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Doesn't reddit block VPNs as well?
i tunnel my internet through linode with wireguard - reddit blocks me if i'm not signed in. with soundcloud, i just got a generic 403 from cloudfront combine that with country-level internet filter, the internet is getting harder and harder to use :(
I used that once and got in trouble with the client since the ruleset was over blocking.
Instead of blocking or limiting features to whitelist users with approved behavioral patterns and limit / block those that don't -- such as loading a page and immediately commenting or doing things that normal humans don't do, they block IP addresses and ASNs.
I just close the browser tab and remind myself not to waste my time caring, there'll be other platforms.
My router is setup for WireGaurd and it'll never be disabled.
Shame on SoundCloud
What's the motivation for blocking VPN read access for this and other services? Are AI scrapers using commercial VPNs to get around rate limiting?
VPNs often use providers with excellent peering and networking - the same providers that scrapers would want to use.
Should be interesting to see how the internet blocks those of us who don't want to be fingerprinted, ID'd, or reveal our home IP addresses. YouTube already blocks embeds to login and prove I'm not a bot, funnily it doesn't work and embeds never play. Reddit will block me unless I'm signed in which I don't mind too much, but the daily beast and many others block me which is a shame because I'm a real human being using…
This is the main issue here, the web has become actively hostile to normal people in the quest to monetize every second of online activity.
The irony is that I tried to access the link here but reddit blocks VPN access aggressively.
Across 3 VPN providers I use, none of them have issues accessing reddit anonymously. There are nodes/regions that are blocked, but finding a working server isn't hard.
You can't just blanket block all VPN access, that's not how the internet works... they could pick some common/well-known providers of VPN services and block their IPs/ASN/etc., but you can't just flip a switch and make all forms of VPN/proxy stop working, as there's no way to tell with certainty that someone is using one.
MTU detection is the easiest one. Sucks for people with ISPs that don't do 1500 bytes but those are rare.
yeah sure, if you ignore the existence of literally every mobile isp.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The exhausting "well actually" masks a corrosive argument, that if you can't enforce the rules in a rigid and rigorous fashion, the rule is fiat. It's not that he doesn't know the difference. He's making the argument that since there's no _technical_ difference there can be no legal difference.
Should be interesting to see how the internet blocks those of us who don't want to be fingerprinted, ID'd, or reveal our home IP addresses. YouTube already blocks embeds to login and prove I'm not a bot, funnily it doesn't work and embeds never play. Reddit will block me unless I'm signed in which I don't mind too much, but the daily beast and many others block me which is a shame because I'm a real human being using…
As someone who has both spent quite a bit of time writing scrapers and later lots of headache on blocking malicious bots from accessing websites, I can tell you this has become futile. Bot makers aren't stupid. If you put in a check for how fast actions are performed, they will put in a sleep timer in their script. If you start blocking residential IPs because many people use it, you are probably just blocking a school or dormitory, while the real bots will quickly move to another IP once they smell something is off. Today with modern multimodal LLMs, you can bypass almost every "human-check" imaginable. And if they can't pass something, most of your users sure as hell won't either. Not because it is too hard, but because it will take too long to solve. The sweet 3-15s actionable human intelligence threshold has been passed by now. The cats and dogs type captchas were already solved more than 12 years ago by simple CV machine learning. The tech has progressed an insane amount since then. In the end I always ended up basically doing what SoundCloud did here if my service was sensitive: Block entire countries, all tor exit nodes and all known VPN ASNs. That will get it down by like 90%. Bear in mind that anyone who wants to put in some effort will still easily bypass this, but at least the low-effort guys from third world countries will take a while before they catch on. So you can go back to doing some actual work in the meantime.