meetdilip said:
I already agreed on that point. What that do not digest to me is see all South Asians as spammers. There are millions of net connection in all these countries put together. If you are banning the whole IP range, you are accusing all of them as bad traffic as you call it.
It's not how *I* or how anyone else sees Asians that is the problem - they'll be going strictly by the numbers. It just so happens to be reasonably accurate that there is significant spam generated on machines located in Asia (who/how is not important), so it doesn't seem to occur to you that it just so happens that the region has earned this reputation.It's not so much an accusation as having been caught "red-handed", so in cases like this, the short story is that if the numbers say that a particular network is hitting your own network and hitting it hard, you gotta do what you gotta do to protect it. It would be irresponsible to think or do otherwise.I mean, not every person is a thief, but many people lock their doors and have bars on the
windows to protect themselves from the few, right? Or are you gonna go around asking everyone to take away the things that impede your entry to their home because you don't like the implication that they are accusing you of being a criminal? Doubtful. Same basic premise applies.As you say, there surely are millions of connections in the region but if 99.9% of those connections don't use your service, all you care about are the 0.1% that do, and if out of that that 0.1% a significant fraction of *that* is bad traffic... what choice do you have? How do you tell which specific addresses are OK? How do you guarantee that address won't be allocated to a spammer tomorrow?Basically, the admins have no way of determining that a particular IP address is going to be associated with good or bad traffic for any length of time, and as banning single IP addresses would be both arduous and tedious, expensive (man hours, even if one were to script it) and ultimately, counter-productive because all the spammer needs to do is disconnect and reconnect and he'll probably have himself a brand-spanking new IP to continue his nefarious ways, again, what choice do you have?If one writes a script, one risks flagging legitimate traffic (including traffic from countries where "bad traffic" is less of a problem) being dropped which is kinda bad for
business.So my mode of thinking remains that this particular service probably does not cater to a large audience in India and as such a blanket ban was the most effective yet least negative impact option, and unless it's a really badly run service (unlikely, being German), I'm quite sure this wouldn't have been a decision made (or actioned) by one of the junior techs.I also notice that you didn't really answer to my analogy - I put it to you that if it was one guy doing these bad things, you might even just be able to ignore his behaviour; but if it was the whole building, complex, block, suburb throwing stones at your windows every day, that would be harder to ignore. And you'd still be pissed at all the neighbours throwing stones - even *if* you knew they were being paid, you still don't know who is paying them.What I'm trying to say is that a blanket ban like this wouldn't be the result of an isolated incident - it would have to be a relatively serious problem for them to go ahead and implement a ban like this, as in, enough of the traffic originating on BSNL's network was bad that it dwarfed the good/legit traffic (hence, the impact would be minimal) and it would be highly unusual for them to not weigh up the pros and cons of doing so.For example, in my case, blocking China wasn't the easiest decision but my thinking was basically that unless I am seeking Chinese investment in my company, or if I'm buying stuff from China (yes, both options exist), but on the whole I don't need to worry about traffic originating in China, as it's highly unlikely (close enough to 100% chance) that anyone viewing and/or signing up for my service with a Chinese address would be legitimate. Sure, yeah, it is different use-case, but the principle is basically the same.So instead of repeating the same sentiment over and over again, despite me informing you *why* they probably did this; perhaps you could come up with a solution or alternative to a blanket IP ban.