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Comment by unxdfa | Hacker News Reader

Yeah when I land on your web site and I get:

  Request on Hold - Suspicous Activity Detected.

I'm turned off instantly. I'm on a static IP on a respectable ISP in the UK and I'm not waiting in a queue for 57 seconds and counting to look at the sales pitch.

Edit: so I use that time wisely to shitpost about it on HN, then check TrustPilot and I see:

"Unfortunately, based on your description (I need a ticket number or other customer information to find you in our system), you accidentally resembled an abuser."

Not a good outward appearance. I'll stick with AWS and paying through the nose.

View on HN

Yeah companies and their small minded "sysadmins" are very eager to use an IP address as the primary predictor of hostile intent, sometimes they add user-agent as well. Not sure why but this is the sort of behaviour why I cannot trust such companies with my business.

You don't know how bad it is. As a third worlder, I tried to sign up for Hetzner storage once, my account was immediately flagged as suspicious. That by itself isn't a big deal, much bigger web services do the same. But they sent me a link to some third party identity confirmation service, which made me do a dumb song and dance of holding an ID in front of my face in front of a webcam to verify myself and had both automated and human(?) stages. That by itself took a dozen tries to get through. But even after that, Hetzner still deemed my account as suspicious, I had to write a couple paragraphs of explanation to justify my existence. I assumed after this they should have no reason to not let me through. But 3 days later I got a mail saying the account was permanently banned from Hetzner.

This is exactly why I do not want to use such companies. I do not want to be an accessory in this racist crap. Your IP does not define who you are. Hetzner could two things:

- stop operating in countries they don't want business from

- treat people equally

What they are doing is: pathetic.

To put that in perspective, I am currently in a developing country and CloudFlare websites are making me click 'I am human' checkboxes dozens of times per day.

HN does the same

Sorry but who cares what HN does?

Is this a business? No.

Should we follow any of the practices of HN? I do not think so. My personal website has a more scalable infrastructure than HN.

HN is basically glued to CloudFlare from a business perspective so do we expect anything else?

I tried to register with them once and also hit one of those automated trip wires, so they made me send them my ID with a bunch of other stuff and then _refused to create an account for me_. The internet is full of stories like mine, so yeah, their abuse detection is total crap.

Maybe you're behind «Carrier-grade NAT», sharing your public IP with thousands of other customers?

No I've got a paid static IP which I exclusively own on a business service line.

There is no excuse for being a victim of an algorithm.

And I never get this anywhere else!

My static IP was erroneously blocked from Wikipedia as some previous owner used it to run open proxies or the like. Never had any problems anywhere else. It happens.

"It happens" is a bad defence.

It's not a defence, it's just reality. Abuse is real. Using IP addresses to combat abuse is very broken – I too had carrier-grade NAT when I lived in a developing country in the past – but it does work. Abuse prevention is hard, but very much required. Abuse prevention with zero false positives is nearly impossible with the current state of technology. So yes, "it happens" because all of this is hard. You can pretend the problem doesn't exist, but that's denying reality.

As you might understand that is exactly what everybody, both the guilty and the innocent, says.

In a court of law I am innocent until proven guilty.

In technology circles I am guilty until proven innocent.

That's the difference, the outcome of which is the technology provider can quite frankly fuck off.

It’s the ‘the customer is always right’ philosophy, clearly by someone who has never worked retail or services.

This is not retail.

Isn't that exactly what it is?

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