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by wartywhoa23 54 days ago
Let's all block whole countries just because our propagandists brainwashed us so, yay, what an Internet that'll be!
2 comments

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.

---

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.