Monday, August 25, 2025
A neat idea, but I can see this leading to the Balkanization of the Internet
I did not expect my recent post about blocking a Chinese web bot to generate such a large discussion at Hacker News and to a lesser degree, Lobsters (for the record, I did not submit my post to either site). Reading over the comments at both sites, I think my favorite comment so far is:
"I'm seriously thinking that the CCP encourage this with maybe the hope of externalizing the cost of the Great Firewall to the rest of the world. If China scrapes content, that's fine as far as the CCP goes; If it's blocked, that's fine by the CCP too (I say, as I adjust my tin foil hat)."
Then turn the tables on them and make the Great Firewall do your job! Just choose a random snippet about illegal Chinese occupation of Tibet or human rights abuses of Uyghur people each time you generate a page and insert it as a breaker between paragraphs. This should get you blocked in no time :)
Hacker News comment on “Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don't like me”
There's also the 1989 Tiananmem Square massacre, Falun Gong persecution and last but not least, that Xi Jinping looks like Winnie-the-Pooh. I was considering the idea to include such information in each post, but then in a follow-up comment to that one:
I just tried this, i took some strings about Falun Gong and the Tianmen thing from the chinese wikipedia and put them into my SSH server banner. The connection attempts from the Tencent AS ceased completely, but now they come from Russia, Lithuania and Iran instead.
Other Hacker News comment on “Bro, ban me at the IP level if you don't like me”
Russia and Iran don't surprise me, but Lithuania? Weird. But ultimately, yes, I get China to block me, only for them to outsource their scraping to other countries.
Sigh.
