8 ms·

We glued together content moderation to stop soccer pirates

• m348e912 3y ago
  The one data element missing seems to be concurrent streams per account? Just seems to me that one account with 200 active streams might be fraudulent.
  • nightpool 3y ago
    Or it could just be TikTok. It's hard to say without context.
• NullPrefix 3y ago
  > Some of the obvious risk factors include: > Is the email address a company domain or a consumer email like Gmail? Do you actually expect people to use their work email for personal purposes?
  • Entinel 3y ago
    I used to work in IT and one of my responsibilities was managing the company email and TONS of people used their work email for personal stuff. At least 1/3 of the company.
    • ilyt 3y ago
      Righjt but they are talking about site's customer base. Most people have e-mail hosted on some big provider
    • smegger001 3y ago
      what do these people expect to happen if they change jobs and loose access to their accounts?
      • wmf 3y ago
        Magic. No, seriously.
      • NullPrefix 3y ago
        You don't lose your account in some service just because you lost the email it was created with. Sure, previous employer could takeover your account by resetting password, but do you really expect them to do that?
    • Scoundreller 3y ago
      Drives me even more bonkers when it's a gov or quasi-gov organization where anyone with a few dollars could get a copy of everything. Then there's the stuff that can come out of private sector in a lawsuit.
    • jamesfinlayson 3y ago
      I see this all too often in customer data at work too.
  • duskwuff 3y ago
    Mux is a video broadcast infrastructure provider, not a sports streaming web site. The vast majority of their users are expected to be businesses.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • faeriechangling 3y ago
    I absolutely expect people to use their work email for personal purposes.
    • TulliusCicero 3y ago
      The problem is that the word "expect" in English is overloaded: sometimes it basically just means to predict, other times it implies what you think someone should be doing.
• emacdona 3y ago
  Sigh... f*ck sports leagues/governing bodies. The reason some honest people pirate streams for sporting events is because they make it so annoying to pay for them. Some examples... I live in the US. I briefly took an interest in the EPL. If I wanted to watch all EPL games (or have the option of watching any particular EPL game), I'd have to subscribe to Peacock _and_ Fubo -- and I'm still not sure that gets me all games. I briefly took an interest in the NHL (this was years ago, granted -- things may have changed). If I would have subscribed to their service, the ONLY team whose home games I couldn't watch would have been the TEAM OF THE CITY I LIVE IN (i.e.: "my" team). My two favorite sports, though, are Cycling and F1. I LOVE cycling. To watch every UCI race, I'd have to subscribe to GCN+ (they have the Giro), Peacock (they have the Tour de France and La Vuelta), and Flobikes (they have most of the Classics races). THE ONLY sports governing body that has figured this out (for sports I like, anyway), is F1. I pay F1.com $80 a year and get MORE content than I would if I watched the races on ESPN. I can see EVERY RACE, EVERY QUALIFYING, EVERY PRACTICE. I can even choose WHOSE car I want to see the first person view from. If you want to "stop pirates", make it easy for them to give you money and watch their favorite sport.
  • vkou 3y ago
    > If I would have subscribed to their service, the ONLY team whose home games I couldn't watch would have been the TEAM OF THE CITY I LIVE IN (i.e.: "my" team). They don't want to cannibalize in-person attendance where fans pay for $300 tickets and $20 pints of beer.
  • _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    Here's a take on this with pictures https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones https://www.theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
  • programmarchy 3y ago
    Yep, NHL blackouts are idiotic. Hard to imagine they are selling more arena tickets that way.
    • oplav 3y ago
• matt3210 3y ago
  You didn’t save anything unless you can show reasonable evidence that they paid properly as a result of your efforts. It’s likely that at least some people never would have paid for the content even if they can’t pirate it.
