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Comment by 2ndorderthought | Hacker News Reader

Utah hosts I think the biggest nsa data center.

Honestly, I would like my ISP to block all traffic to and from Utah if this law passes. I can't think of anything I want or need that involves that state.

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Unfortunately it does not work that way unless perhaps I am misunderstanding your comment. The traffic monitored by the NSA will pass through their collection points in each state and will be silently mirrored to them regardless of the routing of your ISP. Even if your specific ISP does not mirror data the traffic will very likely pass through ISP's that do.

I think you misread me. I just meant, if companies are liable for VPN users in Utah, don't even let me connect to anything in Utah. I'm good.

I realize all my traffic gets siphoned there regardless more than likely anyways.

yeah this be the answer.

the Utah DC is just storage. NSA copies whatever it wants to locally and backs it up in Utah.

Only way you gonna avoid that is to use a meshnet that avoid major ISPs

Without it being good or bad (long term, second order effects), I do think all of these (proposed) laws and where we are heading will balkanize the internet. Alternative tech may sound appealing to the tinkerers, and they may keep certain important channels alive (think radio amateurs... they know this game) but for the masses? I already happily block entire countries or regions to my VPS as there is zero benefit for me to not drop them at the FW level.

I wish there was an easy way to geolocate ip addresses by us state. It's not too hard to block everything from say russia.

Let's all block whole countries just because our propagandists brainwashed us so, yay, what an Internet that'll be!

I haven't had a single person in my life or social media inform me of a single thing I have missed out on since blocking Russia and several other hostile nations with my firewall. I've been doing this for about 15 years. No regrets so far.

I understand your philosophy but it doesn't match my reality.

Warty. I doubt you personally are. But unfortunately your country has engaged in a lot of troublesome activities. We can connect through a 3rd party like we are now that's fine with me. I don't hate all Russians or anything like that.

I see no reason to directly connect to any Russian Internet infrastructure though.

People in glass houses..The same argument can be levelled at the troublesome activities engaged in by the USA.

Well, thanks for that at least..

Am I a hostile one for you, being a Russian who has to bypass both domestic blocks of the outbound traffic and (much more rare) "hostile nation" geoip blocks on the other side via VPNs just to read that damn article, mind you, not to hack anyone?

It’s for sure not fair for you personally. However it’s also not fair the rest of us have do deal with Russia’s hacking and propaganda organizations that are either directly state run or willfully tolerated. IP blocks don’t fix everything, but they do (or did at least) counter a good portion of the bots for no effort.

You live in a country that is awful to itself and everyone around it, but that’s not something we can fix.

It’s unfortunately not something Russians can fix either.

And I understand the desire to just blackhole all RU traffic, but if everybody starts doing this, it would result in two things:

1. Ordinary Russians who want to just read your website will have to jump through hoops (or probably find another source; I don’t live in Russia anymore but find myself clinging to the latter option for websites that decide to block all non-US traffic)

2. Hackers will... use botnets to proxy their traffic? It’s not like they don’t have options, they just pick lowest hanging fruits for now.

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The proper solution to the hackers problem is:

• Use static sites for static content

• Practice good security for webapps, and maybe use a WAF

A sad, utterly sad world to live in. Thanks for understanding the few of us who are not hackers, propagandists, or their victims..

Russia and the US are currently attacking and threatening their neighbors in their respective wars of aggression.

However, only russians are commiting war crimes almost daily to their neighbors.

I don't see how the distance is relevant.

Which countries are you already blocking?

Had to check my settings. Russia, Belarus, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia. Have any further suggestions?

Skiing

I hope e.g. Colorado has better Internet regulations, so I could do my skiing there instead.

I'm good, plenty of other things to do with my time and money.

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