nginx: How To Block Visitors By Country With The GeoIP Module (Debian/Ubuntu)

I don't know about anyone else, but articles like this boil my blood.

Not because I have anything against the author or the technical content, but because someone out there feels the need to divide the global Internet up into chunks for some economic or political end and I find both of those motivations distasteful.

I fail to see in the 21st century why we should be perpetuating these regional archaic norms when we should be more forward-looking.

Sorry, my Wednesday morning rant.

I guess my silly question is: why and what for?

I see a lot more harm than benefits in doing that. After all, no matter what the contents, it is preventing normal average people from getting in .

> ...why and what for?

Economic. So you can charge by geographic area. Many companies do this.

Political. So you can block certain areas for policy reasons.

And a subset of the latter: Legal. So you can block as required by law.

None of which changes the correctness of both your assessments, of course.

@jdixon --

And you've got the BBC which is a mishmash of all of them.

And how well does GeoIP hold up to various forms of IP spoofing?!

Case in point:

http://www.digitalspy.ca/gaming/news/a401849/world-of-warcra...

All this is going to do is alienate all of those gamers, hurt Blizzard both financially and in terms of their public perception. I see no winners in this situation.

Another case in point: SelekTor (sp?).

Yeh just use SelekTOR to get around blocks, selecting a country is easy and so is creating a URL pattern so it only redirects for a specific website making most web blocks pointless.

Doing patterns to get around media website blocks is a bit more complicated since you don't want the the stream being redirected just the geo ip block test. But for your average website without any major media content, then a pattern something like *websitename.com/* is simple enough to add.

I am also in the process of accepting requests for sites to be added to SelekTOR's default patterns so if their is a website that is blocked and you would like to see it unblocked using SelekTOR then you can contact us via http://www.caledoniacomputers.com/?page_id=247 and provide the details of the site you wish unblocked.

Please note I am unable to unblock US based sites or sites blocked by the US government.