urbanMSP

UrbanMSPers,

We are having some issues with hackers and unwanted site access coming out of China, Russia, Korea, and Nigeria. I am likely going to either ban access from these countries or simply make UrbanMSP only available in the United States (or North America). Anyone opposed to this? Any international viewers? If so, I am happy to add an exception for your IP range.

Thanks,
Shawn

I think we might have a real person who lives in Sweden. Could we not ban Europe and Canada? Or is that racist?

I was going to post the "That's racist" kid gif, but then I looked at the calendar and saw that it wasn't 2005.

And, no, selective geo-blocking isn't racist.

Blocking the individual countries where the problem IPs are originating sounds reasonable, but I don't know if it really makes sense to block everything outside of North America. Do we get any traffic from places like the UK, Australia, France, or Germany?

Yeah good point I'll probably just do China to start with and see how that goes.

Yeah good point I'll probably just do China to start with and see how that goes.

I don't know if this is historically an issue, but I do sometimes look at the forums when I'm in Hong Kong visiting people. If that's banned under the China umbrella band, it's not a huge issue, it's only for a couple weeks at a time.

If that is the case I would be happy to unblock the specific IP or IP range that you are visiting from - Just e-mail Nick or I if you ever get over there and cannot access the forum.

Also if international travel is a frequent thing it might be useful to pay a few bucks a month for a VPN service. When you're travelling you'd make a secure VPN connection to a server somewhere in the US. All your traffic would go through the secure tunnel and look like it came from the US, so you'd be able to access things that were US only. Not just UrbanMSP, but lot's of sites will do blanket blocks on foreign countries that spew a lot of spam and other infections.

ohhhhhhh I was wondering why the Chinese government would take the time to block a Minnesota development forum!

Good thing the U has a free VPN that anyone with an active UMN email can use.