  • andrenotgiant 3y ago
    Yeah being pedantic here, but reading the details of the $750k reference, it's (hopefully) nowhere near $750k that they saved: > That, combined with the fact that these streams usually have large viewership, means we incur a not insignificant cost and have no one to bill. In 2021 alone, Mux had over $750,000 in unpaid invoices due to pirated streams. For an infrastructure company like Mux, this pirating comes with hard costs. Transcoding, storing, and delivering video is not cheap. If these pirated streams were not held in check, they could quickly spiral out of control and have a significant negative impact on our business. By identifying and shutting down these streams, we are able to reduce our costs. So to actually saved $750k, they'd have to have some combination of: 1. 100% COGS or 0% operating margin. Youch. Probably not, likely closer to 30% COGS, making actual infra/bandwidth cost to them of $750k services closer to $225k 2. Massive growth in attempted abuse. E.g. Their level of attempted abuse grew 3.3x to $2.5M, they stopped all of it, that would have cost them $2.5M x 30% COGS = $750k But at the end of the day I think they just wrote a clever headline to get upvotes on HN :)
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • deleted 3y ago
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  • lostcolony 3y ago
    Didn't read the article didja? Or even click and read the full title? The $750k figure is the amount of Mux's services they provided in 2021, that were (claimed to be) pirate streams, and were not paid. By taking steps to catch and remove pirates, they are reducing the number of unpaid invoices they have. Their actual costs are less, yes (in that how much they invoice != their actual costs), but it's reasonable to say saved themselves $750k of their services. It had nothing to do with converting pirates to paying customers. It had to do with preventing pirates from incurring infrastructure costs for them/making use of their services without paying.
• duskwuff 3y ago
  So, a lot of users in this thread seem to be misunderstanding what Mux is, and how the "soccer pirates" interact with their service. Let me clarify: Mux is a streaming infrastructure provider. They provide services for companies who want to stream video to their users -- news web sites, video chat services, etc. Kind of like web hosting, but specifically for video. They are not a video content provider; they do not sell subscriptions to end users. Mux's problem is that pirates will sign up for their service to restream pirated video content, like live sports streams: Official stream --> pirate --> Mux --> viewers When this happens, Mux usually gets stiffed on the bill, and if the stream stays up, Mux gets legal nastygrams from the content owners. So it's in Mux's interest that they detect these pirates quickly and terminate service before they run up too much of a bill. The blog post explains how they do that.
  • post_break 3y ago
    Yeah I was one of the confused at first. Throwing my hands up saying who cares pirates going to pirate. But this is different. They are abusing this service to stream illegal content, vs tapping directly from the akamai stream which I've seen in the past.
  • komali2 3y ago
    In that case, isn't this a similar situation platforms like Twitter or Youtube find themselves in, where they don't want to take full responsibility for moderation or suddenly they're liable for all the harmful content on their platforms, but on the other hand they're forced to moderate just enough to avoid governments forcing them to be on the hook? It seems like such a weird place to be in.
    • jaimex2 3y ago
      Agreed. Why you would accept stopping the buck and not work with your legal team to proxy litigation the same way all big tech does is beyond me.
      • duskwuff 3y ago
        1) You can't effectively proxy litigation to J. Random Pirate with fake contact information and a stolen credit card. 2) Even if you did, you're still out the cost of the services they used, which can be considerable (especially if you let their service keep running until the DMCA notices show up).
• Mandatum 3y ago
  Wow. n8n in production. Bold.
  • yowlingcat 3y ago
    This was also my reaction. I have not seen it in production before. With that said, I'm not saying that as a value judgment -- and I guess I'd be curious if you'd be skeptical of making that choice.
    • vxNsr 3y ago
      I’m curious to know why. This is first I’m hearing of it but it doesn’t look too bad, is it just that it’s less mature than other workflow automations?
  • quelltext 3y ago
    Can you expand a bit. I was not familiar with n8n and looked at their website and it seems they have many users. Why is it bold? Why shouldn't it be able to handle the task here?
    • Mandatum 3y ago
      Having used it pretty heavily in a containerized desktop environment, I wouldn't use it in production for anything business critical. It's a mix of "there's too much unknown" under the hood, and "there's weird things that I can't reproduce". It hadn't really reached critical mass as of yet, so support from the community is lackluster. I'd sooner pay a bucket for something like Tines to offload critical mechanisms, and then do the dirt-cheap stuff on n8n.
