> error pulling image configuration: download failed after attempts=6: tls: failed to verify certificate: x509: certificate is not valid for any names, but wanted to match docker-images-prod.6aa30f8b08e16409b46e0173d6de2f56.r2.cloudflarestorage.com
First blaming tailscale, dns configuration and all other stuff. Until I just copied that above URL into my browser on my laptop, and received a website banner:
> El acceso a la presente dirección IP ha sido bloqueado en cumplimiento de lo dispuesto en la Sentencia de 18 de diciembre de 2024, dictada por el Juzgado de lo Mercantil nº 6 de Barcelona en el marco del procedimiento ordinario (Materia mercantil art. 249.1.4)-1005/2024-H instado por la Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional y por Telefónica Audiovisual Digital, S.L.U. https://www.laliga.com/noticias/nota-informativa-en-relacion-con-el-bloqueo-de-ips-durante-las-ultimas-jornadas-de-laliga-ea-sports-vinculadas-a-las-practicas-ilegales-de-cloudflare
For those non-spanish speakers: It means there is football match on, and during that time that specific host is blocked. This is just plain madness. I guess that means my gitlab pipelines will not run when football is on. Thank you, Spain.
Every response and comment from LaLiga, the football organization responsible for this, has been so far that this is a minor issue that only affects a few bunch of nerds who talk about "docker images" or "github repositories" or "whatever that means".
Meanwhile, there are testimonies of smart home devices like anti-theft alarms or automatic doors, that stop working whenever there is a football match, because their backends rely on Cloudflare.
Last week, a woman asked for help on social media, as the GPS tracking app she uses to see where her father with dementia is, went offline during a match. It was getting late and he still wasn't back home, and she couldn't locate the tag he was wearing to find him: https://www.infobae.com/america/agencias/2026/04/05/laliga-d...
It's hard to say this, because no one should experience an event like this, but as stressful as these are, it's the only way to make the mainstream people care about this censorship. "I cannot pull a docker image" will never be on nightly news, but safety and personal security is a more powerful driver for discourses.
This is generally how the GFW works in China. Instead of an overbearing nanny like a school or corporation's DNS blocker, you're left with a sense that you're on a version of the Internet that is just intermittently and somewhat mysteriously broken.
And indeed, in China, a lot of things that probably aren't fully intended to be blocked are not reliably accessible. Implementation varies, so you get strange routing and peering issues. It feels like an Internet that isn't fully formed, that hasn't finished coming together yet.
Nation states and corporations obviously gain some things sometimes by having Internet censorship/blocking frameworks in place. Maybe, sometimes, ordinary people even benefit, too, if it helps shut down illegal and genuinely harmful businesses.
But it feels like the whole world is gradually trending towards more and more Internet censorship without realizing that we are un-building a miraculous thing that took enormous effort and cleverness and expense to build. I wish we could think about this not only in terms of freedom (and we absolutely should think about it in terms of freedom), but how we are disintegrating the infrastructure of communication and computing.
And when purchasing a product, there's no "bill of materials" telling you about the services it relies on, beyond "internet connection" at best.
When the La Liga match starts, everything that's proxied via CF (including zero access reverse tunnels) stops working.
There's even a website made for checking if the match is on: https://hayahora.futbol/
You can check if your host is affected: https://hayahora.futbol/#comprobador&domain=docker-images-pr...
Pirates would rather not be blocked, so they create a new, disposable website for every game. Any blocking must happen fast.
Cloudflare would rather not block websites without a court order specifying the sites to be blocked.
The courts would rather not create a special fast lane through the courts, just to resolve a squabble between two huge corporations.
Looks like same old regulatory capture.
https://xcancel.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492
Everyone looks bad in this conflict.
Or can this be avoided by using an alternate DNS?
But anyone who is pulling docker images in a sunday afternoon while the rest of the country is glued to their screen to watch a football game or enjoying a sunny sunday outside having beers and tapas and what not should be capable of setting up wireguard.
And even if you managed to get them all beforehand, some VPN providers will adapt and keep some servers in reserve, putting them online just as you managed to block the previous ones. Getting around internet censorship is a large chunk of their business, and some are really good at it.
Big companies don't hide their VPN ASNs. Obscure, for sure, but getting a good list isn't hard. Usually they get blocked.
Smaller companies may pass under the radar, and have higher tolerance for risky strategies.
The fringe providers are the problem. They aggressively change IP ranges, front-vs-obscure ownership, and play dirty. Shady folks will resell residential ranges. End-users often get tainted goods.
... and you still have the collateral damage game when VPNs host infra with big cloud providers vs colofarms vs self-host, etc.
Yes, they block IPs belonging to CDNs (CF including R2, BunnyCDN, CDN77, Fastly, Alibaba, Akamai even)...
But come on, this can't be true. I wonder how many other people in IT wasted hours on issues and tickets to find out it is due to a football match taking place. Admittedly, chances are low, as football matches are usually outside of office hours.
What Spain does is basically censorship and it's very poorly executed. The docker image registry is only one out of the many collateral victims of this stupid law.
This is not an issue under the civil code (civilian issues), but something to be dealt under penal (criminal) code.
In Spanish
https://www.fiscal.es/memorias/memoria2020/FISCALIA_SITE/rec...
Oh, and BTW, LaLiga has just partnered with a CF rival.
Now CF can just sue both like hell because of unfair competition:
https://nitter.tiekoetter.com/xataka/status/2042658662850724...
https://x.com/jaumepons/status/1904906677335245294
So, if you want them to build stuff, ask yourself, are there any "Docker Registry" startups out there. If jsdelivr/globalping is not keeping you busy enough... there is an idea
Globalping and jsDelivr took years to gain a meaningful user base
I think your name alone carries significant weight in the industry and you have built a very large community.
If you even vibe code something with, you will get a stupid amount of money thrown at you and a contract that bounds your existing projects and the next 3-5 years to a particular company as project lead.
Here is a list of acquisitions Cloudflare made recently: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/acquisitions/
Most of these companies did not have a half dozen paying customer or even a fully fleshed-out product before they were acquired.
https://x.com/ahachete/status/2035783292549755228
But it's among the fastest growing in the EU? Granted, part of this is starting from a low base, but it's hardly "in shambles"
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG?locat...
It’s precisely because CloudFlare isn’t responding fast enough to pirate origin sites that this mess exists. If they reacted quickly to remove configurations that are obviously facilitating copyright infringement, Spain wouldn’t resort to full scale ASN blocking.
How do we know it’s CloudFlare? Because other CDNs like CloudFront, Akamai, Fastly, etc. respond to takedown demands and aren’t being blocked.
They should have used a cookie or something else that does not require asking me every few minutes to prove once more that I am not a bot.
There was a time when Cloudflare had become less intrusive, but for the last months it has begun again to intervene almost each time when opening some pages.
There is no doubt that anti-bot protection can be implemented in a better way than Cloudflare does, but presumably the alternatives would consume more resources on their servers, so probably they choose whatever minimizes their costs, regardless if that ensures maximum discomfort for Internet users.