IP address blocking banned after anti-piracy court order hit Cloudflare

Plenty of corporate web filtering solutions block on IPs, and the adoption of ESNI will only make it worse. If you manage an important website, moving out of a bad neighborhood (Cloudflare) before you end up the victim of blocking is probably a good idea.

It would be my boss or boss' boss ordering me to block the addresses, wouldn't it?

This is one of the useful tactics that unions will use when they aren’t legally allowed to strike for one reason or another, they will engage in large scale “work to rule”, which is pretty much what it sounds like, you do your work following the rules to the letter and no further, stubbornly by the book no matter how inconvenient or unproductive or disruptive the rules are when you suddenly start following them exactly.

It’s particularly effective if the rules are a large part of their collective grievances with management, as it highlights to all involved that the current rules need changing, and can sometimes result in fairly quick and positive changes since it demonstrates to management that the current “rules as written” are not the most fiscally effective set of rules for running the business.

Surely they should have contacted Cloudflare and asked them to sort out the issue with their network ...

CF will probably retort {common carrier, we are American and you are not etc}. Austrian policy makers get upset and ... THIS NONSENSE IS STILL NOT SORTED.

The internets are somewhat broken, quite badly. We all allow ourselves to end up in a series of virtual walled off silos - Facebook, Twitter etc, run by some pretty worrying monster commercial companies, whilst living within quite disparate physical societies. I think that the fediverse is a possible contender for the way forwards. I dumped Reddit for Lemmy and that seems to be working so far. I know a lot of 'X'iles are finding a home with Mastodon.

I worry about quite a few networks. One of the tools in the box is the IP block list. With the rise of the hyper-scalers, the IP blocklist is becoming increasingly useless. Same with SMTP filtering for spam. You can't block M365 or Gmail en-masse (tempting for my home setup, though!)

I recently gave CrowdSec a run at work (I will stick with it but with care). Great idea for the 2010s but not so much now. I got it to watch HA Proxy logs (proxies on site Exchange) and it pretty soon decided that my real users should be banned because of how Outlook works, or rather how the auth that Outlook uses works. Outlook doesn't just use Kerberos, it also uses EWS for the Addressbook and the good Lord knows what else. So you get a connection to a endpoint from Outlook without auth creds which generates a 401 (failed auth) error, then Outlook tries again, this time with creds and it works OK (200). To a CrowdSec agent those repeated 401s look like bots pissing around.

That is one reason why we cannot have nice things.

I'm a Brit (yes we Brexited) but I am still very much a European and so is my little country, like it or not - I have seen shed loads of number plates from across the EU trundling along the large A30/A37 crossroads/roundabout called Yeovil in Somerset. Mostly lorries and quite a few cars and campervans.

So I am from country X (GB in my case, not that X!) but I engage with (w,x,y,z) societies on line. Now whose laws apply? In general it seems we muddle along effectively but should there be a formal internationally accepted agreement?

I don't think I understand. A court orders you to block certain IP addresses: you have no options. If that block disallows access to unrelated pages there's nothing either the engineer or the boss can do. Should the engineer lose any sleep over this? Am I missing something?