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Showing posts from September, 2017

Russia becomes an internet outcast for some reason

It's starting to happen more and more often to me. I'm trying to use some service and all of a sudden I see an error page, sometimes a custom one but more often generated by cloudflare or a similar service, with error message effectively saying that IP addresses from Russia are banned on the service. And what is even more interesting, most of this services don't have any particular policy reasons not to allow Russian users, it's not not like they are publishing prescribed materials or doing anything interesting whatsoever. A payment processor, a popular online course provider, some random forums and information sites, one site with educational videos that I like (that one is especially funny because I'm banned from the subscription page and so can't pay them but their cdn does't care and I can actually download any video I want). But why does it happen? Is there some recommendation in some popular security guideline "block Russia, Cambodia, and Afghan