Month: November 2025

Die Europäische Zentralbank schlägt Alarm: Kursverluste großer Tech-Konzerne könnten zu massiven Verwerfungen an den Finanzmärkten führen. (Börse, Google)

Erstmals lassen sich viele Funktionen der Airpods Pro mit Android-Smartphones verwenden. Wegen Google ist das Ganze eingeschränkt. (Airpods, Apple)

Zur Ausnutzung der Chrome-Lücke reicht der bloße Aufruf einer bösartigen Webseite. Angreifer können daraufhin Schadcode zur Ausführung bringen. (Sicherheitslücke, Google)

Der Kursverfall des Bitcoin setzt sich fort. Private Anleger und institutionelle Investoren ziehen sich aus risikoreichen Investments zurück. (Bitcoin, Börse)

For much of 2025, top-tier Spanish football league LaLiga has waged war against online piracy in controversial yet completely unapologetic fashion. A more single-minded approach may not have been deployed by any other entity, ever.

Launched around February, LaLiga’s persistent blocking of Cloudflare (and by extension, countless innocent customers) is a story still being told from distinct perspectives.

In LaLiga’s view, a court order granted it the necessary authority to block pirate sites. In the event that collateral damage even exists, that should be attributed to Cloudflare for a) harboring pirate sites and b) using innocent customers as ‘human shields’ by forcing them to use the same IP addresses as pirate sites. Cloudflare regrets that LaLiga saw fit to obtain a business-disrupting blocking order, without giving it an opportunity to appear in court, causing a rift that still hasn’t been bridged 10 months later.

Silent Cooperation No Longer Enough

The voices of the innocent sites and services, blocked by Spanish ISPs at LaLiga’s behest, have complained but haven’t really been heard. When approached by customers for comment, the ISPs carrying out the blocking haven’t been heard either, mostly because they have said very little indeed. Compliance with a court order has been mentioned in their roles as ISPs; as internet broadcasters with rights to air LaLiga broadcasts that presumably benefit from their own blocking? No comment.

The role of Spanish ISPs in whatever comes next won’t be a secret. As LaLiga opens up the bidding process for the seasons 2027/2028 until 2031/32, the league’s expectations are detailed in black and white.

First impressions raise questions of autonomy; specifically, how much independence will ISPs be required to sacrifice under an anti-piracy regime controlled by LaLiga, one in which it dictates policy, compels support for legal action, and mandates cooperation in investigations against their own customers.

Obligations to Collaborate

There’s little doubt that LaLiga views piracy seriously, but should any remain, none have any hope of surviving the obligations laid out in its anti-fraud policy.

The first paragraph states that successful bidders must ensure exclusive access to LaLiga content within the designated territory and implement at minimum several specified security measures. They include Digital Rights Management (DRM), anti-VPN systems, geo-blocking systems at the device and CDN levels, and security marking at both the source and CDN.

Visible watermarking is required to identify users, and measures must be in place to verify their locations. LaLiga also expects documentation to show the location and sources of any unauthorized retransmissions.

General Obligations

LaLiga says that its partners must “collaborate efficiently” and proactively, including against “the provision of public information aimed at promoting or facilitating unauthorized access to said contents,” whether on Facebook and YouTube, or on Whatsapp, Telegram, and Discord. User Generated Content (UGC) platforms, web-based illegal streaming sites, card-sharing services, IPTV suppliers, and BitTorrent-like systems such as Acestream, are all seen as legitimate targets.

Also under the spotlight, authorized entities “who exploit the content abusively and fraudulently.” When LaLiga initiates legal proceedings against these entities, its broadcasting partners are required to participate as an injured party.

LaLiga also places restrictions on the type of viewing devices broadcasters make available to their customers. LaLiga says that there are only three “safe environments” for installing software – Google Play Store, Huawei AppGallery and iOS Store. Functionality to load software from any other source must be prevented.

Create Synergies, Share Details of Users Detected as Pirates

When rights organization Promusicae sued Telefonica in 2005, demanding the identities of customers accused of pirating music, Telefonica fought all the way to Europe’s highest court to avoid handing over its customers’ personal details.

In 2008, the Court of Justice of the European Union handed Telefonica a landmark win.

But that was then, and this is now.

