Comment by hifromwork | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hifromwork | Hacker News Reader

>It means that more than one percent of the IPv4 real estate on the Internet (and probably much more) is occupied by people and organizations who are either clueless or just do not care how much the rest of us are paying to keep our websites on line

There's a significant mental leap here. "I block these IP to conserve my resources, therefore they belong to clueless or malicious organisations". It's wrong in both directions:

* I don't think Google, Bing and other crawlers are inherently malicious, and certainly not clueless. Search engines serve a very important role in the internet. Ditto archive.org, and probably dozens of other bots.

* IP based blocklists work well for honest bots (not malicious, or at least not illegal). Malicious bot operators just buy SIM cards and use regular mobile internet for the crawling (basically unblockable, because the IP may be renewed every day or every hour). And the really malicious actors use residential proxies, i.e. botnets that proxy traffic through normal users' computers. Anyway I wonder how many of those 56MM IP addresses are regular dynamically allocated consumer grade ISPs.

>1-5-2024

For the love of all that is holy, what is this date format.

"the IP may be renewed every day or every hour)"

What a coincidence! Right now from my phone on my carrier's network while traveling in the UK I am unable to reach https://cheapskatesguide.org My phone's IP address is likely on this guy's blacklist of 56M addresses. So I am forever going to remember whatever service this website provides may be arbitrarily unavailable unless I'm on a know good IP address. Overly aggressive blacklists like this are lame, make you lose customers, and go against the Internet's fundamental principle which is about the ability to exchange information with anyone in the world.

Not everyone on the internet is trying to get customers though.

I will also add the mentality of choosing to allow or deny access to your service for millions of IP addresses at a time based on some ill-defined rule or based on the service operator's whim is EXACTLY the same mentality that lead us to the current difficulty of running self-hosted email/outgoing SMTP servers.

"Oh because your dynamic IP address was assigned to and used by shady guys 2 years ago, now you cannot access my website, or all your emails will be flagged as spam."

Don't do that people.

I don't think the IP blocking refers to Google, Bing etc. The site has a robots.txt that allows for these. Of course if robots.txt isn't honored, an IP block is in order.

For-profit corporations aren't inherently malicious or benevolent. They are legal structures that maximize return on capital without moral judgement or care about what it does to others. A bit like Cthulhu.

https://cheapskatesguide.org/robots.txt

Corporations are legal entities incapable of any action. The actions carried out in their name are performed by people who very well can be malicious.

seeing month-day-year is one of my biggest pet peeves, why not just use day/month/year or year/month/day in a logical order.

mm/dd/yyyy is the most common format in the US. When speaking, I might say December 5, 2023, and this format matches that.

dd/mm/yyyy isn't objectively better IMO. It's what you're used to, making it easier for you to read. It's not what I'm used to, making it harder for me to read.

yyyy-mm-dd is the best format because it's sortable and unambiguous and standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

yyyy/mm/dd isn't standard or commonly used AFAIK, so best to avoid it.

mm-dd-yyyy also isn't standard or commonly used AFAIK, so best to avoid it.

https://xkcd.com/1179/

dd.mm.yyyy is better because it’s in an order, but that’s besides the point. If lots of native English speakers (Americans) use one way, and lots (U.K. and bros) use another, the only logical thing to do is use the unambiguous one (yyyy.mm.dd).

People who use mm.dd.yyyy in English text with no indication that they’re American, writing for Americans, have no place on this planet. Joking not joking.

>dd.mm.yyyy is better because it’s in an order,

DD/MM/YYYY vs MM/DD/YYYY each have pros and cons. I don't think we can objectively say 1 is better than the other. I agree YYYY-MM-DD is best. The standard is YYYY-MM-DD, not YYYY.MM.DD, so the dashed version is better than the dot version.

>People who use mm.dd.yyyy in English text with no indication that they’re American, writing for Americans, have no place on this planet. Joking not joking.

The same would apply to dd.mm.yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy with people who don't indicate what country they're from. A few other countries use DD/MM/YYYY:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

> the dashed version is better than the dot version

:) yeah I'm fine with either. Just typed with dots out of habit.

> The same would apply to dd.mm.yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy with people who don't indicate what country they're from. A few other countries use DD/MM/YYYY

I thought maybe that was a typo and you meant "A few other countries use MM/DD/YYYY"? But then I looked on that page and only saw a few places that use a variety. Usually when a country uses multiple standards for anything, it's a sign that one of them is "token". For example English is one of two official languages in India:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India

English would be widely spoken there, but it's widely spoken everywhere without being an official language.

So if we take countries that say "yeah whatever, we'll do MM/DD/YYYY too", that leave America ;)

Oops, it was a typo, I did mean "A few other countries use MM/DD/YYYY".

According to the page, the Philippines, Panama, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands use it as the primary format.

And Ghana and Togo use MM/DD/YYYY as the primary format in Ewe.

According to [1], Canada's official format is YYYY-MM-DD; and both MM/DD/YYYY and DD/MM/YYYY will lead to confusion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Cana...

Month: 1-12 Day: 1-31 Year: unbounded

I come from a dd/mm/yyyy country, but you can’t say mm/dd/yyyy is completely illogical.

Don't bots also get covertly installed on regular folks machines? And those machines will be running from domestic ISP IP address blocks which are commonly shared/cycled between the ISP's customers. Block those and you are blocking legit customers.

> Block those and you are blocking legit customers.

The block doesn't need to be permanent. There are people out there publishing list of IPs known to belong to botnets and they're regularly updated. You can ban an IP for, say, 72 hours, and update your ipset regularly.

But anyway I've got a philosophical question...

If a customer has its computer owned by a botnet operator and that computer connects to a banking website, is the customer legit?

Well you'd need to know if the customer or the bot is connecting. Both are on the same IP which was my point. Rationally I'd want to block any compromised device regardless of the customer, but it's a complex problem for sure.

>>1-5-2024

>For the love of all that is holy, what is this date format.

Most commonly used in the US. 'Cause we gotta show it like we say it. I think.

With dashes? We almost always use slashes here in the US. The only time I see dashes is for ISO format, and that's year-first.

Yes. It’s less common but looks unremarkable to me.

Sure. It was the dominant written style throughout the 20th cent and folks kept on with it.

No, you have it confused with 1/5/2024. We don't use dashes with this order.

I've seen dashes. Much less common but I have seen it used and I live in NYC.

People sometimes get used to dashes in dates when / is an illegal character in a filename.

I see mm/dd/yyyy much more often, though I did see mm-dd-yyyy or mm-dd-yy a fair amount in goverment and military work.

See https://eforms.state.gov/Forms/ds5507.PDF for example, page two. Though again, it's not as common as slashes.

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