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Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

boston.conman.org

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Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admin a few local business sites.. I whitelist all the countries isps and the strangeness in the logs and attack counts have gone down. Google indexes in country, as does a few other search engines.. Would recommend.

Is there a public curated list of "good ips" to whitelist ?

So, its relatively easy because there is limited ISP's in my country. I imagine its a much harder option for the US.

I looked at all the IP ranges delegated by APNIC, along with every local ISP that I could find, unioned this with

https://lite.ip2location.com/australia-ip-address-ranges

And so far i've not had any complaints. and I think that I have most of them.

At some time in the future, i'll start including https://github.com/ebrasha/cidr-ip-ranges-by-country

Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

#42
post #31

Earlier 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?

And across the water, my wife has banned US IP addresses from her online shop once or twice. She runs a small business making products that don't travel well, and would cost a lot to ship to the US. It's a huge country with many people. Answering pointless queries, saying "No, I can't do that" in 50 different ways and eventually dealing with negative reviews from people you've never sold to and possibly even never ta…

Google Shopping might be to blame here, and I don't at all blame the response.

I say that because I can't count how many times Google has taken me to a foreign site that either doesn't even ship to the US, or doesn't say one way or another and treat me like a crazy person for asking.

Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

#43
post #31

Earlier 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?

Don't care, works fine for us.

And that's perfectly fine. Nothing is completely bulletproof anyway. If you manage to get rid of 90% of the problem then that's a good thing.

Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

#44
post #25

If ipv6 ever becomes a thing, it'll make blocking all that much harder.

No, it's really the same thing with just different (and more structured) prefix lengths. In IPv4 you usually block a single /32 address first, then a /24 block, etc. In IPv6 you start with a single /128 address, a single LAN is /64, an entire site is usually /56 (residential) or /48 (company), etc.

Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

#45
post #31

Earlier 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?

And across the water, my wife has banned US IP addresses from her online shop once or twice. She runs a small business making products that don't travel well, and would cost a lot to ship to the US. It's a huge country with many people. Answering pointless queries, saying "No, I can't do that" in 50 different ways and eventually dealing with negative reviews from people you've never sold to and possibly even never ta…

As long as your customer base never travels and needs support, sure, I guess.

The only way of communicating with such companies are chargebacks through my bank (which always at least has a phone number reachable from abroad), so I’d make sure to account for these.

Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

#46
post #31

We 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.

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?

The percentage of US trips abroad which are to China must be minuscule, and I bet nobody in the US regularly uses a VPN to get a Chinese IP address. So blocking Chinese IP addresses is probably going to have a small impact on US customers. Blocking all abroad IP addresses, on the other hand, would impact people who just travel abroad or use VPNs. Not sure what your point is or why you're comparing these two things.

Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

#47
FAFO from both sides. Not defending this bot at all. That said, the shenanigans some rogue or clueless webmasters are up to blocking legitimate and non intrusive or load causing M2M trafic is driving some projects into the arms of 'scrape services' that use far less considerate nor ethical means to get to the data you pay them for.

IP blocking is useless if your sources are hundreds of thousands of people worldwide just playing a "free" game on their phone that once in a while on wifi fetches some webpages in the background for the game publisher's scraping as a service side revenue deal.

Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't care, works fine for us.

And that's perfectly fine. Nothing is completely bulletproof anyway. If you manage to get rid of 90% of the problem then that's a good thing.

And if your competitor manages to do so without annoying the part of their customer base that occasionally leaves the country, everybody wins!

Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

#49

We 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.

Block Russia too, thats where i see most of my bot traffic coming from

Re: Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

#50
post #3

One starts to wonder, at what point might it be actually feasible to do it the other way around, by whitelisting IP ranges. I could see this happening as a community effort, similar to adblocker list curation etc.

That's what I'm trying to do here, PRs welcome: https://github.com/AnTheMaker/GoodBots
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