Fun with Geobanning

[ESummerdown]

(Might I add here it's nice to come back to a profile after months of not using it to be surprised by a hundred notifs.)

*Ahem. Anyway, here's the problem.

https://www.deviantart.com/mythiril/journal/You-re-NOT-Human-786451470

DA has in the past fessed up to geobanning internet traffic to Syria, Chrimea, Iran, and a handful of others. A year or so ago, the author of this journal complained and got enough DA mod-attention for them to say they'll undo the ban.

But it would appear that was just a padded lie and now I have a good excuse to not use DA: Solidarity for geobanned users.

In other words, there's still Newgrounds and I'm glad to use it more instead.

[Tony-DarkGrave]

yeah and lots of sites do that to countries and lots of countries do that to sites, its nothing new get over it and if it bothers you that much switch your default DNS address and use a VPN.

[ESummerdown]

At 5/22/19 12:58 PM, Tony-DarkGrave wrote: yeah and lots of sites do that to countries and lots of countries do that to sites, its nothing new get over it and if it bothers you that much switch your default DNS address and use a VPN.

Gee if only you listed a few examples of those "lots of sites," then I would believe ya.

Even then, this whole reply is way more permissive of the behavior than it deserves.

[Tony-DarkGrave]

At 5/25/19 10:26 AM, ESummerdown wrote: Gee if only you listed a few examples of those "lots of sites," then I would believe ya.
Even then, this whole reply is way more permissive of the behavior than it deserves.

I gave you an example of how to get around the problem, and if you need an example you just have to look at social media sites and other Top 10K Alexa rank websites, an example that either restrict or censor access themselves or do it at the behest of government request or out of security due to spam and fraud from those countriesso they can continue operating in the country, every case is different but the common denominator is its BRIC and other third world countries known for fraud and security threats.

Like I said get over it.

[Gimmick]

At 5/25/19 11:05 AM, Tony-DarkGrave wrote: Like I said get over it.

Can confirm: Am in BRIC country, multiple websites got blocked here every now and then, but by the government ordering ISPs (or sometimes ISPs just doing so, citing 'government orders') instead of websites. Newgrounds got blocked at one point too, and that's when I switched to 1.1.1.1 at long last.

Hell, sometimes the reasons don't even make a lot of sense - Internet Archive got (briefly) blocked because of a (bogus) copyright claim by a movie company. It was restored only after a lot of hue and cry...what if it'd been one of the smaller sites?

[Tony-DarkGrave]

At 5/25/19 11:23 AM, Gimmick wrote:

At 5/25/19 11:05 AM, Tony-DarkGrave wrote: Like I said get over it.

Can confirm: Am in BRIC country, multiple websites got blocked here every now and then, but by the government ordering ISPs (or sometimes ISPs just doing so, citing 'government orders') instead of websites. Newgrounds got blocked at one point too, and that's when I switched to 1.1.1.1 at long last.

I see what the problem is Deviant art is currently following sanction regulations on Syria. Under these regulations brought on by Executive Order US based companies cannot give services to said sanctioned country.

You might also want to invest in a VPN to encrypt and secure your connections.

[Gimmick]

At 5/25/19 11:45 AM, Tony-DarkGrave wrote: US based companies cannot give services to said sanctioned country.

Which honestly sounds like a crock of shit, the Internet's supposed to be operating under the principles of freedom and distributed control, which seems to be decreasing with every passing day. I don't live in Syria, but if things continue at this rate we might see a large-scale fragmentation of the internet as we know it (which has already happened long ago in China)

[Tony-DarkGrave]

At 5/25/19 12:13 PM, Gimmick wrote: Which honestly sounds like a crock of shit, the Internet's supposed to be operating under the principles of freedom and distributed control, which seems to be decreasing with every passing day.

It doesn't matter what the companies medium of service is as long as it's based physically in the US for the most part minus a few exceptions which usually isn't the case, it has to follow cutting services to said country due to sanctions.

I don't live in Syria, but if things continue at this rate we might see a large-scale fragmentation of the internet as we know it (which has already happened long ago in China)

China and Russia are already doing it and the EU and its idiocy is well on it's way.

[ESummerdown]

Responding to the problem by suggesting a VPN does not solve the problem. And ftr, those things can be expensive or skeevy or both.

But hell, the world's too hard to change anyway, let's be accepting of the crap people worse off than us get trying to use the same sites we are. If internet usage is on a whim of distractable governments, I guess there's nothing we can do. Definitely not shaming those institutions publically, loudly, (at times) humorously, excetera.

[Tony-DarkGrave]

At 5/25/19 08:40 PM, ESummerdown wrote: Responding to the problem by suggesting a VPN does not solve the problem. And ftr, those things can be expensive or skeevy or both.

Bullshit you can get a good VPN for $100 USD for a 2 to 3 years which comes out to a few dollars a month and it encrypts your data and it does solve the problem once you switch from your ISP preffered DNS to either 1.1.1.1 which is cloudflare or 8.8.8.8 which is Google's you pretty much completely bypass 80% of government and corporate blocking because your requests look completely genuine traffic from the VPNS IP.

They're are complete articles on this subject on CNET and Tom's Hardware that give you graphs of pros and cons of the best available VPNs.

But hell, the world's too hard to change anyway, let's be accepting of the crap people worse off than us get trying to use the same sites we are. If internet usage is on a whim of distractable governments, I guess there's nothing we can do. Definitely not shaming those institutions publically, loudly, (at times) humorously, excetera.

Don't drink the secular humanist koolaid.

[NeonSpider]

ITT, OP being lazy and ignorant, and @Tony-DarkGrave speaking the truth. I mean how hard is it to do the bare minimum of pull up a search engine and figure out the whys of all this? It would have been totally appropriate had @Tony-DarkGrave merely thrown one of those "Let me Google that for you" links and left it at that.

tl;dr - Websites must operate according to the laws of the countries they are hosted in, or they risk legal sanctions themselves.

It's almost like some people are unaware that governments and laws exist.

[Tony-DarkGrave]

At 6/2/19 10:44 AM, NeonSpider wrote: ITT, OP being lazy and ignorant, and @Tony-DarkGrave speaking the truth. I mean how hard is it to do the bare minimum of pull up a search engine and figure out the whys of all this? It would have been totally appropriate had @Tony-DarkGrave merely thrown one of those "Let me Google that for you" links and left it at that.

tl;dr - Websites must operate according to the laws of the countries they are hosted in, or they risk legal sanctions themselves.

It's almost like some people are unaware that governments and laws exist.

He should be lucky I didn't start posting a ton of links to break his argument, luckily I didn't feel like it due him being some random that just posted here in Poli and chase him off. And yes that is how laws and governments work lol.