• 63 3y ago
  > The contractor can escalate or silence the alert using the buttons on the Slack message. If it is a false positive, they will press “Silence,” which activates another n8n workflow that adds the asset to an allowlist, so it won’t alert again. So if I were a prospective soccer pirate hoping to take advantage of Mux publishing the specific details of their content moderation system, could I just stream myself harmlessly showing off my soccer jersey collection for an hour to get future alerts ignored and then swap the feed over to soccer when the game starts? Granted I'm sure they'll take notice once they get a DMCA letter, but I imagine it might take awhile for everyone involved to catch on.
  • VPenkov 3y ago
    Presumably, but they could always add more heuristics like tracking viewership spikes. Sounds like they'd have a way to append more checks and were aiming for "good enough for now".
  • dilyevsky 3y ago
    You’d be surprised how quickly a decently popular stream get dmca’ed these days (and in some jurisdictions your entire domain is autoblocked by isps). Content owners use automated tooling to scour the web for their IP
    • ronsor 3y ago
      Can't they put their stream behind some kind of anti-bot CAPTCHA?
      • bobdvb 3y ago
        There are lots of methods that pirates use, their websites are an absolute nightmare to navigate sometimes and you can't be sure that the link you're clicking on is an ad, an extra referral hop, an embed, or the actual video. There is a whole secondary market of paywalled pirate services which makes it harder to discover. But then the anti-piracy companies just join the telegram groups, subscribe to those services, and then get the links in order to issue the takedown notices. There's a lot of human intelligence as well as automation. Heck, a handful of agents in India can do a heck of a lot of manual link hunting in an afternoon. It's also worth noting that a lot of illegal streams are syndicated, so you take down one source and it'll break 50 websites.
• dreampeppers99 3y ago
  thanks for sharing
• jojobas 3y ago
  If it's ever broadcast on normal, free-to-watch TV, anywhere in the world, it's fair game in my book to record/restream it. Change my mind.
  • wmf 3y ago
    I'm not trying to change your mind, but "free" TV is paid for by commercials and those commercials are local. If, for example, the whole world watches a pirated Brazilian stream with Brazilian commercials then the Brazilian advertisers have to pay for the whole event. The current system where the event is licensed to local broadcasters in each country shares the cost more evenly and fairly.
  • airtag 3y ago
    There's a big difference between a private copy for your own enjoyment and redistributing that on a larger scale. The first one is consuming something you were not meant to consume, with little or no cost to the rights owners. The second on is giving away something that someone else had substantial costs to produce. In my mind it's fair game to record and watch anything, if it's an unencrypted, freely available broadcast somewhere (local laws here back me up) - That includes the use of VPNs to access it. Sports broadcasters know this and make the use of VPNs quite hard, still if you get it to work, good for you. That includes other sneaky trickery like VPNing into Switzerland, where rebroadcasting other countries' FTA TV is legal, if you can receive them there (e.g. all of the UK's FTA TV) or setting up a remote controlled TV receiver in the country for you own use. Making these streams available publicly is a different game. Depending on where you live, passing on streams privately again may be OK - for example the country I live in allows passing on recordings to a handfull of friends. If at any time during the chain from the broadcast to you there's a need to break an encryption to make this possible: No fair game, pirate!
    • slackfan 3y ago
      Is there? the advertising money already went back to the content producer, everybody got paid.
      • 3y ago
• FridayoLeary 3y ago
  These pirates are the enemy of civilisation. Thank goodness the average citizens are standing up for the profit margins of the broadcasters and by extension, the overpaid players.
• breck 3y ago
  [flagged]
• mig39 3y ago
  The best way to encourage pirates is expecting a Canadian viewer to pay $100 or more a month to watch soccer. I don't condone it, but hypothetically, the $7 a month I pay to stream illegally is a fuck you to the leagues and their rights owners.
  • garbagewoman 3y ago
    You pay to stream illegally, yet still somehow feel self righteous? I could understand the sentiment if you were putting in the work yourself
    • bobdvb 3y ago
      It's also an FU to people like me who work on the legal side of streaming. My work is devalued and my efforts are stolen by pirates for their own profit. They get the privilege of profiting from the streams we make which requires massive infrastructure, yet we get vilified. It's one thing to hate the way things are structured, it's another to think that it doesn't affect real people.
