@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Likely aren't available at all in some countries. Why? Certainly not racially motivated. It's all about licensing/legal/regulatory reasons. Race has nothing at all to do with it.

Do you have any examples of geo blocking or are you grasping at straws only? These are all things we can use here.

Likewise, tons of websites I use now detect my location and force me to use Spanish. I hate that, but it's not blocking. It's an attempt to customize services for what they wrongfully assume is best for me.

I also constantly get sent to UK versions of online stores when I clearly indicated American ones. It's foolish and myopic, but it's not geo blocking nor obviously racist.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Netflix has different content available in different countries. Why? Certainly not racially motivated. Definitely about licensing agreements. (regulatory)

RIght, not blocked. Netflix works here and they make it clear that they provide content by "area detected." It's open and clear and you are never blocked.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Example: Hulu... that's not really available anywhere outside the US. Why? Certainly not racially motivated... but licensing I'm guessing? (regulatory)

I actually talked to them when I moved outside of the US. They don't just block their streaming service. They block their customer service, violating the law. They BREACH regulations in doing that. I actually had the Hulu rep complain that it was racist that only people actively in America could cancel their accounts since you couldn't even get service AND your only recourse was reporting credit card fraud.

Nice try, that's not licensing or regulation. That's flat our racism in every sense. Blocking the stream only, but providing a notice that the IP is detected outside a license zone isn't geo blocking, that's geo informing. They actually block and in doing so, break the law. So, yes, good point but not to the one you thought you were making.

In east Texas where my nieces went to high school, their schools were predominantly Vietnamese. And magically, those districts got different, and fewer, resources than neighboring districts with a much higher ratio of white students. There's lots of excuses made, but the bottom line is, what your race TENDS to be determines what services you TEND to get. Most racism doesn't have a DNA test. Most is done by targeting trends that mostly hurt one race and minimally hurt another. That's what racism looks like. In fact, that's almost always what it looks like. Individual situations, people attacking one single individual, isn't racism. That's just... being mean or whatever. It's when the attack is against a group, at least a small one. More than one person. It's not about them as a person, but about a group that they do not control their membership in.

If you want to be racist against hispanics, sure, many whites and blacks will get swept up in that. But they are an itty bitty percentage within the greater group. What's the non-hispanic, non-mixed racial numbers in north america south of the US border... 2% maybe? Mexico doesn't even recognize anything but mixed as an official race. And most of those people could, if they wanted to, immigrate somewhere and identify differently and never be discovered as having come from a predominantly hispanic nation.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Race refers to the categorization of human beings into groups based on physical attributes such as skin color, hair texture, and facial features. Geographic restrictions, on the other hand, pertain to limits or boundaries set on certain areas or locations.

This is an abhorrent right wing rhetoric that has been used to gerrymander and isolate poor, minority based neighborhoods. It is unthinkable to use this as logic. Geographic restrictions do NOT work with national boundaries, that's a known falsehood. And it is known that national boundaries have racial generalities.

You are exposing the point we are making.

Imagine if the blockage was based on "countries that speak English". And we tried to say "but not EVERYONE is white."

I think it needs to be said, blatant and obvious racism should never be defended. I understand the goals in trying to find some loophole to excuse horrible, detestable Americans doing what so many do. But that's not really ethical. Racism is always wrong, it's not appropriate to attempt to hide it or excuse it. I realize that racism is often pointed to in cases where it clearly doesn't exist. But this is a well known, inexcusable bit of racism (it happens to Europeans too, btw, it's not only about skin colour but also national identify, language, culture...) for which there is no viable, ethical (or in many cases legal) reason. Blocking real customers makes no business sense. Geo IP blocks provide no security, but do lose business. There are no regulations, security or business cases that I've ever had presented that would allow or excuse any level of geo blocking let alone broad blocking.

This is racism. That's black and white. THe question is only... why is it so okay to allow it?

I'll call out one company that lost a bit of business to it. xByte did this and flat out said they had no interest in customers that would ever travel outside the US and didn't care if it tarnished their reputation to appear to have failed as a technology company to anyone who did. They back peddled after losing customers and, more importantly, vendors, but we pointed out to them that it was STATED by their vendors that they were fired over blatant racism and while they claimed it not to be true, they offered no motivation to the contrary (and since none could exist, that makes sense.)

@EddieJennings said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

@CCWTech said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error.

I haven't used Amazon CloudFront, but have you confirmed that configuration is correct? Do you have any way to verify if there was any kind of burst of traffic that may have triggered some kind of policy that would cause traffic to be dropped?

On the question of racism, I would follow the technical issue to a potential policy issue. Then see if the policy was created to somehow allow and drop traffic based off of assuming the immutable physical characteristic (race) of the sender. My thought process wouldn't start with "traffic has been configured to be dropped because of a racist policy."

