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: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.

[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?