The unintended consequences of blocking IP addresses

Re:The unintended consequences of blocking IP addresses by jrochkind1 on Friday December 30, 2022 @08:12AM (#34184682)

Yes, it occured to me that the "obvious" answer is that instead of a court order for ISPs to block the IP addresses, there would be a court order for CloudFlare to drop the customer. The intended effect of the court is the same -- the customer is blocked unless/until they move to a different provider (this was true anyway already), but without the collateral damage.

In an essay that seems to be a sober technical analysis of the issue, it's noticeable that they didn't even bring up this solution. I guess they don't want that solution either, so don't want to bring it up, not even to explain why they don't want it, it would only confuse things. But, I mean, we're going to think of it anyway...

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Re:The unintended consequences of blocking IP addresses by creeble on Friday December 30, 2022 @05:56PM (#34191114)

I think there's a jurisdictional issue for Austria to get Cloudflare to do anything at all.

So the court says "fine, just block Cloudflare's servers at all Austrian ISPs. Perhaps that will get their attention."

See, Cloudflare wants it both ways: They don't want to have to tell rights-holders who their free-tier, movie-thieving customers are, but hey, that doesn't mean you should block their servers. Right?

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Re:The unintended consequences of blocking IP addresses by jrochkind1 on Saturday December 31, 2022 @08:59AM (#34196458)

The "obvious" answer (which Cloudflare does not like for "obvious" reasons) is for them to just say: Sure, Austria, if you give us a court order to remove/block a certain customer identified by hostname, we will do so, no need to block the entire IP.

But yes, they want to have it both ways -- the only way available to you to block is an overreach that harms the internet, and we are not interested in providing you other ways to block.

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