[fixed] The Mana World could be unavailable in Russia.

[Hello=)]

The mana world could be unavailable in Russia, state-wide.

The reasons behind this fact are simple: CloudFlare CDN does not minds hosting some really dubious projects (like 2ch, etc where you can face some really questionable content) and then they also tend to ignore most of abuse reports as well. This prompted local regulators to issue IP bans on at least some cloudflare CDN servers. This means the following: each and every ISP in Russia required to block these IPs under risk of severe fines. While this censorship-style regulation is questionable for sure, they actually have some valid point: servers serving your content also serve rather questionable content at same time and their owner refuses to remove such content. So it has come to this. TMW updates download could and would fail in Russia. Generally speaking, TMW could be unusable at Russia at this point, "thanks" to CloudFlare.

It seems to be banned by IP (108.162.197.125), state-wide ban. Issuer of ban is a Russian drug-regulation agency. Failing URL is http://tmwdata.org/updates/news.txt?hos ... aworld.org

P.S. and btw, I reported this condition about 2 months ago in IRC.

Moderator edit: see MadCamel's reply.

[nm0i]

...

[o11c]

And what are we supposed to do about that? Switch to another update server until the powers that be decide to ban that too? Keep switching the update host every few days?

If you don't like someone breaking the internet, go after the people breaking the internet. If that means replacing your entire government, then fork your entire government, commit a fix, and push.

[nm0i]

Do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Don't even dare to thing about it, don't even think about decentralizing updates. These thoughts are for weak.

[Hello=)]

If you don't like someone breaking the internet, go after the people breaking the internet.

So I came here. Initial design of Internet protocol assumes everyone haves their own IP address (and does not shares it with some ilegal drug dealers and somesuch). At the end of day, if you share your house with drug dealers, you don't have to be surprised SWAT squad roams around and causes "some inconvenience". Sharing IPs wasn't a part of IP protocol design, to begin with. Does not changes the fact banning CDNs is silly. However world is not perfect.

And what you're supposed to do? Hmm... some people you know have got a number of ideas how to fix this crap. To my surprise, some TMW devs are not ignorant about what would happen to players.

[wushin]

See my thoughts here
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=18231

IMO, mirrored hosts of updates would be nice for when these situations pop up as they always do for a number of reasons; routing, bans, port blocking, etc.

[o11c]

Mirrored hosts of updates is not a tenable solution if they do not share the same domain name. I don't think it's possible to share the domain name since cloudflare does its own balancing of it.

[wushin]

... o11c the CloudFlare is the problem. As thats the IP banned in Russia.
As a tenable solution the idea that people host update mirrors and people can select from local mirrors when CloudFlare has problems for them. Short term.

Log term the best CDN is geographic edge
- Get a list of "trusted" mirrors (See any major distro that uses apt/rpm)
- Each of those should have a CDN attached in front of it
- Based on Geoip/config setting you can change the update server

If this sounds familiar you do this step setting up Debian.

[SriNitayanda]

I thought the long term solution is that t3st3r and nm0i would start a revolution in Russia

[o11c]

wushin, all of those things you're saying we should have are what we already have with CloudFlare. CloudFlare is not the problem, Russian censorship is the problem.

[Hello=)]

wushin, all of those things you're saying we should have are what we already have with CloudFlare. CloudFlare is not the problem, Russian censorship is the problem.

The "Russian censorship" haves no any reasons to ban downloads of some MMORPG on its own. However, if you share your IPs with illegal drug dealers, its another story.

And there ARE some problems
1) Single domain name is easy to block.
2) You do not control what else being hosted together with your content. So it happens it shares IPs with drug dealers and somesuch. That's where cloudflare suxx. Thats what can prompt regulators for IP bans.
3) In fact CloudFlare suxx in Russia even without any censorship, having very bad download rates and ton of failed downloads.

Basically, as seen from Russia: first, download rates just dropped to the hell and there was many failed downloads after TMW switched to cloudflare. Then, as if it was not enough already, some IPs of cloudflare were blocked by regulators since they tend to ignore abuse reports. Do you honestly think international projects should be managed this way?

And speaking of censorship and somesuch, isnt it ironic USA kicked the butt of wikileaks web site a number of times? Then, Snowden have to hide here in Russia from USA "democracy" for launching ... democratic processes. Maybe someone should be less USA-centric and stop using double standards? You simply do not have balanced, worldwide view while dealing with international project.

[Nard]

wushin, all of those things you're saying we should have are what we already have with CloudFlare. CloudFlare is not the problem, Russian censorship is the problem.

The "Russian censorship" haves no any reasons to ban downloads of some MMORPG on its own. However, if you share your IPs with illegal drug dealers, its another story.
[...]

+1

This can also happen in some EEC countries, not only for drugs dealing, but also for pornography diffusion without minors control, pedophily related image diffusion, negationism, authors and publishers rights transgression spamming and so on. There is a strong lobby in EEC to censor such hosts the hard way.

[blackrazor]

If you don't like someone breaking the internet, go after the people breaking the internet. If that means replacing your entire government, then fork your entire government, commit a fix, and push.

Censorship isn't the problem. Sharing your IP with drug dealers and other criminals is the problem. And it is far more sane to find another file host that won't share your IP with drug dealers than it is to advocate bloody revolution in another country.

I wonder if you would be so glib, or so willing to risk your life in a revolution if Cloudflare was censored for illegal activities in your own country?

[o11c]

Censorship isn't the problem. Sharing your IP with drug dealers and other criminals is the problem. And it is far more sane to find another file host that won't share your IP with drug dealers than it is to advocate bloody revolution in another country.

Shared IP addresses are no longer the exception, but the norm. Ideally, the world would have better IPv6 support so we *could* have unique IP addresses. But currently, we do *not* live in a world where you can have as many unique IP addresses as you want, and we don't get to choose whose IP addresses we share.

Also, given that it's Russia, the things being censored are probably political opposition (especially people talking about Ukraine right now), homosexuals, and religions - not actually criminals.

I wonder if you would be so glib, or so willing to risk your life in a revolution if Cloudflare was censored for illegal activities in your own country?

I absolutely would.

[nm0i]

o11c, using ipv6 is not effective. Only possible way to resolve it is to kill all americans as they're using too many ipv4 addresses.

I think instead of making revolution in Russia it is far more effective to use nukes on north-american continent. Thus, there'd be no choice to find alternate hosting for datafiles and we will fix ipv4 problem for long time.