Re:HN bans Hector Martin’s home IP address
by dang on Wednesday October 04, 2023 @05:23PM
(#37771997)
If someone wants to tell me the username, I'd be happy to look into what happened. Without the username, I don't know of any way to check this particular case—all I can say is what changed during those few days, and what changed is that we blocked more IPs that were making logged-out requests; logged-in requests would not have been affected.
Since that link refers to opening HN in an incognito window—and all those requests would be logged-out—most probably it was that activity that triggered the block. As I think I said elsewhere, it's hard to distinguish between a legit user accessing a bunch of HN links in various tabs, and a distributed botnet making similar handfuls of requests from a million different IP addresses.
What I can tell you for sure, though, is that the claim that we were targeting any individual user is quite false. Isn't that the main point?
* https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111165508206292497
Based on other posts in that thread though, he also appears to be behind CG-NAT, which is always a confounding factor for IP-based blocking. Maybe someone else on his netblock is running that crawler.