Tell HN: Debian blocks access to wiki pages from VPN IPs | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Debian blocks access to wiki pages from VPN IPs

15 points_8j5013 comments

Just what the title says.

ProtonVPN here. I get blocking when people try to comment or make changes but this is preventing debian users from accessing the wiki for help or to follow instructions.

For a bit more context, I have gone to a great length to make sure my devices can only access the internet via a VPN that is enforced at the network level not at the host level for obvious reasons.

Is this acceptable? Do they also block Tor? What is the benefit?

No other distro or open source project I encountered has a similar restriction.

I thought I would post here because they are one of the most popular distros. If they need my direct IP address to use their software then is the "free" part of FOSS really true? (Paying with loss of privacy).

Edit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/460fm4/debian_wiki_inaccessible_for_months/

https://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2016/05/msg00093.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/63xyod/psa_debian_wiki_blocking_all_access_to_certain/

This isn't new apparently. How can I tell the right person this isn't 2008?

Firstly it works completely fine for me on VPN (using Cloudflare Warp) so you may want to consider changing provider. Perhaps they have IP blocked the VPN endpoints of your provider?

Is this acceptable? Only you can decide that for yourself. To me this seems like a perfectly normal thing for a sysadmin to do in the face of constant abuse of any sort of free resource including DDOS and other attacks which frequently come via VPNs. It’s unlikely they are distinguishing read from read/write access because the IP block probably happens upstream of the wiki (that’s how I would implement it personally).

Implementing a block like this seems a pretty good indication that they realise it’s not 2008 and are responding to the state of the web today.

VPNs are not suitable for DDos, upstream can see requests/URLs since it is responding with a 403.

Captcha with CDN is the way to go these days. Also, why are they special? Arch, Ubuntu, etc.... have no problem. If you see the links in my post, they block other providers too, switching just to please them is not an effective strategy.

The Debian wiki is loading fine for me with Proton VPN. Have you tried connecting to a different server?

I've been using two servers alternating, both get a 403. I can try more later on. Maybe it is a fail2ban type block?

I have a dedicated mobile data plan for browsing sites with a 'residential' IP which is really a phone carrier 3G/4G connection. I do this when my VPN is blocked for certain browsing activities. Worth investing in this setup!

> What is the benefit?

Reduce spam and abuse

Like i said, for making changes I get it. I just want to read a debian specific wiki. They block archive.is too. You can .htaccess block specific pages for form submit action.

I tolerate excessive captcha for every other site as well.

I guess whatever spam control system they use is simply blocking all VPNs rather than more fine grained check if the request is for read/write

Captchas are a more acceptable solution if they can't make it more granular. Perhaps they object to captchas because foss vs proprietary third party?

Capchas are bad. It will trow users away.

They are not any worse than a 403 page?

A .htaccess block doesn’t help if you’re trying to mitigate ddos attacks. Your server still has to expend quite a lot of resources to do htaccess checking vs an ip firewall block is just one hashtable lookup at kernel level.

They are giving a 403 which looks a lot like .htaccess. You can't do a whole lot of DDosing from a VPN IP either due to data cap and connection count limits per account.

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