Hacker News Reader

Comment by bez00m | Hacker News Reader

As someone who also sees this kind of messages fairly often, I always wondered about companies/individuals who voluntarily (not being forced by law, that's another story) block their users by IPs coming from bad countries... The message always goes along the lines of "you're murderer and rapist, we hate you". I still need to find a person who managed to change their political stance after seeing something similar. I don't have a shortage of people who got convinced that enemies are all around.

So, just an advice to all wannabe overseas-dictatorship-overthrowers - be nice, try to educate the people, don't make assumptions about person's wrongdoings and awareness based on their IP.

A good service with a strong message that Russian/Iranian is seeing on a regular basis does a lot more good than a service that throws a perfect insult just once. At least if your goal is to actually change something rather than throwing insults.

View on HN

> As someone who also sees this kind of messages fairly often, I always wondered about companies/individuals who voluntarily (not being forced by law, that's another story) block their users by IPs coming from bad countries...

As a service owner currently looking at adding widescale blocks based on location... it's not a global business, so the downside of blocking an entire country is functionally zero and the upside of easily removing a tonne of compromised machines from the 'can try to DDoS us' pool is noticeable.

If someone from Iran wants to do DDoS attacks they probably know enough to change their own IP to somewhere else so your blocking Iranian IPs is basically futile.

The blanket actions you can take to reduce your attack surface will often work to stamp out low/mid effort attacks, but the more sophisticated attackers who really want to specifically target you will take the time to get around these simpler countermeasures. That doesn't make those countermeasures useless, though.

> I still need to find a person who managed to change their political stance after seeing something similar.

The intent was never to change your political stance. It's just plain old hate. Armchair political activists are always looking for "morally correct" excuses to be racist and xenophobic, and "your government did a mean thing so you as a citizen are responsible" is one of their favorites.

> I always wondered about companies/individuals who voluntarily [...] block their users by IPs coming from bad countries

The problem is not with "bad" countries.

The problem is when a large amount of abusive traffic comes from a handful of countries, it's technically easier to block entire IP ranges and ASNs, than to filter and allow the small amount of well-behaved clients while blocking the rest. This is especially the case when the company has no commercial presence in these countries.

To be fair, the scenario you describe where countries are blocked purely out of political or personal reasons does exist, and I agree that it's morally wrong, even if it's the prerogative of any individual or company who they want to provide service to. But in my experience the blocking is usually motivated by abuse.

> the scenario you describe where countries are blocked purely out of political or personal reasons does exist

In my experience the reason is one of the following:

1. Following the local jurisdiction. By far the most common one, and one I have least questions for. At least not to the companies who implement this policy - someone over here already posted the consequences of not complying. Big companies often care to say "nothing personal, buddy, strictly business", but nothing more as in the OP's case with Microsoft.

2. Avoiding the attacks, as you said. I definitely agree they exist. And I can imagine every Cloudflare block page I've seen is because of that, but in my experience it's maybe 5-10% of all blockings I experienced.

3. Political activism. What my comment was about. It's always either individuals or small companies. It's always outrageously dumb and pathetic (obviously, except when it comes from an actual victim) and just does the job opposite to the proclaimed intention.

> The problem is when a large amount of abusive traffic comes from a handful of countries, it's technically easier to block entire IP ranges and ASNs

Abuse is becoming a much bigger problem lately, to the point that even large western providers are getting the same treatment nowadays. More and more I see people talking about banning Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean, and at any given time I can see several of their IP addresses in abuse reporting websites (spamhaus, abuseipdb).

What is the future here? I see no reason for those providers to tighten on abusers, given how long they’ve already ignored it. Pretty sure at some point you’ll have to have your own ASN and IP ranges to be able to do anything on the internet.

> just an advice to all wannabe overseas-dictatorship-overthrowers - be nice, try to educate the people, don't make assumptions about person's wrongdoings and awareness based on their IP

I can guarantee that your views would change very quickly if bombs started falling closer to where you sit and killing your friends and people you know.

Believe it or not, the 12 day war between Iran and Israel was exactly that, and the reaction of the Iranian people was not as uniform (in either way) as one might guess. You could walk on the streets and see some "Hit them Israel" and other similar writings on the walls (the Iranian people were not exactly pro Israel before the war). And yet people could not sleep due to constant bombardment, they had to follow the evacuation orders by the IDF etc.

You mean I would hate people more and call them fanatics, terrorists and rapists without knowing anything about them? Do you think that would help?

Except sometimes it works in the other direction. Quite a few of my friends while sheltering from russian bombs in Kharkov still cheered russian efforts to annex Ukraine.

I don't think you can guarantee that. Yes, you might have a strong prior in favour of that - most people don't have a propensity to prefer logical and systematic reasoning over strong emotions such as anger or hate - but it's still rather unfair to a person you're talking to to assume that must be the case.

Yes, when people are badly hurt, they will often lash out in hopes of hurting someone else, using the flimsiest excuses to justify it. It doesn't make it right or a good idea, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com