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Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
121–130 of 516 posts
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is based on personal experience. At least two did not let me unsubscribe from abroad in the past.
Not letting you unsubscribe and blocking your IP are very different things. There are some that do not provide services in most countries but Netflix, Disney, paramount are pretty much global operations. HBO and peacock might not be available in Europe but I am guessing they are in Canada.
I think a lot of services end up sending you to a sort of generic "not in your country yet!" landing page in an awkward way that can make it hard to "just" get to your account page to do this kind of stuff.
Netflix doesn't have this issue but I've seen services that seem to make it tough. Though sometimes that's just a phone call away.
Though OTOH whining about this and knowing about VPNs and then complaining about the theoretical non-VPN-knower-but-having-subscriptions-to-cancel-and-is-allergic-to-phone-calls-or-calling-their-bank persona... like sure they exist but are we talking about any significant number of people here?
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#123We solved a lot of our problems by blocking all Chinese ASNs. Admittedly, not the friendliest solution, but there were so many issues originating from Chinese clients that it was easier to just ban the entire country. It's not like we can capitalize on commerce in China anyway, so I think it's a fairly pragmatic approach.
There's some weird ones you'd never think of that originate an inordinate amount of bad traffic. Like Seychelles. A tiny little island nation in the middle of the ocean inhabited by... bots apparently? Cyprus is another one. Re: China, their cloud services seem to stretch to Singapore and beyond. I had to blacklist all of Alibaba Cloud and Tencent and the ASNs stretched well beyond PRC borders.
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Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#124Unfortunately, HN itself is occasionally used for publicising crawling services that rely on underhand techniques that don't seem terribly different to the ones here.
I don't know if its because they operate in the service of capital rather than China, as here, but use of those methods in the former case seems to get more of a pass here.
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
The more we avoid terms, the more negative their connotations become, and the more we forget about history. I would argue, without any evidence, that when terms are used and embraced, they lose their negative connotations. Because in the end, you want to fight the negativity they represent, not the term itself.
Allow/deny list is more descriptive. That's one good reason for using those terms. Do you agree? In reply to your argument, the deny list (the actual list, apart from what term we use for it) is necessarily something negatively laden, since the items denied are denied due to the real risks/costs they otherwise impose. So using and embracing the less direct phrase 'black' rather than 'deny' in this case seems unlikely…
> Allow/deny list is more descriptive
It really isn’t. It’s a novel term, which implies a functional difference from the common term. Like, I can run around insisting on calling soup food drink because it’s technically more descriptive, that doesn’t mean I’m communicating better.
To the extent we have a bug in our language, it’s probably in describing dark brown skin tones as black. Not a problem with the word black per se. (But again, not a problem really meriting a linguistic overhaul.)
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#126We solved a lot of our problems by blocking all Chinese ASNs. Admittedly, not the friendliest solution, but there were so many issues originating from Chinese clients that it was easier to just ban the entire country. It's not like we can capitalize on commerce in China anyway, so I think it's a fairly pragmatic approach.
Lately I've been thinking that the only viable long-term solution are allowlists instead of blocklists.
The internet has become a hostile place for any public server, and with the advent of ML tools, bots will make up far more than the current ~50% of all traffic. Captchas and bot detection is a losing strategy as bot behavior becomes more human-like.
Governments will inevitably enact privacy-infringing regulation to deal with this problem, but for sites that don't want to adopt such nonsense, allowlists are the only viable option.
I've been experimenting with a system where allowed users can create short-lived tokens via some out-of-band mechanism, which they can use on specific sites. A frontend gatekeeper then verifies the token, and if valid, opens up the required public ports specifically for the client's IP address, and redirects it to the service. The beauty of this system is that the service itself remains blocked at the network level from the world, and only allowed IP addresses are given access. The only publicly open port is the gatekeeper, which only accepts valid tokens, and can run from a separate machine or network. It also doesn't involve complex VPN or tunneling solutions, just a standard firewall.
This should work well for small personal sites, where initial connection latency isn't a concern, but obviously wouldn't scale well at larger scales without some rethinking. For my use case, it's good enough.
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#127I think banning IPs is a treadmill you never really get off of. Between cloud providers, VPNs, CGNAT, and botnets, you spend more time whack-a-moling than actually stopping abuse. What’s worked better for me is tarpitting or just confusing the hell out of scrapers so they waste their own resources. There’s a great talk on this: Defense by numbers: Making Problems for Script Kiddies and Scanner Monkeys https://www.you…
If you can automate the treadmill and set a timeout at which point the 'bad' IPs will go back to being 'not necessarily bad', then you're minimising the effort required.
An open project that classifies and records this - would need a fair bit of on-going protection, ironically.
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention more descriptive. If you hear the term "allowlist" or "denylist" it is immediately obvious and self-explanatory, with no prior context needed. Leaving aside any other reasons, they're just better names.
And while you're at it, start speaking Esperanto, use the metric system, and switch to a Dvorak keyboard.
Is Dvorak optimized for Esperanto?
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#129Is there a way to reverse look up IPs by company? Like a list off all IPs owned by Alphabet, Meta Bing etc?
https://hackertarget.com/as-ip-lookup/
Chuck 'Tencent' into the text box and execute.
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#130Since I posted an article here about using zip bombs [0], I'm flooded with bots. I'm constantly monitoring and tweaking my abuse detector, but this particular bot mentioned in the article seemed to be pointing to an RSS reader. I white listed it at first. But now that I gave it a second look, it's one of the most rampant bot on my blog. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43826798
Rule number one: You do not talk about fight club.
Dark forest theory taking root.