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

same thing from online.no

[bob@dB.org]

or at least it used to be. that covers quite a few hundred thousand norwegian uses as well (adsl, isdn and modem). i also tried messaging ops to find out what was going on, and never got a response. in the end i just figured; fuck it! do i really want to be on a channel with people willing to gag half a nation (online/telenor is the biggest norwegian isp) just to shut up a few noicemakers? my advice is to find yourself a channel with less braindead operators. shouldn't be hard :-)

Re:same thing from online.no

[arcade]

As a norwegian, and as chanop on efnet#norge, I know quite well how much noise a few idiot-users can generate. Wide bans are not that unusual.

*.no is getting banned from more and more channels on EFNet. That is not very strange, when you consider that online.no doesn't take IRC-abuse complaints very seriously. The same goes for many other norwegian ISP's.

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.

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.

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?

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

Re:same thing from online.no

[LordNimon]

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.

Yeah, that sounds about right to me.

Solicits a question...

[3-State Bit]

This brings up an interesting question, which is whether I can help out a friend by routing her IRC traffic or his for her/him, if I have a large server up a lot. I'm not sure I would do it open-to-the-public, but as something for a friend, why not?

2) Anyone who gets posted to slashdot and hangs out on IRC probably has enough techie friends that one of them would be willing to host such a service.

So, a better ask-slashdot might be:
How do I route around draconian ban-by-subnet IRC policies?

Philosophers ask WHY. Engineers ask HOW.

Canada is infamous for its script-kiddies.

[arcade]

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.

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?

IRC Politics

[Komarosu]

Channel politics are flakey at the best of time, all it takes is some idiot in a country to say summat wrong to a chanop and there banned. Another widespred ban on few networks is *.aol.com, as people on technical channels dont belive that "technology wise" people could possibly use AOL. It's these generalisations that end up with domain bans due to a few users spoiling it for the rest.

As for banning ISPs, all it takes is a few "scriptkiddies" to come onto a technical channel with there MP3 scripts and l33tsp34k to annoy a few ChanOps and boom...perma-ban

For further note, i am a Chanop on various channels on the HashNet network, and yes people do get domain banned for stupid reasons. Maybe this will just give you more of a insight.

The biggest offenders: .ro, .ca, .no and .mx

[pvera]

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.

Official Response from #linux

[raduga]

*** poptix is poptix@techmonkeys.org (· Matthew S. Hallacy ·)
*** on channels: @#linux #icons_of_vanity
*** on irc via server irc.secsup.org (Insert Tagline )
> poptix: do you have an official response to the Slashdot story I can send them?
> speaking on behalf of efnet #linux operators?
<poptix> radtuna: sure 'Canada sucks'
<poptix> ;)