processing and delivering or shipping physical satellite dishes. Even if the satellite vendor is aligned with your interests (I'm not touching that third-rail topic)—if your government doesn't want you to have satellite internet, you won't have it.
Satellites aren't, in practice and for the time being, a technological end-run around sovereignty and the practical ability of governments to censor internet access.
It's been discussed on HN before, that even first-world democracies, such as the UK [0,1], feel comfortable enacting laws banning satellite internet.
Interestingly, I don't think you have to purchase the starlink in the same country you plan to use it (else what would be the point of the Mini version).
Tracking satellites is computationally intensive, Starlink has many satellites, and friends generally don't jam friends' communication satellites.
The old jokes about aggressive NFL Copyright enforcement would really pale in comparison to Spain developing a mature anti-satellite capability in order to disrupt soccer broadcast piracy at the physical layer.
> Tracking satellites is computationally intensive
Is it? I've seen a guy doing it by hand with a YAGI antenna and a little handled radio. But I could see it for many and the phased part. Also people have web models like this one showing the orbits.
Its much easier to ban imports and periodically do sweeps to locate terminals on the ground and confiscate/arrest the criminals operating them illegally. A Cessna or helicopter with GPS and directional antennae tuned to the right frequency bands is well within the reach of even banana republics.
Thought you must be exaggerating but after reading further I’m shocked. I know the courts can be a tech illiterate but why are the Spanish courts this bad? Surely they see the consequences of the decision and immediately realise it’s stupid? The UK can be pretty bad with this stuff and the Premier League is huge but I have no concern of something this idiotic happening here.
Huh? I live in Spain and I've never had any issues with internet or any websites being cut off. I'm not sure when these matches are on though because I'm not interested in sports.
Spain does have a problem with the legal system though. Last year they almost cut off telegram and the government had to intervene.
Today, I tried to look up a word on a dictionary and I got an error message. “There must be a football game going on right now”. I thought