Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

There's some weird ones you'd never think of that originate an inordinate amount of bad traffic. Like Seychelles. A tiny little island nation in the middle of the ocean inhabited by... bots apparently? Cyprus is another one.

Re: China, their cloud services seem to stretch to Singapore and beyond. I had to blacklist all of Alibaba Cloud and Tencent and the ASNs stretched well beyond PRC borders.

The Seychelles has a sweetheart tax deal with India such that a lot of corporations who have an India part and a non-India part will set up a Seychelles corp to funnel cash between the two entities. Through the magic of "Transfer Pricing"[1] they use this to reduce the amount of tax they need to pay.

It wouldn't surprise me if this is related somehow. Like maybe these are Indian corporations using a Seychelles offshore entity to do their scanning because then they can offset the costs against their tax or something. It may be that Cyprus has similar reasons. Istr that Cyprus was revealed to be important in providing a storefront to Russia and Putin-related companies and oligarchs.[2]

So Seychelles may be India-related bots and Cyprus Russia-related bots.

[1] https://taxjustice.net/faq/what-is-transfer-pricing/#:~:text...

[2] Yup. My memory originated in the "Panama Papers" leaks https://www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/cypr...

There is a Chinese player that has taken effective control of various internet-related entities in the Seychelles. Various ongoing court-cases currently.

So the seychelles traffic is likely really disguised chinese traffic.

its not weird .its companies putting themselves in places where regulations favor their business models.

it wont be all chinese companies or ppl doing the scraping. its well known that a lot of countries dont mind such traffic as long as it doesnt target themselves or for the west also some allies.

laws arent the same everywhere and so companies can get away with behavior in one place which seem almost criminal in another.

and what better place to put your scrapers than somewhere where there is no copyright.

russia also had same but since 2012 or so they changed laws and a lot of traffic reduced. companies moved to small islands or small nation states (favoring them with their tax payouts, they dont mind if j bring money for them) or few remaining places like china who dont care for copyrights.

its pretty hard to get really rid of such traffic. you can block stuff but mostly it will just change the response your server gives. flood still knockin at the door.

id hope someday maybe ISPs or so get more creative but maybe they dont have enough access and its hard to do this stuff without the right access into the traffic (creepy kind) or running into accidentally censoring the whole thing.

I don't think these are "Chinese players" and is linked to [1], although it may be that the hands changed many times that the IP addresses have been leased or bought by Chinese entities.

[1] https://mybroadband.co.za/news/internet/350973-man-connected...

this all from Cloud Innovation vpns,proxies,spam,bots CN Seychelles IP holder

omg... that's why my self-hosted servers are getting nasty trafic from SC all the time.

The explanation is that easy??

ucloud ("based in HK") has been an issue (much less lately though), and I had to ban the whole digital ocean AS (US). google cloud, aws and microsoft have also some issues...

hostpapa in the US seems to become the new main issue (via what seems a 'ip colocation service'... yes, you read well).

> So the seychelles traffic is likely really disguised chinese traffic.

Soon: chineseplayer.io

Which site is it?

My own shitty personal website that is so uninteresting that I do not even wish to disclose here. Hence my lack of understanding of the down-votes for me doing what works for my OWN shitty website, well, server.

In fact, I bet it would choke on a small amount of traffic from here considering it has a shitty vCPU with 512 MB RAM.

I forgot about that: all the nice game binaries from them running directly on nearly all systems...

> be a hero and die a martyr

I believe it's "an hero".

People get weird when you do what you want with your own things.

Want to block an entire country from your site? Sure, it’s your site. Is it fair? Doesn’t matter.

Oh thank you kind sir.

Uh, no, it's definitely not. Hero begins with a consonant, so it should be preceded by "a", not "an".

Welcome to British English. The h in hero isn’t pronounced, same as hospital, so you use an before it.

This is wrong.

Unless maybe you're from the east end of london.

I’m not claiming everyone pronounces it that way. But he’s an ero, we need to find an ospital, ninety miles an our. You will find government documents and serious newspapers that refer to an hospital.

Thanks, appreciate it. I would hope so. I do not care about down-votes per se, my main complaint is really the fact that I am somehow in the wrong for doing what I deem is right for my shitty server(s).

That's not right. It's:

a hospital

an hour

a horse

It all comes down to how the word is pronounced but it's not consistent. 'H' can sound like it's missing on not. Same with other leading consonants that need an 'an'. Some words can go both ways.

Huh? Who is them in this case?

Likewise, when I was at school, many of my older teachers would say things like "an hotel" although I've not heard anyone say anything but "a hotel" for decades now. I think I've heard "an hospital" relatively recently though.

