Comment by mzajc
4 days ago
I'm sure there's several ways in which ICANN and RIPE could screw Russia over. I'm also sure (or at least hopeful) they understand this would achieve nothing outside of creating a splinternet.
4 days ago
I'm sure there's several ways in which ICANN and RIPE could screw Russia over. I'm also sure (or at least hopeful) they understand this would achieve nothing outside of creating a splinternet.
> would achieve nothing outside of creating a splinternet.
With the growing threat profiles and potential damage, I wonder the cost calculations being made behind closed doors right now of both governments and companies about that very possibility.
A lot of companies already block traffic by country of origin and have since they existed on the internet.
>A lot of companies already block traffic by country of origin and have since they existed on the internet.
Is this an American thing? For example the home Depot and velera do it.
I've seen network operators talk about it from all over the world.
If Sarah owns a gardening center and sells stuff locally, why does her business need to accept connections to her website or network from a foreign country? For her given the attack risk, it makes much more sense to block non-local traffic.
6 replies →
If it’s so simple to do I’m not sure why the west hasn’t already done it vis a vis Russia and China. Spam and scams would drop precipitously instantly.
Dropping traffic by source country is not that hard, if you assume country of ip registration is country of origin, which mostly works although things like multination networks, ip leasing or other reuse, and proxy/vpn can result in misattribution.
However, if you mandated blocking Russia or China at a national level, you would cause some major issues.
a) it would become very hard to communicate with people in China. That would make commerce with China very difficult. Blocking communication with your number 3 trading partner [1] is going to be a massive disruption.
b) Doing the same for Russia would be less disruptive as there's much less trade between the US and Russia, and significantly fewer immigrants to the US from Russia than from China. However, there's still a lot of connection between the US and Russia and that would be disrupted.
Given the success of the internet and the layering of everything else over it, I suspect cutting off internet would likely cut off phone service as well. Even postal mail might be impacted, as there is likely coordination between national agencies via the internet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
Given how much the US and China seem to be mutually interested in decoupling, I don't think that's such a bad thing in the longer term. Certainly Chinese-American business partners interested in finding ways to continue to communicate would do so.
As for Russia, good riddance.
Hey, have you seen the latest in streaming boxes that provide access to 500+ channels of content for free? Pay no attention to the minor detail that it will act as a proxy in your homeland doing the bidding of its foreign masters. Available for delivery tomorrow for the low low price of $35 usd.
As hackers, we should recognise that proxying to get around arbitrary IP range blocks is a good thing.