Blocking a Nation's IP Space

SComps writes "The Register has a good commentary about blocking Chinese IP space and some of the pros and cons surrounding that action. The question I post to Slashdot: "What is your opinion of this and what do you propose to help correct this?" Additionally, what sort of actions do other Slashdot users take to protect themselves from rogue IP space, be it national borders or even retail broadband/dialup providers such as wannadoo or comcast, roadrunner, etc?" The author of the article raises an interesting point, will this 'slippery slope' prove too difficult to walk?

Comments

Officially insane.

[Dibblah]

They're a web hosting provider. And they're blocking entire netblocks from viewing *their customer's* content.

What big company....

[millahtime]

What big company is going to block China? That's where most of their workers are. Can't cut your communications lines to them.

Ya...

[mr_tommy]

Does it not seem somewhat strange that we are more than happy to rally against measures by certain governments to restrict our internet liberties, yet there is no problem with us blocking whole nations access to western sites because of rogue elements in their borders?

This seems a rather murky route to go down, that ultimately, will be in no one's best interests.

what would cut down spam

[Anonymous Coward]

would be if China blocked inbound USA connections seeing as 80% of the worlds spam originates from there, the numbers are no different for all the other scams either ie Phishing, Malware, Adware , Spyware etc etc

hmmm perhaps the rest-of-the-world should just cut off USA it would probably stop 80% of internet related crime overnight

Re:what would cut down spam

[Kelson]

Actually, that's 80% of North America's and Europe's spam. It doesn't provide any stats on how much of China's spam originates in the US.

It's also a list of the people creating the spam, not the location of the machines that are sending it.

And note that North America includes the US, so a lot of that spam is by Americans, for Americans. Just relayed through China, Korea and Brazil.

Inappropriate & Heavy-Handed Response

[aldheorte]

Even if *you* block a range of IP addresses, someone operating a computer on one of those IP addresses could still connect with your server simply by going through a proxy not blocking them, but which you have not also blocked. Given that blocking a national range of IP addresses provides no real security from a marginally determined and capable attacker and that it promotes a balkanization of the Internet, decreasing the network affect and therefore overall utility of the network by blocking many potentially legitimate connections, this seems like a very inappropriate and heavy-handed technical response to unwanted requests from a particular country. It also saves no bandwidth since the filtering happens at the receiving server after the packets have travelled through the network.

From a political science and ideological perspective, industrialized and democratic companies benefit little form blocking the access of citizens of 'pariah' nations to non-classified information. Any opportunity to make available memes that offer alternatives to the totalitarian state line further create the opportunity for the expansion of democracy and free access and speech in those countries. Blocking national IP ranges in this manner would also decrease this opportunity.

Re:some ideas for networking

[MightyMartian]

Can you point to a time when the net was safe for families and businesses. When it was still reasonably safe, I don't recall very many businesses and damn few families even being on it, and it's the sheer stupidity of families and businesses that has been part of the problem with net security.