I run an instance of a downloader tool and had lots of chinese IPs mass-download youtube videos with the most generic UA. I started with „just“ blocking their ASNs, but they always came back with another one until I just decided to stop bothering and banned China entirely.
I‘m confused on why some chinese ISPs have so many different ASNs - while most major internet providers here have exactly one.
Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
241–250 of 516 posts
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#242Earlier 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…
I understand your point, but my argument is in the more generic aspect.
Consider how whoever complains about blacklist/whitelist would eventually complain about about allow/deny and say they are non-inclusive. Where would this stop?
I would say that as long as the term in unequivocal (and not meant to be offensive) in the context, then there's no need to self-censor
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell that to the "web3 is doing great" crowd. I've met and worked with many people who never shilled a coin in their whole life and were treated as criminals for merely proposing any type of application on Ethereum. I got tired of having people yelling online about how "we are burning the planet" and who refused to understand that proof of stake made energy consumption negligible. To this day, I have my Mastodon inst…
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Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sometimes I find an odd password being probed, search for it on the web and find an interesting story [...]. Yeah, this is beyond irresponsible. You know the moment you're pwned, __you__ become the new interesting story? For everyone else, use a password manager to pick a random password for everything.
What is beyond irresponsible? Monitoring logs and researching odd things found there?
How are passwords ending up in your logs? Something is very, very wrong there.
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#245i think there is an opportunity to train an neural network on browser user agent s(they are catalogued but vary and change a lot). then u can block everything not matching. it will work better than regex. a lot of these companies rely on 'but we are clearly recognizable' via fornexample these user agents, as excuse to put burden on sysadmins to maintains blocklists instead of otherway round (keep list of scrapables..…
What exactly do you want to train on a falsifiable piece of info? We do something like this at https://visitorquery.com in order to detect HTTP proxies and VPNs but the UA is very unreliable. I guess you could detect based on multiple pieces with UA being one of them where one UA must have x, y, z or where x cannot be found on one UA. Most of the info is generated tho.
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All of the "blockchain is only for drug dealing and scams" people will sooner or later realize that it is the exact type of scenarios that makes it imperative to keep developing trustless systems. This is like saying “All the “sugar-sweetened beverages are bad for you” people will sooner or later realize it is imperative to drink liquids”. It is perfectly congruent to believe trustless systems are important and tha…
Tell that to the "web3 is doing great" crowd. I've met and worked with many people who never shilled a coin in their whole life and were treated as criminals for merely proposing any type of application on Ethereum. I got tired of having people yelling online about how "we are burning the planet" and who refused to understand that proof of stake made energy consumption negligible. To this day, I have my Mastodon inst…
> and who refused to understand that proof of stake made energy consumption negligible.
Proof of stake brought with it its own set of flaws and failed to solve many of the ones which already existed.
> To this day, I have my Mastodon instance on some extreme blocklist because (…)
Maybe. Or maybe you misinterpreted the reason? I don’t know, I only have your side of the story, so won’t comment either way.
> The goalposts keep moving. The critics will keep finding reasons and workarounds.
As will proponents. Perhaps if initial criticisms had been taken seriously and addressed in a timely manner, there wouldn’t have been reason to thoroughly dismiss the whole field. Or perhaps it would’ve played out exactly the same. None of us know.
> even though it's the institutions themselves who are the most corrupt and taking away their freedoms.
Curious that what is probably the most corrupt administration in the history of the USA, the one actively taking away their citizens’ freedoms as we speak, is the one embracing cryptocurrency to the max. And remember all the times the “immutable” blockchains were reverted because it was convenient to those with the biggest stakes in them? They’re far from impervious to corruption.
> And while this does not require any type of block chains or cryptocurrency, we certainly will need to start showing some respect to all the people who were working on them and have learned a thing or two about these problems.
Er, no. For one, the vast majority of blockchain applications were indeed grifts. It’s unfortunate for the minority who had good intentions, but it is what it is. For another, they didn’t invent the concept of trustless systems and cryptography. The biggest lesson we learned from blockchains is how bad of a solution they are. I don’t feel the need to thank anyone for grabbing an idea, doing it badly, wasting tons of resources while ignoring the needs of the world, using it to scam others, then doubling down on it when presented with the facts of its failings.
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#247Why not just block the User Agent?
Because it's the single most falsifiable piece of information you would find on ANY "how to scrape for dummies" article out there. They all start with changing your UA.
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, but this causes me about 90% of my major annoyances. Seriously. It’s almost always these stupid country restrictions. I was in UK. I wanted to buy a movie ticket there. Fuck me, because I have an Austrian ip address, because modern mobile backends pass your traffic through your home mobile operator. So I tried to use a VPN. Fuck me, VPN endpoints are blocked also. I wanted to buy a Belgian train ticket still fr…
> I wanted to order something while I was in America at my friend’s place. Fuck me of course. Not just my IP was problematic, but my phone number too. Your mobile provider was routing you through Austria while in the US?
Not OP, but as far as I know that's how it works, yeah.
When I was in China, using a Chinese SIM had half the internet inaccessible (because China). As I was flying out I swapped my SIM back to my North American one... and even within China I had fully unrestricted (though expensive) access to the entire internet.
I looked into it at the time (now that I had access to non-Chinese internet sites!) and forgot the technical details, but seems that this was how the mobile network works by design. Your provider is responsible for your traffic.
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#249I've been working on a web crawler and have been trying to make it as friendly as possible. Strictly checking robots.txt, crawling slowly, clear identification in the User Agent string, single IP source address. But I've noticed some anti-bot tricks getting applied to the robot.txt file itself. The latest was a slow loris approach where it takes forever for robots.txt to download. I accidentally treated this as a 404…
That's like deterring burglars by hiding your doorbell
Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why stop there? Just block all non-US IPs! If it works for my health insurance company, essentially all streaming services (including not even being able to cancel service from abroad), and many banks, it’ll work for you as well. Surely bad actors wouldn’t use VPNs or botnets, and your customers never travel abroad?
> Why stop there? Just block all non-US IPs! This is a perfectly good solution to many problems, if you are absolutely certain there is no conceivable way your service will be used from some regions. > Surely bad actors wouldn’t use VPNs or botnets, and your customers never travel abroad? Not a problem. Bad actors which are motivated enough to use VPNd or botnets are a different class of attacks that have different t…
> if you are absolutely certain there is no conceivable way your service will be used from some regions.
This isn’t the bar you need to clear.
It’s “if you’re comfortable with people in some regions not being able to use your service.”