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Why Are Canadian Sympatico Users Being Banned On EFNet?
An anonymous reader asks: "After being away from IRC for over a year, changing ISPs and moving my physical self to another apartment, tonight I tried to get back on EFnet. With a brand new IP, and a brand new computer, I discovered that all over EFnet, all channels related to Linux are banning all Canadian Sympatico users, this includes high speed customers, dial up users, and business users. In fact, the ban is quite severe and bans the entire sympatico.ca domain. I've tried to message several operators in #linux, #linuxhelp, and #slackware, but nobody is responding. What's going on?"
Canada is infamous for its scriptkiddies. As long as its impossible to positively ID a particular person due to IP-jumping, ident-changing and so forth, the only solution is to set an ISP-wide or country-wide ban.
Blame it on the kiddies. If it gets too noisy due to a single country/ISP, then the only logical solution is to ban that country/ISP.
In addition, EFNet#linux and other EFNet channels are infamous for beeing non-friendly and not very helpfull. You would do much better using Openprojectsnet or whatever its named right now. Much more friendly.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Don't just blame draconian ops, it is more of an act of desperation. In undernet we take so much crap from kiddies that 99% of the time happen to be coming from .ro, simpatico.ca (its so bad we call them simpaticrap, go figure), .no and .mx . I have personally banned .mx and .ro temporarily a few times from #asp on undernet because once a kiddie puts his/her mind into making you miserable it will take minutes to max out the ban list. Only reason we cannot ban .no and .ca is that too many innocent people will get hit.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
I'm not a sympatico user, I'm a DALnet user and channel operator instead. While I've never set such a broad ban myself, I know of many channels which have banned sympatico. Apparrently there was an extremely major spammer on sympatico, who kept jumping IPs, simply to the point that operators were forced to ban the entire domain.
So there is a reason for it, though I do agree it is a bit severe.
People might say it's not that easy, but it really is. There are several ISPs that operate EVERYWHERE that Sympatico does, and offers their services at a SUBSTANTIALLY lower cost. I switched over to iStop (http://www.istop.com) a few months ago, and I'm loving it.
I suggest you inquire in the newsgroup can.internet.highspeed about a good ISP in your area, I'm sure Bob Carrick will point you towards his excellent ISP website.
If you're wondering why iStop doesn't offer 3.5mbit residential atm, it's because Bell raised the price for all new lines, and iStop decided they'd rather stop offering the service for new customers than charge old customers way less than what they charge new customers. Ralph Doncaster, owner of iStop, has said that he fully expects Bell Nexxia to once again offer the lower prices for 3.5mbit lines, so he'll be able to offer it again in the future.
Actually Sympatico is primarily Bell, but the provincial phone companies badge their services with the Sympatico name as well (They get a kickback from Bell or access to some of Bell's network or something). So technical support varies wildly, considering you most often get your local phone company's support. I've been on dialup and DSL from MTS's version of Sympatico, and I've never had problems accessing IRC (DAL and EFNET mostly).
As an operator in #linux on EFNet I feel I should chime in. We do not have a ban on *sympatico.ca, the only ban we have related to sympatico is Kitchener-HSE-ppp*.sympatico.ca. It is far more likely that you attempted to join on a system account or do not have identd working. A quick search on google will find our homepage with channel rules and howto's, including why we require identd and resources on installing it. And lets not forget that #linux is not a bunch of operators who are power happy. We volunteer our time to help people with linux. We help hundreds of people every day, and our "draconian" rules are what keep the channel flowing. It is not easy to work in a channel with 125 people doing whatever they want to do, so make sure that people follow some basic rules. If we see repeated abuse from an ISP our policy is to contact that ISP and work towards a resolution that does not require the banning of a large group of people. If we cannot work something out we will ban that ISP, however, usually a few weeks of getting banned from the channel on join will discourage the most pissed off kiddie, and when that ban is no longer in use it is removed. I would also like to state that most of the people I have heard complain about our policies are those that join the channel for a bit of handholding. If you join please remember that we are not paid to help you, and demands are not appreciated. We take special care not to ban out of hand, so if you are banned you did something wrong. http://www.efnetlinux.net/rules.html