There are a few countries out there that people love to hate. Sometimes they choose to block all visitors from those countries to their websites. What is your opinion on the practice? Note that I am not talking about blocking for legal or copyright reasons, or about blocking done by the countries’ authorities or ISPs, only by the websites themselves.

Does your opinion change depending on whether the website in question is a personal website or blog, versus a website for a free/libre/open-source software project, versus a public service (e.g. a Fediverse instance)? Would you stop using your Lemmy instance if you learn that it is blocking visitors from certain countries?

  • Send Pics of Sandwiches@sh.itjust.works
    22·
    2 days ago

    A friend of mine was a security administrator for a small webhosting company for a while and he would often block certain countries based on the fact that his company didn’t do any business in those countries, and simultaneously those countries were prominent sources of malicious traffic. Not to say that the only traffic from those places is malicious, but if you don’t plan on offering any services in those areas it definitely makes sense to geoblock them from a security standpoint.

    • abacabadabacaba@infosec.pubOPEnglish
      32·
      2 days ago

      This makes sense for a website for a commercial service. This question is more about personal blogs, FLOSS project websites, or other similar websites that could be equally useful to people from all countries.

      • Send Pics of Sandwiches@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        2 days ago
        Security still plays. If I'm offering a blog for instance or some FOSS software that isn't in Russian or about Russia and I'm getting frequent bad traffic from Russia, I'm probably going to geoblock Russia.

Security is very often the reason (other than legality or copyright) that web services employ geoblocking. While people can easily circumvent this via VPN or any number of other methods, this takes slightly more effort which helps improve the overall signal to noise ratio for web-traffic considerably. 

It's not about trying to stop those people from accessing that service per se, it's just a fact that there are a number of countries who don't have laws or don't enforce laws regarding tampering with foreign systems. While this may be the action of just a few people in any given country, the traffic can be from many thousands of different IP addresses which may only have a country of origin in common.

Attacks on FOSS software as a means of gaining illicit access to organizations using that product as part of their infrastructure are more and more common (search: supply chain attacks). People who are earnestly trying to use a website that they are being geoblocked from are sadly caught in the crossfire of a fight they have no part in, and probably don'tknow is happening. However, the people doing the geo blocking are generally not doing so out of malice, but out of necessity.
      • Cypher@aussie.zone
        42·
        2 days ago

        You expect everyone to just have a neutral opinion of every country and the majority views of its citizens?

        I don’t care if an individual in Russia is ‘good’ because I have no way of verifying that so I block them from everything.

        Chances are high that if my project/blog or whatever helps a Russian it’s someone who holds very different political beliefs so I would rather not.