Timeout
Censorship
Have you seen the internet censorship currently happening in Iran? Practically the entire network is down. Due to the government, citizens cannot access the internet to stay informed or report their situation to the world. It is a deplorable act that perfectly describes their regime. Surely, something like this wouldn't happen in a democratic country. Right?
Today, during a break from studying, I started tinkering with hosting my own local AIs. I connected to my server and installed Ollama with Open WebUI. The next step was to download the models so I could run them. I looked into which one might suit me best and started the download. It didn't seem to make any progress, so I started looking at the logs.
Long story short, I spent 40 minutes tweaking even the most basic connection settings, and nothing seemed to make sense; for some reason, the model wasn't downloading. Then, I ran a traceroute on the packet to see exactly where the connection was failing. It left the container, went through the server, left my house... Then: Telefónica (the Spanish ISP), and it died.
At that moment, it clicked. I went to hayahora.futbol (which literally translates to "is there football right now?") and there it was, a resounding yes.
You might not know this, but whenever there is a football match, thousands of legitimate websites are censored in Spain. That's right, they cut off the internet, and suddenly you can't access Twitter, GitHub, or download an Ollama model.
Piracy
A few years ago, LaLiga (the Spanish football league) opened a case against piracy, requesting the power to take down websites illegally broadcasting football matches. Then they hit a wall with ECH technology 1, which protects user privacy by encrypting the domain of the websites they connect to.
What did they do then? They accused this protocol of supporting piracy and asked for permission to block IPs directly, which are indeed visible in connections.
Why is this a problem?
We ran out of IPv4 addresses a long time ago. If you've heard my comparisons of the internet to the telephone network, it's as if we had run out of phone numbers and had to share one among several people. For a long time, the typical hosting method on the internet has been name-based.
For example, Cloudflare offers a service acting as a gateway to protect you from attacks, add redirections to different servers, etc. A completely legitimate service. For this to work, several websites from different clients share the same IP address, and when you connect, you are routed to one site or another depending on the URL you use.2
This means that, effectively, if LaLiga decides (without any judicial oversight) that a specific IP is pirating, they take down all websites sharing an address with it.
What to do?
If you are against this situation, as I hope you are, you can help change this by following the recommendations that Daniel García leaves on his website.
Regardless, knowing about the situation and talking about it is already a big step. Let's hope this reaches enough people and there's a change soon.
Update: Docker
As if the Ollama issue wasn't enough, it seems LaLiga has also taken down Docker services, breaking the infrastructure that tons of services depended on.3
An absolute disgrace...
The debate is raging on Reddit, but I prefer free and decentralized software. Leave your thoughts down below, you don't even need to register!