LALIGA maintains its commitment to combating audiovisual fraud and the consumption of illegal content through various initiatives and legal actions. Now, thanks to the coordination of a specialized team, LALIGA has successfully and immediately shut down DuckVision, a pirate platform that provided illegal access to live sports content, including the Spanish league, to more than 200,000 people in Spain alone.
DuckVision consisted of a web application that encouraged users to download an Android app, which had over 200,000 active users in Spain during January 2025, according to data.ai. It was concealed by the services of the U.S. technology company Cloudflare, which intentionally protects criminal organizations for profit.
The website also provided access to pirated content and was complemented by an IPTV system and Ace Stream to distribute LALIGA’s content, which was illegally taken from broadcasters such as ESPN, Movistar, DAZN, Sky Sports, Ziggo, and Bein Sports, among others.
The illegal content offered by the pirate platform was promoted through Telegram channels with over 13,800 users and on DuckVision’s website, which had nearly 70,000 unique users in Spain as of December 2024, according to Semrush data. The shutdown of the platform and its channels adds to the closure of other well-known extensions such as Luar, Kodivertido, and TVChopo, which announced their immediate shutdown, as well as the closure of Cristal Azul, Spain’s most significant illegal streaming channel.
This action taken by LALIGA will be repeated in the coming days to disable other platforms and pirate content services. Meanwhile, the promoters and developers of DuckVision will be reported to the police and judicial authorities in the coming days, with all the gathered evidence.
Google, Cloudflare, VPNs, and other entities involved in piracy bear responsibility for the illegal activities they enable and profit from. LALIGA, backed by the law, will not stop defending football and the interests of its clubs against criminal activities related to audiovisual fraud and its laundering.
I've created and maintaining an Android library that implements user-space driver for common USB to serial converters https://github.com/felHR85/UsbSerial (Nothing fancy compared with what others are posting here but it has been my little proud).
I estimate that I've earned around 3 - 4 k€ in 6 years because of this project mostly from:
- Freelancing in projects related.
- Paid version of an Android app that uses the library
- Free version of the same app with ads
- Donations
Obviously I have a proper job but I've been able to learn a lot because of this side project. I would do it again
There is an industry pushing us to eat more, there is another industry pushing us to lost weight through exercise but there is no one pushing us to lost weight through fasting.
I had an interview some years ago which demanded a difficult CS problem to be solved and besides coding the offer stated that you should happily accept being helpful with the IT needs of the marketing guys installing their Antivirus, email...
Somedays ago discovered that my FT232 which I used to develop a FTDI user-space driver for Android is a counterfeit one. Ironically the feedback I've received about this project is mostly positive.
I now have to test the Flow control and the parity/frame... signals so I hope I wont have to buy one.
Before the 1st FTDIGate, as a guy who has implemented user-space drivers for the most common USB to serial converters my opinions about the FTDI were quite good (from an engineering standpoint I really like the solution they use to send the CTS,Parity status, Break... in a two bytes packet every 40ms which it is a good simulation of a serial port instead of having to poll sending control commands) but now I would recommend to avoid them.
From my humble experience I would recommend CP2102, they work fine (and have a nice documentation for driver developers). The CH340/CH341 is real pain.
I just created and maintain a little Android library (a very rewarding experience by the way) so most of the complaints about Github doesnt really apply to me because the size and reach of my project (I understand the point perfectly though).
But I read some complaints about the users and the issues they tend to open and I fully agree. They are a minority but I can't only imagine what people with bigger projects have to deal with. This is what I've found:
- People with little to zero experience in the language/framework that simply state that my project doesn't work without providing more information and sometimes they didn't reply to my "give me more info" inquiries.
- Guys who just want to get their homework done and They are basically trying to get it done using me as non-paid freelance.
- And my favourite one, junior dev in a company, he needs to get their work done with more pressure than the previous one so became anxious about their problems and I feel it even via email. Eventually He gets the thing done but He notices I changed the build system to Jitpack for better dependency handling and and start to complain about Man in the middle attacks to his company and black-hat hackers replacing my lib with a malicious one (I guess it could happen but come on).
But it is a very rewarding experience besides these anecdotical cases
The whole shamus projects, from books (I read his autobiography) to programming posts are awesome. His game "Good Robot" was greenlighted recently so we are going to see his first released game soon, which is pretty interesting coming from a guy who talked so openly about it http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=20638
Thousands of my fellow spaniards signed on Quitter for the first time, missed they political arch-enemies from the enemy front and went back to Twitter.
The worst thing is the feeling that you are always at work. In this situation I discovered going to the gym is helping me to switch the mode (it could be running, swimming...just any physical activity). If I keep working remotely this year I would like to:
- Keep two computers, one for work and other for my spare time.
- Keep a room of my house as my private study or, if it is not possible, work somedays from a coworking space.