      • porkbeer 3y ago
        The companies themselves devalue it by not making it a valuable service. The pirates offer a better service, in your abscence of it.
        • bobdvb 3y ago
          They don't offer a better service, they offer a cheaper service (because they run a worse offering without any content production costs) and they don't offer geographic restrictions (which are not the fault of the streaming service provider, we'd happily take global rights and occasionally we do). I don't speak for my employer, but I think it would be great if we were able to get global rights and companies compete with each other for the best value product on the market. Until then, we'll still aim to be the best product on the market and by giving the lowest price we can, we'll capture more market share (no one I work with is greedy, even our finance folk).
• crazygringo 3y ago
  This article could use big improvements in both its tone and organization. People don't have a lot of love for greedy sports broadcasters, and tech people are often associated with a kind of "information wants to be free" ethos (for better or worse), so starting out your blog post with: > identify and take action against soccer pirates and other delinquents who try to stream copyrighted content comes across as pretty tone-deaf for the intended audience. Delinquents? What's next, are they going to tell me not to copy that floppy, or ask if I'd download a car? What's crazier is that they actually have good justification but don't put it until the end of the article -- that pirates are using the service to broadcast streams that become super-popular (racking up charges) and then don't pay their bills for bandwidth and processing, losing near a million dollars in a year. Talk about burying the lead. This article is a great example of what not to do. But it's a great learning opportunity for the rest of us. Always start your article with why the article subject matters. Don't wait until the end, don't just assume the reader is on your side. ...And also maybe don't call people delinquents when a decent proportion of your readership probably watches some of these same pirated streams...
  • mmcclure 3y ago
    Not the author, but I am a Muxer with edit access. I agree that the "delinquent" bit isn't hitting the intended tone there so I went ahead and made a quick edit to at least address that piece. I think the author intended as a reference to the payment kind of delinquency, but I can see why it wouldn't read that way. Thanks for the feedback!
  • Mashimo 3y ago
    Someone who pirates content, does not pay his bills and probably earns money through adverts I don't mind calling a delinquent.
    • crazygringo 3y ago
      The sentence easily read as calling consumers of streams "delinquents", and that's how I had read it. Because the verb "to stream" can be used to refer to both the server and client, same as "pirate" refers to both distributor and consumer. I had definitely read it as them calling the viewers of soccer streams being delinquents and pirates, since no further context was given. This was my point -- the actual context isn't explained until the very end. And even then, it doesn't unambiguously clarify who is being attacked at the top.
• anarchogeek 3y ago
  People pirate streams of soccer matches because it's nearly impossible to pay for legally. The matches for a single team or league are spread out amongst a ton of different streaming providers. Sometimes there is no paid option at all because of region blocking and complicated deals. I happily pay Apple for MLS matches because there was no reliable way to get them here in New Zealand. It is still stupid because Apple has no idea what they're doing, the announcers are terrible, the audio levels all over the place, random silence, it gets loud, then random cutting between shots... At least it streams well. But for other leagues? It is cheaper to go buy a ticket to watch the Wellington Phoenix at the stadium than it is to pay for streaming! Even then I can only find some matches. What about other leagues? I follow Uruguayan soccer... good luck finding a place I could even pay for that which licenses the content in New Zealand. My only hope is that this post about how to block pirate streaming will help the pirates evade being blocked.
  • Symbiote 3y ago
    Plenty of people also pirate to avoid paying, or to pay less. I knew someone in England who ran a pirate football streaming service. He had TV and streaming subscriptions to a rented apartment in Cyprus, and streamed from there to people who paid him in England. Customers were introduced by word-of-mouth, so supposedly it was difficult for the copyright holders to discover. The same matches were shown in England, but at a higher price.
