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Comment by jws | Hacker News Reader

Ultimately, maybe not, but I finally dabbled in geolocation on a property that was receiving comment spam. I ended up eliminated 100%, not nearly 100%, actually 100% of the spam by blocking anonymous content from one country.

In another application I got rid of 90% of the flash wear on an IoT device by blocking a single country from a port.

A determined, targeted attack will go around a geoblock, but I have to reluctantly admit that it can be useful for the high volume attacks.

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Perhaps the takeaway is that you shouldn't leave ports wide open rather than go for xenophobia?

Blocking an IP range isn't xenophobia.

Extending the line of thought of OP sure is.

It's not $country's fault that you don't use vpn or port knocking.

It is $country's fault that there is a free reign for criminals, either state sponsored or acting on their own.

I'm guessing here but it seems that the majority of the world pursues cybercrime investigations with foreign victims at the same rate as Russia, which is about 0 (unless for some reason we're all just never hearing about this great computer crime police work in Africa/Latam). Several African countries can't even pay government employee salaries on time, are they really going to be sending records requests to Google or Yahoo or Binance, infiltrating underground forums, or developing informants? Nigeria in the best case hands off the BEC suspects to America but rarely does police work themselves.

Interpol regularly goes after cybercriminals, they do require local cooperation but that happens more and more frequently. But obviously there are still places where this isn't a priority.

1) if your threat model is blocking direct connections from countries you deem unworthy, then I don't even know where to begin unpacking levels of wrong here.

2) proxies exist, many of which are your "first world residential ip address" thanks to IoT in every toaster.

Can you stop moving the goalposts. You said 'blocking countries equals xenophobia'. It doesn't.

You are talking in a thread where OP called such countries “self-proclaimed vermin” and you’re parroting terrible and restrictive opsec practices.

No, it is not okay that many US websites decided to block access from EU instead of adopting a normal privacy policy, it is equally not okay to block access from whole regions of the world based on your prejudice, there are much better solutions.

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