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lucb1e a day ago

Blocking providers makes sense since they can talk to the human that is doing the abuse. It's their customer after all

Like with IP ranges that send a lot of spam/abuse, it's the provider's space in the end. If the sender has no identification (e.g. User-Agent string is common for http bots) and the IP space owner doesn't take reasonable steps, the consequence is (imo) not to guess who may be human and who may be a bot, but to block the IP address(es) that the abuse is coming from. I remember our household being blocked once when I, as a teenager, bothered a domain squatter who was trying to sell a normal domain for an extortionary price. Doing a load of lookups on their system, I couldn't have brought it down from an ADSL line but apparently it was an unusual enough traffic spike to get their attention, as was my goal, and I promptly learned from the consequences. We got unblocked some hours after my parent emailed the ISP saying it wouldn't happen again (and it hasn't)

You don't have to look very far on HN to see the constant misclassifications of people as bots now that all the blocking has gotten seven times more aggressive in an attempt to gatekeep content and, in some cases, protect from poorly written bots that are taking it out on your website for some reason (I haven't had the latter category visit my website yet, but iirc curl/Daniel mentioned a huge outbound traffic volume to one scraper)

reconnecting a day ago | parent [-]

I like the part about leaving the neighborhood blocked from internet access. Did neighbours find out that it was because of you?

However, email accounts could be stolen, and this makes the email provider a victim as well.

This particular case sounds very simple, and I'm quite confident that if we dig further, it's highly possible that all accounts use some pattern that would be easy to identify and block without hurting legitimate users.

lucb1e a day ago | parent [-]

Neighbors? No, household; the ISP can't see into the house's network which MAC address did it, so they blocked the subscriber line that served my parents' household back when I lived with them (it was partially blocked actually: you could still visit info pages about the block on the ISP website and contact them by email)

Edited to add:

> this makes the email provider a victim as well

Sure, but they have to deal with a hijacked account anyway, better to tackle it at the source. I'm also not saying to block the whole provider right away, at least not if you can weather the storm for a business day while you await a proper response from their side, just to use blocks when there is nobody steering the ship on their end