    • garbagewoman 3y ago
      It’s amazing how many Brits I know are averse to paying for anything, despite their incomes
    • bobdvb 3y ago
      I work in the tech side of a sports streaming company. A quoted statistic from a study that was made a few years ago suggests that around 30% of people consuming pirate content are "pay never". We've done some exercises that show that a proportion of people can be encouraged not to watch pirate streams, but a good proportion won't no matter the cost. Interestingly, we did an event where we made a significant match available for free, you still had to register for a 30 day trial, but you could easily cancel and pay nothing. The piracy on that match was no different than any other match and the estimated pirate viewership (we have various ways of estimating impact) was NO LOWER. I have every sympathy with people who don't have access to content, and even for a portion of those who can't afford it. I certainly want everyone to get affordable content everywhere, I strive with my colleagues to make it better and deliver it in a cost effective way. But ultimately, we cannot ignore that too many people could afford to pay and don't want to. It's all well and good to point the finger at faceless corporations or the perception of the leagues, but ultimately its engineers like me who have to struggle with piracy, it's our work that's affected.
• standeven 3y ago
  ”If it is a false positive, they will press “Silence,” which activates another n8n workflow that adds the asset to an allowlist, so it won’t alert again.” So the secret is to first stream a safe video that will purposely trigger a false positive, and then switch to a pirate stream later on.
  • wolrah 3y ago
    > So the secret is to first stream a safe video that will purposely trigger a false positive, and then switch to a pirate stream later on. Or just make it look at a glance like a safe stream: https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/4/16733386/ufc-pay-per-view-streamed-on-twitch-by-a-guy-pretending-it-was-a-video-game https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/4/16733386/ufc-pay-per-view-... That strategy would probably work for a lot of major sports.
• ricktdotorg 3y ago
  as a UK bloke in the US who supports a non-premier league team (Sunderland, currently in the EFL), i am legit screwed when it comes to wanting to pay to watch my team. it is literally impossible to pay to view while i reside in the USA. i want to pay, but i can't! hulu told me i could bundle EFL with Disney (!) but i was never able to see any Sunderland games on Hulu so i cancelled. EFL streams are hard to find, but in the absense of being able to pay to view, i will take anything i can.
  • disposition2 3y ago
    The games are only viewable in the ESPN app. I’m pretty sure you can watch almost all EFL Championship games via ESPN Plus. You’ll have to download a different app, it’s not on Hulu,
    • ricktdotorg 3y ago
      ahh that is very good (and specific) information! i have tried to avoid "app"-based viewing, but it looks like i need to reconsider. thank you so much for the intel!
      • disposition2 3y ago
        You're welcome, happy I could help. Good luck with getting promoted...looks like there are only 2 regular season fixtures left but hopefully you can watch them.
• kioleanu 3y ago
  I have the same problem like the others say in Germany. I have a Bundesliga season ticket for which I pay 360 euros and I see all home matches in person. Away matches are a completely different story. Half of them are shown by Sky, the other half by DAZN, and for some matches they only show highlights during the game. Sky wants 30 euros per month and at least a year of subscription and DAZN wants 25 euros per month. My life doesn't revolve around football, I don't need to see all matches, just my team's. I would gladly pay 10-12 euros for pay per view, but no, that's apparently not an option.
• andreareina 3y ago
  Kudos on them for using human review
• choeger 3y ago
  Dear Liberty Media, please have a look at such a tool and maybe reconsider your addition of defective by design (aka DRM) technology to f1tv streams. It broke on three (!) different playback devices I own. thank you, a valuable customer
• theshrike79 3y ago
  There's actually a group that streamed pixelated FIFA-gameplay during games with the correct streams and all. It looked good enough so that people actually watched and they got the ad revenue off it :D Also: perfectly legal, they're just streaming a video game =)
  • RugnirViking 3y ago
    not just one group, search youtube for any interesting event that happened during a game, maybe for a reply to show your friend who was away, and there are thousands of fifa versions online with matching titles in literally seconds after it happened
  • garbagewoman 3y ago
    It’s perfectly legal because it’s just dumb enough that nobody cares, though
  • dilyevsky 3y ago
    Heh that’s actually kinda brilliant. With good enough engine you can make it almost indistinguishable from irl, hell you can even throw in some better camera angles. I do wonder if that’s going to be 100% legal going forward given potential for abuse here
• kettleballroll 3y ago
  > Is the email address suspicious looking? I wonder what this looks like? Everything that isn't Gmail or outlook?