Yes, its trivial to confirm and it is a persistent issue living in a hispanic country. We have teams throughout Latin America with computers in the US and it's absolutely no effort to determine when the only factor that makes you blocked is "hispanic nation" and nothing else.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Which "race" is being blocked by restricting access to Nicaragua? Mestizo? Mixed indigenous and European (primarily Spanish) ancestry? Is spain blocked as well? Is France? Is costa rica? Is the entire central america blocked? Is Mexico? South America? Kinda short-sighted to think it's racially motivated when there are so many other, more likely, reasons for geographic blocks.

That you are trying to make an argument that "Latinos" don't exist so you can't block people by nature of being in a broader hispanic or, say, African group, I think makes the point.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

geographic blocks are not racially motivated.

This is obviously backwards. As you've not, not has anyone in years of me talking about this, supplied any plausible or factual benefit to blocking, but the negatives, including loss of business, loss of reputation, etc. don't just make it anti-business, but generally illegal (fiduciary responsibility in larger companies.)

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Did you somehow miss the list I posted of so many more likely reasons a country is blocked?

None of those are even plausible. Let alone LIKELY.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

What's your evidence to support the site blocking is racially motivated, and not, lets say, regulatory or otherwise motivated?

Because no regulation anywhere, ever is supported by geo blocking. That never qualifies for any regulation.

@Obsolesce said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

@CCWTech said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

Living outside the USA has shown me how many supposed 'IT Security Policies' are in my opinion, racist.

I got this today:

403 ERROR
The request could not be satisfied.
The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner.
If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation.
Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)
Request ID: zomv8JAx_0HrRCvqqrBVKdUVY0WYlrp6F0BhpVut-NLG060J2fKC-w==

1. I happen to be in Nicaragua right now, and I think it would be hard to argue that there are a lot of Nicaraguan hackers (In other words we aren't talking originating from China or Russia here).
2. Do IT staff really think that the hackers they should worry about aren't familiar with VPN's or other ways of spoofing their IP or location?

This happens from time to time and today it I guess annoyed me more than it normally does.

Thoughts?

Not sure what race has to do with geographic restrictions. I'd say it more-so has to do with laws, regulatory, and other such things:

• legal and regulatory compliance
• export controls
• licensing
• infrastructure / performance concerns
• economic considerations
• fraud/security concerns
• content sensitivities
• strategic business decisions
• taxation and financial regulations
• local partnerships or agreements
• network abuse (sure there's one single aspect of your hacking point)
• language and support concerns
• etc.

Well, when you block by large racial regions, and all of those other things don't apply, it's pretty strongly definitely about race.

None of those other things can be used in conjunction with geo-ip blocking. I'd say the opposite... I don't understand how you can mention those other things given that it doesn't work for that. Other than race and/or nationality (which are deeply tied) there's no other effective reason for geo blocking.

Power out here

@CCWTech said in Is it racist? I think it is.:

@CCWTech It looks like the usefulness of it was discussed here: https://mangolassi.it/topic/22519/linux-geoip-blocking
I'm not someone who finds racism in everything, but this just struck me as odd. Maybe I am totally off base.

A big former vendor here, xByte, lost TWO of their IT providers over these kinds of policies. They blocked "countries that speak Spanish" meaning anyone, that visits those countries for any purpose, or is detected as being in those countries even if they are not, would not only be blocked from xByte services, but provided with a screen that implied that their web hosting had failed, rather than been blocked. So they were willing to go out of their way to anti-market themselves, to convince would-be customers that their service was broken, to avoid getting them as customers. When asked about this, they doubled down that they had no interest in customers who might ever try to reach their sites from those regions. Foolish given that their entire IT team was in Costa Rica and blocked, and very upset about how they were treated prior to that outright blockage by "racial region".

@gjacobse said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

I’ve been wondering what else I could move to Proxmox as well. Realize that I could also move my ReadyNAS to a Nextcloud install if I get a better machine, cpu and drives..

Anything that runs on AMD64.

( image url)

We used to use osTicket. We love that it is free, open and self hosted. We felt the system felt slow and clunky.

Using FreshDesk here. Can't say that we love it, but it is definitely on the better side of things. We are on the free plan and it works fine. Lots of options and totally hosted for free.

If it is purely a single internal company, traditionally I've been most happy with Spiceworks. If you don't run up against their data configuration limits, it tends to be the best tech experience IMHO.

@nadnerB said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

That's not where 2023 is, lol

@garak0410 said in SpiceWorld 2023:

@TeleFox said in SpiceWorld 2023:

@garak0410 I actually decided to go this year. Hoping things will pick back up.. been AFK too long. See ya there.

Last year was "muted" but still good...I can only hope this year will be better...but sad they didn't get "The Spazmatics" to come back for the ACL Party...I hope they are better than last years group.

The Spazmatics were awesome.