Comment on Cheapskate's Guide: Nuking web-scraping bots

• elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  You had me until the “ethically sound position” part.

  You’re saying that Joe Blogger is acting unethically because he doesn’t allow VPN users to visit his site. C’mon, brother.

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  • sxan@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You’re saying targeting people who are taking steps to improve their privacy and security is ethical? Out do you just believe that there’s no such thing as ethics in CIS?

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    • elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You’re putting words in my mouth. I didn’t say that. Targeting sounds like specifically doing it with an agenda.

      What you’re saying the equivalent of being offended that you can’t bring guns inside someone’s private property. “It is not ethical that you forbid me to exercise my constitutional rights of bearing arms in your house. How dare you not allowing me to put my AK-47 in your kitchen counter!”

      Nope. I said that if someone doesn’t want to deal with VPN users because it’s more hassle than worth (e.g. bots), then so be it. Joe Blogger may get 20 visitors a month instead of 24. Oh the horror!

      I am a huge advocate of privacy laws. But if Joe Blogger doesn’t allow me in his personal website, eh. I might try archive.org.

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      • sxan@midwest.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Hold on a tick.

        Specifically blacklisting a group of users because of the technology they use is, by definition, “targeting”, right? I mean, if not, what qualifies as “targeting” for you?

        And, yeah. Posting a sign saying “No Nazi symbolism is allowed in this establishment” is - I would claim - targeting Nazis. Same as posting a sign, “no blacks allowed” - you’re saying that’s not targeting?

        I know we’re arguing definitions and have strayed from the original topic, but I think this is an important point to clarify, since you took specific objection to my use of it in that context; and because I’m being pedantic about it.

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• tripflag@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Absolutely; if I was a company, or hosting something important, or something that was intended for the general public, then I’d agree.

  But I’m just an idiot hosting whimsical stuff from my basement, and 99% of it is only of interest for my friends. I know ~everyone in my target audience, and I know that none of them use a VPN for general-purpose browsing.

  As it is, I don’t mind keeping the door open to the general public, but nothing of value will be lost if I need to pull the plug on some more ASN’s to preserve my bandwidth. For example when a guy hopping through a VPN in Sweden decides to download the same zip file thousands of times, wasting terabytes of traffic over a few hours (this happened a week ago).

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  • sxan@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I know that none of them use a VPN for general-purpose browsing.

    Interesting. The most common setup I encounter is when the VPN is implemented in the home router - that’s the way it is in my house. If you’re connected to my WiFi, you’re going through my VPN.

    I have a second VPN, which is how my private servers are connected; that’s a bespoke peer-to-peer subnet set up in each machine, but it handles almost no outbound traffic.

    My phone detects when it isn’t connected to my home WiFi and automatically turns on the VPN service for all phone data; that’s probably less common. I used to just leave it on all the time, but VPN over VPN seemed a little excessive.

    It sounds like you were a victim of a DOS attack - not distributed, though. It could have just been done directly; what about it being through a VPN made it worse?

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