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Comment by nicolas_t | Hacker News Reader

They block any connections from HK so I'm not allowed to access the site. The number of sites blocking any connections from certain countries like Hong Kong as increased lately, it's becoming rather frustrating and I can't really see the reasoning behind it.

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The number of spam connections emerging from China and Russia are huge. For small firms who might not have the expertise or the budget to host things on CloudFlare, wholesale blocking off IP addresses from the two countries results in almost 100% decrease in spam.

I have a VPS which I maintain for myself to experiment with different services, and I do the same. The number of spam attempt to connect on my ssh port went down from around 10k per day to 1 per week.

Yup, for all my clients it is Russia, China, Brazil, Vietnam.

It's all floods, spam, hacks, bots, malware, with zero market for my clients. All downside, zero upside in accepting any traffic from those places.

In my experience, China and Russia get blocked by many corporations' web application firewalls (WAFs) or other firewalls. You may be caught by that restriction.

I'm in Taiwan and am also blocked. What did Taiwan do wrong?

It's strange, clicking the "International websites"[0] at the bottom right, they explicitly state that they'd allow calling the Mandarin version Taiwan instead of China, if the translator wanted.

There is a public mail list[1][2] of the webmasters at the bottom of the page as well, if you want to talk them.

[0] : https://kde.org/support/international/

[1] : mailto://kde-www@kde.org

[2] : https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/

Nothing, the vendors can block/choose where they want to advertise their products in.

Is VPN usage not common in HK as it in in China?

Unlike China, we don't have to deal with the great firewall... I do use a few VPNs but that's mostly for testing things from different sites. I've also noticed that VPNs tend to be blocked too.

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