[T]he successful bidders who, by virtue of their status as telecommunications operators, are internet service providers, undertake to actively cooperate in judicial actions such as preliminary proceedings, aimed, at the request of LaLiga, at identifying those customers who access audiovisual content illicitly through the internet service, through illegal systems such as, for example, P2P (AceStream) or Cardsharing, avoiding formalizing an appeal against the judicial resolutions agreed upon in this area.

ISPs Must Promote Dynamic IP Address Blocking to the Courts

At a time when internet groups and researchers are issuing warnings over the dangers of IP address-based blocking, becoming a successful bidder for LaLiga broadcasting rights requires ISPs not to just ignore the advice, but to invest time and resources to ensure the courts endorse its use.

LaLiga says that the effectiveness of the measures must be promoted as effective against third-party intermediaries it perceives as undermining its blocking efforts.

They include VPN and DNS providers, anonymization services and, in a move unlikely to be well received at the White House, reverse proxy services. Despite receiving no direct mention here, a well-known American company would likely become a primary target.

Extracted from the original (Spanish)

The Successful Bidders also undertake to promote a joint policy against audiovisual fraud and to cooperate in speeding up the adoption of dynamic blocking of those websites and web resources identified as broadcasting, distributing, or sharing LALIGA content without consent, in particular, the modality of “live dynamic blocking” via IP, as well as through any of its technical modalities, collaborating to promote its adoption by the courts of justice and cooperating to achieve maximum effectiveness in the shortest possible time, providing, if necessary, the necessary personnel and means to ensure that such blocks, communicated by whoever is judicially designated for this purpose, take effect any day and time of the week immediately upon communication.

The successful bidders undertake to promote, together with LaLiga, the appropriate judicial and extrajudicial actions to promote the effectiveness of the blocks, in particular against third-party intermediaries whose services are used for the direct or indirect circumvention of the aforementioned blocks, such as, for example, providers of VPNs, reverse proxies, anonymization services, DNS, and/or hosting services.

Immediate Blocking Without Need For Judicial Intervention

An issue as potentially serious as this deserves another direct quote. For obvious reasons the statement here is translated from the original Spanish, but the original document is linked below and available for review.

The Successful Bidders, regardless of whether they are established in the territory or not, voluntarily, expressly and directly undertake, without the need for judicial intervention, to agree to the immediate blocking of those domains, subdomains, IP addresses and web pages and resources that, for violating intellectual property rights and other related rights, are notified to them by LALIGA or by the entity designated by it through any means of notification that allows proof of receipt, who will provide as proof of this evidentiary support extracted and compiled through any of the trusted providers approved by the Spanish or European authorities, together with a technical report issued by their audiovisual anti-fraud department, thereby taking effective knowledge of the illicit nature of the actions of the domains, subdomains and IPs.

Both the supporting evidence and the technical report will be recognized by all Successful Bidders as sufficient proof to directly and free of charge agree to the requested block, which will be facilitated immediately upon receipt of the request by LaLiga.

Surprisingly, the above isn’t even a full accounting of all requirements, far from it, so we’ll return to the topic later.

At this point it’s worth mentioning the tone of the document, which is absolutely uncompromising in both its determination and the instructions required to achieve its goals. On several occasions the Successful Bidders are warned that if they fail to meet LaLiga’s requirements, and then fail to improve or correct the issue at hand, they will have their contracts terminated.

Failure to comply with these obligations, or their partial or defective compliance, after a reasonable period has been provided for their correction, will be a mandatory cause for automatic termination of the contract, with written notification from LaLiga accompanied by a technical report from its Audiovisual Anti-Fraud Department demonstrating the verification of the non-compliance being sufficient proof for this.

There are further examples in the ‘Competitive Tender Process’ document here (pdf)

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Die EU-Kommission will den Datenschutz zugunsten der KI-Nutzung schleifen. Verkauft wird das als "Vereinfachung". Eine Analyse von Friedhelm Greis (DSGVO, KI)

Verbraucherschützer schlagen Alarm: Tests zeigen, wie KI-Spielzeuge Kindern detaillierte Anleitungen zu Messern, Streichhölzern und Medikamenten geben. (Spielzeug, KI)

Die Einführung von Wero im Onlinehandel verläuft holprig. Viele Bankkunden werden noch für Monate ausgeschlossen. (Wero, Paypal)

Oracle setzt auf Wachstum im Cloud-Geschäft, finanziert durch aggressive Kreditaufnahme. Analysten warnen vor Klumpenrisiken und negativem Cashflow. (Oracle, Börse)