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?"

Comments

Re:Canada is infamous for its script-kiddies.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the solution is to get a user id system of your own in place or to improve the system's capability to deal with anonymous assholes. Mass blocking complete ISPs is giving up, not a solution.

Re:same thing from online.no

[bob@dB.org]

As long as norwegian kiddiots act as they do, and the same goes for the canadian kiddiots, one cannot expect channel operators to take heed of one or two good seeds among the thousands of bad ones.

It would seem that your definition of idiot is even broader then mine. Based on the above paragraph it seems you place about 99.9% of Internet users in this category. And you're a ChanOp on #norge? (for our international readers: norge is Norwegian for Norway).

If you are that desperate to join a certain channel, buy yourself a server somewhere, or get a shell-account from a friend - so that you can bounce of that and onto the IRC-network of your choice. One moment though - make sure that friend of yours is a _Friend_ and not someone that allows everybody to get accounts on his box - or that IP is sure to be banned from several channels as soon as the first kiddie appears.

This is elitist crap. Not everyone has the possibility to get an account on another computer, not everyone has the opportunity to pick and choose their ISP. Me, i work in the industry, and would have no problems finding a host that would allow me access, but you're missing the point...

Oh, and "shut up a few noisemakers" .. are you aware of what amount of noise a "few noisemakers" can generate? And are you aware that EFNet just supports 25bans per channel? And that a single floodnet often is far more than 25 flood-klients?

I think a have a fairly good idea about how much noise a "few" noisemakers can generate, yes! My point is that this is (to me) a completely unacceptable approach for controlling noise. On my list of really bad ideas, it's right up there with reducing SPAM by blocking all mail from Korea and China.

Now, how would you solve that problem? Please, do explain, in detail.

I really don't care enough about this to apply by brain to that problem. All I was saying was that I'd rather not hang out on a channel where thinks that blocking ~70% of all Norwegians is an acceptable solution to the noise control problem.

Re:Canada is infamous for its script-kiddies.

[arcade]

Killing protesters kinda works for china, too. It is shocking to see how easily people fall back to uncivilized measures when their comfort might be reduced by the smallest amount ("People didn't understand the system"). Banning 99.9% innocent users is not a solution to a 0.1% problem, unless you desire a segregated net.

Not a good example from your side. Killing people is quite different from refusing someone access.

Why doesn't the US let anyone that wants enter their country? Isn't that _unfair_?

Why doesn't Canada let anyone that wants enter their country? Isn't that _unfair_?

Why doesn't Norway let anyone that wants enter their country (well, we almost do *sigh*)? Isn't that unfair?

And so forth.

No, its not unfair.

On IRC, on the internet - you can even start your own irc-server, or your own irc-channel, if you do not like the alternatives you have, or you're denied access to other peoples resources.

booohooo, i feel SO sorry for those that are refused. Booohoooo.

Re:Canada is infamous for its script-kiddies.

[WEFUNK]

How long has this reputation existed? I'd be interested to know if it's related to the high penetration of broadband in Canada (primarily Sympatico DSL and Rogers cable). If so, it's more than just disappointing that entire countries are being penalized for adopting high speed access and we should expect to see more of this (both script kiddie problems and overzealous blocking) as broadband is more widely adopted.

I suppose problems like this contribute to the growing list of ISP policies and practice against power users, static IP addresses, domain hosting, bandwidth limits, etc. To protect networks from being abused and banned, might we expect to see even stricter ISP controls (and decreased privacy) in the future, such as expanding the current lack of support for Linux to actually banning the use of Linux and other unsupported systems?

here we go politics

[jjshoe]

to start with, #linux is a completely different channel then #linuxhelp by far. you can NOT get in to #linux without ident while you can get in linuxhelp assuming you dont meet one of the following trojan stopping bans.

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these bans are to stop a set of what looks like some type of automated scripts finding trojan'd and wingate type machines to join the channel and spew two lines off garbage and part.

.no is not ban in linuxhelp no matter how badly i wish it was. EVERYONE i have delt with .no speaks very bad english and throws a fit if you say they need to re-word something. if they have a problem they want you to hold their hand through the entire problem (MOST other people want their hand held, but ALL the .no want their hand held) and when you tell them you wont they throw a giant fit.

optonline.net is the only massive ban enforced in #linuxhelp due to constant trollage.

*sigh* tell me about it.

[Second_Derivative]

This isn't just a problem in IRC channels, on messageboards you'll often get a few trolls hell bent on crap flooding the forums (wait... this is Slashdot why am I saying something that's gotta be freaking obvious. Achem)

Anyways, what I certainly think might be nice is to have an RBL-like system somewhere that scans for open proxies and automatically blacklists them. When your server recieves a connection, it just sticks .rbl.openproxy-rbl.org or whatever on the end of the IP and sees if there's a response. If there is it drops the connection like it's carrying the plague (or Code Red as the case might be). Simple, and easy to cache seeing as you can just have a local BIND running to cache results for hosts who commonly connect.

I ran into this two years ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't access a few channels that I wanted to access because the entire sympatico domain was blocked. My workaround was to just go through another system, but that is quite annoying.

I have since moved and no longer use sympatico so it is no longer an issue. Although come to think of it, I don't think I've even used IRC since.

You could try a proxy...

[pilot1]

If your using mIRC 6, you can go through a proxy to change your IP address, I know of a few proxys that Efnet, Dalnet and Quakenet don't detect. I'm not sure if Efnet and Dalnet allow it,Q uakenet doesn't allow it, but you can still do it. Here is one that Quakenet can detect, i'll give another one out to you if you email me, but if I gave it out publicly I doubt it'd be fast anymore. fll-vodsl61-cust204.mpowercom.net and use port 3128