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Comment by datadeft | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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