  • garbagewoman 3y ago
    Outlook? Never heard of that
• shp0ngle 3y ago
  The reactions here didn’t go how mux expected them to go, heh
• dataengineer56 3y ago
  > If you had asked me two years ago which sport a video startup needs to be most worried about, I would have said American football or basketball ... It wasn’t until I joined Mux that I found out how much people love soccer… This is a pretty terrible, sheltered introduction. He didn't realise that American sports aren't the most popular sports outside of America? He feels the need to tell us that in the intro? Did he not do any research before starting his job? Did no one interviewing him pick up on this? Also note that the detection labels mention "field" but not "pitch" even though a football playing area is by definition called a football pitch. More American-centricity that will ultimately harm them (not that I consider that to be a bad thing in this case).
  • TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
    I don't think that the pitch/field distinction is meaningful (except for cricket, wherein I believe that the pitch is part of the field). For football (all codes thereof), simply use whichever of the two words feels right in your dialect of English.
    • 4ggr0 3y ago
      Yeah, I'm a central european and I would call it a football field. Granted, not the biggest football fan, I only watch the international tournaments which happen every other year. And I'm not a native english speaker.
    • dataengineer56 3y ago
      Wouldn't it affect the classifications if it gets labelled as a pitch but their system isn't checking for that word?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• fafqg 3y ago
  [flagged]
• underlines 3y ago
  Anyone who hosts an illegal stream website (which usually makes them thousands of $$ per day), would immediately try the following: 1. Stream the video game fifa 2023 for the first 2-3 streams until my account gets onto your allowlist. 2. Stream illegal football content, not triggering your n8n flows, due to the allowlist.
  • throwaway744678 3y ago
    Or, perhaps: 1. Switch to another provider 2. No second step.
• wslh 3y ago
  From Argentina, the World Cup champions, with love: an army of children find a solution in short time and they don't need to be tech savvy. Just one story, I remember a children of 10 trying to watch a soccer match but without having a TV plan at home. The solution? Call friends via Discord and have them put the webcam towards the TV! They even have a friends meeting watching a soccer match.
  • nnntriplesec 3y ago
    Ah... the good old analog hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
    • wslh 3y ago
      Yes, rediscovered once time again but by children.
• Rastonbury 3y ago
  I recall there are ways to trick image recognition in ways undetectable to humans, but maybe too much effort for a pirate
• greybox 3y ago
  [flagged]
• DonHopkins 3y ago
  If only people cared as much about dedicating time and resources to education or health care or fighting corruption as they do about sports. What is it about sports that makes people give a shit about something that ultimately doesn't even matter?
• jwie 3y ago
  Being in the middle Mux wouldn’t be able to offer more substantive changes to the service problem. A neat operational fix to a tough event driven problem. The root cause here is “sports streaming services are garbage.” Mux can’t do anything about that, and likely their “partners” don’t want to hear it anyway. Part of me would have preferred to technically sweep this under the rug so nobody who cared would notice or be able to complain about it.
• pqs 3y ago
  It's been said that a growing number of individuals are turning to Telegram to stream pirated soccer matches. These streams often have massive viewership, with all of the streaming costs allegedly covered by Pavel Durov. However, it's worth questioning how sustainable this model is, considering that while Pavel is certainly wealthy, it's unclear if he has any incentive to continue footing the bill for illegal soccer streaming infrastructure. What are your thoughts on the future of pirate soccer on Telegram?
  • anonymouscaller 3y ago
    Before the paid/pro plan, Telegram was definitely burning a hole in Durov's wallet, but now without knowing how many people have subscribed to the paid plan, it's really hard to say. How do these pirate streams work on telegram? Are people using video chat to steam through the app or are people just sharing links?
    • pqs 3y ago
      They are streaming through the app, which has a streaming feature for channels.
  • prmoustache 3y ago
    Does the video stream goes to telegram servers or are people sending video to each person connected similar to what jitsi does with videocalls?
    • pqs 3y ago
      It goes through Telegram servers. It is similar to stream soccer through a Microsoft Teams call.
• dexterdog 3y ago
  Can't they find the vast majority of the large streamers by monitoring the reddit/irc/discord groups where the links are posted? That seems like a far more green way to find these things because there is minimal compute required. I know it doesn't sound as sexy as a hierarchy of triage flags and maybe some fancy "AI" dust, but that's how I would do it.