[s1110]

Genuine question: the website doesn't work in Russia. Did you restrict the access or is it my ISP doing that? Someone tries to prevent me from studying of very niche info on ancient Intel CPUs. Thanks! P.S. Big fan of your work!

[kkaske]

I did find that, while running a financial startup, I was able to significantly reduce attacks on the server by disabling access from Russia and China. Not saying that's happening here, just my experience. That was a while ago so I'm sure things have changed since then.

[red75prime]

That is it was more financially effective to block an entire country, than analyzing attack patterns and blocking by ASNs or IP-ranges. Correct?

[astrange]

Startups don't have enough free time to analyze individual ASNs, because they don't have enough people for that.

That and financial businesses usually don't operate outside their host country anyway. Though you do want your customers to see their accounts when they're traveling.

[pyuser583]

Yes. Multiple countries.

In all fairness, this isn’t a good use of that technique. But most websites are of no interest outside a handful of countries.

[s1110]

Thanks for your reply! I hope this is the real reason of blocking. If that's not the case, that's at least not effective. Less effective than idk placing a banner in the header or whatever.

I mean I eventually read the article. Sorry for that. But we're at "Hacker News", sporting hackers ethics, aren't we?

[inferiorhuman]

Opposing the invasion of Ukraine and the biggest existential threat Europe's faced in a couple generations seems pretty ethical to me.

[pyuser583]

We should be jamming American media down Russias throats like we did during the Cold War.

[wood_spirit]

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were one of the very first things that the Trump presidency stopped.

[drysine]

By preventing some computer history enthusiast in Russia from reading an article on a processor from 1985? Really?

[tgv]

It could be this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/russian-internet-users-are-unabl...

[vodkadin]

Some smaller sites ban ips from countries that continually try to hack into your server or just make a ton of requests, it happens to be that traffic is often from Russia and China. Could just be that.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

I block Russia, China, and Iran from my sites. They represent 0% of the revenue, and 99% of the login attempts.

[mavamaarten]

Yeah. In the same vein I also don't distribute my app in the Play Store in certain countries. I realize it completely sucks for them, but it's purely a business decision. Certain countries are just very vocal in terms of negative reviews, simply swap 5 star and 1 stars due to cultural differences, and also bring in almost zero revenue. The net result of distributing in these countries is literally negative: they hurt my ratings and reviews and don't make up for that in terms of money.

[grishka]

Probably your ISP, or more precisely, the ТСПУ box they were required to install. You can use this tool to test your connectivity to these hosting providers that the government dislikes: https://hyperion-cs.github.io/dpi-checkers/ru/tcp-16-20/

Ken himself did block access to his website from Russia for a while after 24/02/2022, but right now it loads for me after a CF captcha.

[userbinator]

One word: VPN

[danparsonson]

That's three words

[pyuser583]

I’m upvoting you.

[Loughla]

Or is it 5

[mannycalavera42]

ya'r good boy

[orbital-decay]

It is your ISP. (don't ask me how I know but please research this before posting)

[justsomehnguy]

Because the author is the opportunistic racist:

> kens on April 10, 2022

> Are you trying to access from Russia? Russia is currently blocked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30974444

> kens on Dec 3, 2022

> Unfortunately there are also many people in Ukraine who didn't personally do anything to deserve what's happening. Consider the country filter a small reminder of the ongoing war and a suggestion that you might find better opportunities outside Russia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33846782

Yet he doesn't consider to 'find better opportunities outside of the USA' despite the actions of the USA government in the last 30 years.