Issues accessing FT on specific ISP in India
 

Haven't faced any issues normally accessing FT over any network pretty much anywhere in the world, but when using Airtel (Indian telecom operator) I am always blocked. It doesn't happen with the other major telecom operators in India, or on any Wi-Fi network I have used. Resolves itself when I switch to a VPN. Is this an ISP specific issue, and if so, how to resolve this?


https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...9eddb2a050.png

I would guess that it's just been flagged for its use in scamming/spamming

I am sorry but this is a poor excuse. More than 300 million people in India have Airtel service and you can’t flag all 300m as spam. I face the same issue when I am traveling in India on AirTel network and gave up on accessing FT in disgust.

I'm also having this issue with a dedicated IP I'm using in San Jose, CA. It appears that FlyerTalk have some liberal ASN block rules configured in Cloudflare, which means they're blocking large swaths of IP addresses preemptively. It's quite annoying to have to switch to a VPN to use this one website.

Both Airtel mobile and broadband service IP blocks in India are still blocked by cloudflare. This is like blocking a group of people larger than population of most countries!

Not a Cloudflare decision as these IPs can access other Cloudflare fronted sites.

Since this issue has been around for more than a year on this thread, I guess contributions when in that country is neither missed nor sought after enough to fix.

An odd position for an International website.

Reminds me of dumb administrators who used to block entire AOL IPs when it had the dominant number of online consumers.

It's due in part to Cloudflare's risk assessment of certain IP connections, and what we have to assume that Internet Brands have taken a Cloudflare protection feature and turned the dial up to maximum.

So it is Cloudflare but also Internet Brand's choices.

Since this block doesn't seem to exist for any other Cloudflare guarded site for this major ISP that I can see or hear reports of, FT seems either irrationally paranoid or uncaring about this segment uniquely from other major sites.

It is like blocking all Comcast IPs because just the sheer number of subscribers guarantee a substantial number of hacking/spam attempts via those IPs.

The only such broad blocks I know of are for AWS IPs because those can be and have been used anonymously to spam/hack.

Banning the largest ISP of a country is not a rational choice.

I am not internet brands, but their blocks have impacted the major ISPs of other countries before. Perhaps not a country the size of India but significant counties nevertheless. The blocks are not permanent and come and go based on risk.
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But if I were Internet Brands running some fora on a commercial basis, where I want to do my best to (a) guarantee availability and uptime so the majority of users can freely use the service and (b) have to work with the software they have available to run the fora which doesn't defend itself well against brute force and DDOS attacks - noting that logins are a simple username and password, then using services like Cloudflare and turning the dial up to maximum is one strategy in an internet environment that is increasingly hostile to defend a platform that can't defend itself easily.

You suggest that blocking an entire country that Cloudflare has probably had significant telemetry as being a source of malicious traffic as being inappropriate, but with limited time and resource, running a service that is free for the end users to use, and the need to lean on the services of platforms like Cloudflare which are in themselves not cheap, what else would you suggest?

I would suggest they look at every other site that is able to run without such a block and not be subjected uniquely to all the horrors. Which by itself would suggest that the block is based on faulty data/reasoning/attitude of the administrators rather than a rational decision. Or may be it was based on a singular event in the past. May be the administrators can take a look and clarify on current data than people with no knowledge defend it.

No need to assume that somehow a large part of the country targets FlyerTalk of all the sites out there just because the block exists. Of course, it is a FT feature that for every bad airline/decision, there are apologists for it. 🤷‍♂️ This is no different.

I spoke with our network team.

More or less, this is our solution with the resources (time, money, workhours) that we have. If we assume that India has the same percentage of risk as the UK or US, they still pose a greater risk in absolute terms.

If 1% of all traffic from those countries is malicious, that's 700k from the UK, 3.5M from the US, 14M from India. That's quadruple the next highest country (since China blocks us).

I am not here to defend any corporate decision in that regards, I'm just conveying the reality and mindset that people hold at IB who are more knowledgeable than me in this particular domain.

I have the same issue in many US based Starbucks which is really crazy, and even more fun is with Express VPN. Love having a travel site block me when using a VPN service used by travelers…