IP bans are something you should resort to when it’s literally that or your servers choke to death on botnet spam
Comment on Guess I'm banned by Know Your Meme now. [yippee.wav]
Fondots@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I was recently reading some Wikipedia article on my phone and when I was scrolling I accidentally hit a button to edit it and was greeted by a message that my IP was banned from editing for the next 10 months.
I haven’t even attempted to edit Wikipedia in probably 20 years. Admittedly last time I did I was probably about 14 years old, and it may have been some juvenile vandalism, but somehow I don’t think that they managed to trace me from a computer in my high school library to my current cell phone, or that anything I did warranted a 21 year ban
So obviously it’s because phones using cellular Internet go through IP addresses only slightly less often than most people breathe.
It feels like that sort of IP ban really isn’t particularly useful. The vandals probably aren’t usually on that address and most of the time it’s getting used by random people who probably don’t even think about editing Wikipedia.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
ZeldaFreak@lemmy.world 1 day ago
IP Bans are usually pointless. Not all ISPs give a connection a static IP or even solely an IP (DSlite). The reason is they don’t want private people hosting stuff and generating more traffic and they can charge you more. My ISP (Vodafone Cable in Germany) didn’t even gave me an IPv4 to use (it’s called DSlite/Dual stack lite), meaning I was behind a NAT on their end and many shared that IP. I did ask them nicely if I could get a real IPv4 for certain stuff and they gave it to me, but only when I book the upload boost for 5€ + a month. It’s not static but it only changes when my router is disconnected for a long time (I don’t know the exact time but at least several hours up to an day).
So usually an IP ban makes only sense for a limited time or specific ranges from companies (for example VPNs or hosting services that don’t care who books their service).
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Shared IPv4 addresses are not to deter hosting but because there aren’t enough v4 addresses to go around. Most ISPs will happily give you an entire block of persistent IPv6 addresses but won’t give you a v4 because of address space exhaustion.
ZeldaFreak@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I kinda worded it wrong. Some ISPs do give out full IPv4 addresses but do rotate them, because they can and do charge more for static IPs. This doesn’t have something to do with a lack of v4 addresses. Only DSlite has something to do with the lack of v4 addresses.