Started happening a couple of weeks ago. I get captchas only in incognito mode. As to why I’m using incognito, none of your damn business.
Just Hinet letting spammers and botnets run wild on their network, as usual.
I was blocked from two of my favorite websites for the last two weeks because Cloudflare has decided that all of Taiwan’s internet addresses are botnets.
No, I’m not joking. Hinet has had shitty network security for at least the last 20 years and they just don’t give a shit.
Yeah hinet really is the wild west. They just do nothing about these repeat offender IPs. I noticed when I accidently leave a port open when doing local development I get hit by fuzzers almost immediately.
So are you saying ISP’s should be scanning peoples internet traffic and if it doesn’t suite their taste stop it? What kind of traffic monitoring is allowed by the law here?
I feel the problem is that people here have no understanding of computer security what so ever. Home and small office computers are full of malware and for most its a meaningless problem as long as email and social media works. Passwords are all numbers and so on.
Hence botnets run wild.
If it is to the point where customer’s browsing experience is being affected, as in the OP’s case, then it may be in the ISP’s interest to do something, I suppose. What do you think they should do?
Again, in my case the issue has gone away. Other posts in the thread have said this was a widespread issue in Taiwan a couple of weeks ago; to me that suggests there’s nothing I could have done.
Sure, it may be intermittent, or it may have gone away forever. But my response was more directed at @Twnfinn, who raised an interesting point, well to me anyway, around what an ISP’s responsibility is in this scenario.
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ISPs should be dumb pipes. Security should be up to end users.
Criminal activity such as botnets, spam, and malware? Yes.
Or you can just let things go to hell and let everyone else on the planet IP range ban your entire country. Which is what has been happening over the last few weeks.
Which do you think is preferable?
90% of end users barely know how to turn their machines on and off. That’s why network security is the responsibility of the people who are running the, you know, the network.
That’s their problem.
And botnets aren’t illegal.
Spam may be illegal in some jurisdictions, but not all.
Not worth the effort.
So as an ISP what am I supposed to track? Are you allowed to watch child porn? How about learning to make weapons? Or order drugs? What about you writing something nasty on Forumosa, should the ISP block that too?
It’s not the power companies job to decide what you do with your electricity and its not the ISP’s job in a western democracy to decide how you use your internet.
That’s my take on it. Not an IT professional so its possible I’m missing some technical aspect.
It’s just like power and water. You pay for what you use. If someone wants to check out what you are doing, they need a warrant.
Actually, they are (in most civilized jurisdictions). Most of them are malware infections on people’s computers.
Try it and see what happens.
Yes, that was obvious.
No, botnets are just networks of interconnected devices. Researchers use them for legitimate purposes all the time. If they are used to spread malware, perform Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks, steal data, etc… it is those acts that are illegal.
The power analogy is an interesting one. I remember in my home country, there was some collusion between law and enforcement and the power companies, although I’m murky on the details. If the power bill on a rental property went up a lot, chances are you would get a visit from law enforcement. Indoor marijuana growing was popular for a while.
Yes
We should just go ask China for some tools. They have great ones, probably offer them very cheap if we share the data with them.
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This started with me a little more than a year ago when I switched VPNs. It hasn’t happened much for the last few months.
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