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Comment by BLKNSLVR

11 hours ago

Yeah, my setup is purely for my own security reasons and interests, so there's very little downside to my scorched earth approach.

I do, however, think that if there was a more widespread scorched earth approach then the issues like those mentioned in the article would be much less common.

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BLKNSLVR

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Borg3  31 minutes ago

Haha, nice, I run something similar.. But more manualy managed and I put those bans pernametly. Currneltly, there are 1360 blocks in drop list and growing. I never really remove them, because even those leased blocks move from one spam/abuse operator to another, so no big loss.

And indeed, if people would fight w/ spam/abuse better and more aggresivly, the problem would be much smaller. I dont care anymore, In my opinion Internet is done. Time to start building overlay networks with services for good guys...

lxgr  10 hours ago

In such a world you can say goodbye to any kind of free Wi-Fi, anonymous proxy etc., since all it would take to burn an IP for a year is to run a port scan from it, so nobody would risk letting you use theirs.

Fortunately, real network admins are smarter than that.

  • BLKNSLVR  8 hours ago

    Pretty much. I think there's also a responsibility on the part of the network owner to restrict obviously malicious traffic. Allow anonymous people to connect to your network and then perform port scans? I don't really want any traffic from your network then.

    Yes, there are less scorched-earth ways of looking at this, but this works for me.

    As always, any of this stuff is heavily context specific. Like you said: network admins need to be smart, need to adapt, need to know their own contexts.

    • lxgr  1 hour ago

      This is how you get really annoying restrictions on public networks, because some harmless traffic will inevitably be miscategorized by an overeager firewall/DPI system.

      I’m not saying that there should be zero consequences for allowing bad traffic from your network, but there’s a balance, and I would hate a world in which your policy were more common.

      Arguably we are already partially living in that world, as some companies are already blanket-banning entire countries, VPNs etc., rather than coming up with more fine-grained strategies or improving their authentication systems to make brute force login attempts harder. It’s incredibly annoying.