Weirdly, in certain expressions I say "before mine eyes" even though that fell out of common usage centuries ago, and hasn't really appeared in literature for around a century. So while I wouldn't have encountered it in speech, I've come across enough literary references that it somehow still passed into my diction. I only ever use it for "eyes" though, never anything else starting with a vowel. I also wouldn't use it for something mundane like "My eyes are sore", but I'm not too clear on when or why I use the obsolete form at other times - it just happens!

Ignore the trolls. Also, if they are upset with you they should focus their vitriol on me. I block nearly all of BRICS especially Brazil as most are hard wired to not follow even the simplest of rules, most data-centers, some VPN's based on MSS, posting from cell phones and much more. I am always happy to give people the satisfaction of down-voting me since I use uBlock to hide karma.

In ublock -> my filters

    # HN Block Karma View
    news.ycombinator.com##.comhead .score:style(overflow: hidden; display: inline-block; line-height: 0.1em; width: 0; margin-left: -1.9em;)
    news.ycombinator.com###hnmain > tbody > tr:first-of-type table td:last-of-type .pagetop:style(font-size: 0!important; color: transparent!important;)
    news.ycombinator.com###hnmain > tbody > tr:first-of-type table td:last-of-type .pagetop > *:style(font-size: 10pt; line-height: 1.45em;)
    news.ycombinator.com###logout::before:style(content: "|"; padding: 0.25em;)
    news.ycombinator.com##form.profileform tbody tr:nth-child(3)

Generic American English pronounces the 'h' in hospital, hero, heroine, but not hour.

Same is true for RP English.

Therefore, for both accents/dialects, the correct phrases are "a hotel", "a hero", "a heroine", and "an hour".

Cockney, West Country, and a few other English accents "h drop" and would use "an 'our", "an 'otel", etc.

Now do historic. Suddenly all Brits turn into Cockney's.

Interesting: https://techafricanews.com/2025/07/24/smart-africa-calls-for...

Sure, and all Americans sound like they're from Ocracoke or Tangier.

If you IP block all of China then run a resolver the logs will quickly fill with innocuous domains with NS entries that are blocked. Add those to a dns block list then add their ASN to your company IP block list. Amazing how traffic you don’t want plummets.

> RP English

One might think RP English certainly doesn't determine correctness.

They're referring to the fact that Chinese game companies (Tencent, Riot through Tencent, etc.) all have executables of varying levels of suspicion (i.e. anti-cheat modules) running in the background on player computers.

Then they're making the claim that those binaries have botnet functionality.

Personal sites are definitely interesting, way more interesting than most of the rest of the web.

I was thinking I would put your site into archive.org, using ArchiveBot, with reasonable crawl delay, so that it is preserved if your hardware dies. Ask on the ArchiveTeam IRC if you want that to happen.

https://chat.hackint.org/?join=%23archiveteam-bs

Those are nice filters, I checked out your profile too!

Thank you. :)

It is a public git repository for the most part, that is the essence of my website, not really much writings besides READMEs, comments in code and commits.

I was thinking of 'hotel'. Wrong building. Ooops.

A public git repository is even more interesting, for both ArchiveTeam Codearchiver, and Software Heritage. The latter offers an interface for saving code automatically.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Codearchiver https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Software_Heritage https://archive.softwareheritage.org/save/

They can exploit local priviledge escalation flaws without "RCE".

And you are right, kernel anti-cheat are rumored to be weaponized by hackers, and making the previous even worse.

And when the kid is playing his/her game at home, if daddy or mummy is a person of interest, they are already on the home LAN...

Well, you get the picture: nowhere to run, orders of magnitude worse than it was before.

Nowadays, the only level of protection the administrator/root access rights give you, is to mitigate any user mistake which would break his/her system... sad...

After initial save, do they perform automatic git pulls? What happens if there are potential conflicts? I wonder how it all works behind the surface. I know I ran into issues with "git pull --all" before, for example. Or what if it is public software that is not mine? I saved some git repositories (should I do .tar.gz too for the same project? Does it know anything about versions?).

On Software Heritage: for forges (GitLab, cgit etc), every couple of months SWH lists all repos, pulls new/updated ones. I think if you save an individual repo, it gets pulled later too, but I'm not sure of the schedule. They have custom tooling (open source) for doing the importing of repos, tarballs and other things. They deduplicate on the backend, so if you cloned some repos then the files/commits that are shared between them are saved once. They import the git tags (and other refs) too.

ArchiveTeam Codearchiver is quite a bit different, it does one-shot archiving of repos into VCS-native export formats, like git bundles. There is some deduplication based on commit hashes I think.